This semester, you will pick a topic around which to organize your ethnographic research -- i.e. participant observation and interviewing, as well as any other methods you’d like to employ. To be able to have group conversations about your ongoing research, I would like you to pick a topic from one of these three broad categories. The options include:

1) How do friendships happen on Lafayette’s campus?

2) How does being an athlete (or non-athlete) shape a Lafayette student’s experience at this college?

3) How do elderly residents of Easton understand the city and the changes it’s gone through in recent decades?


Please realize that there is much space in each of these for you to narrow down your interests. By this I mean, if you really want to think through something about something specific (like gender or race or age or region of origin, etc.), there is certainly space for that in any one of these topics.

The individual assignments about this topic are listed under the “writing assignments” elsewhere on this page. You can write any of your three papers about this project, although those papers always need to be driven by thesis statements (i.e. they cannot be only summaries of your research activities).