Claims and Styles of Argument

“Dark Webs: Goth Subculture in Cyberspace”
Claim: Net Goths bring exactly the same sorts of concerns to cyberspace just like everyone else. This includes music, fashion, parenting, and discrimination.
Style of Argument: Toulmin

“House for the Homeless”
Claim: One cannot make generalizations about the homeless. They may have had problems the tried to get rid of those bad habits and the company that came along with them. They want to change and stop the never ending cycle.
Style of Argument: Rogerian

“Transmission from Camp Trans”
Claim: Although these women are transgender they have to put with the same pressures that women go through and even more just because they are no the “norm”.
Style of Argument: Classical

Research Paper Update
My research process is beginning to roll like I wanted it to. I took your pointers in my research journal and they are working just fine. I still need to go to the library and a little more research which I plan to before Monday. I am also going to my field site again this weekend. Also reading these stories have given me great ideas on how to go about writing my paper and how to include the information that I have found. A question that I intend to ask at peer review is how can I make the structure of paper better or how can I make my claim stronger?

Carrie Steele-Pitts Home

The Carrie Steele-Pitts Home is a private, nonprofit, and nondiscriminatory child caring agency that provides 24-hour state approved residency for neglected, abandoned abused or orphaned. Through the services of caring informed, and responsible staff, the Home aims to maintain a family environment that fosters the physical, social-emotional, mental and spiritual development of each child. (www.csph1888.com)

26-acre wooded campus is landscaped with neatly manicured flowerbeds an d grassy spaces where children can run and play. Birdhouses, made by children, hang from the trees, and playground equipment is tucked in areas between the five residential cottages. In each cottage, approximately 20 children live with their house parents, a team of compassionate adults who provide 24-hour supervision and care. Each cottage has a family room where the children gather after school to finish their homework and spend time with their friends. Sofas and chairs are arranged among the bookshelves, computer learning areas, and tables where the children do their assignments. The children's bedrooms down the hall are filled with stuffed animals; their walls hung with mylar birthday balloons.One of the most important moments of each day is the evening meal, when all of the children and staff gather in the central dining room to eat together and talk about the day's experiences. After eating, there is a time of sharing, where children and staff are encouraged to present readings, songs, funny stories, and personal achievements to the entire group.

In the atmosphere of love and acceptance, CSPH is able to provide the structure and discipline that many children's lives have lacked. Following simple rules based on respecting others, the CSPH staff and children develop a since of community. These bonds have grown have grown more important as children's lives have become increasingly fragmented.

In the Home's early years, the majority of children were abandoned or orphaned. Today many are unable to live with their parents due to abuse, neglect, drug addiction, alcoholism, HIV/AIDS, or other intractable family situations. Children are exposed to unprecedented levels of violence - in their homes, their neighborhoods, and through the media. More and more children are diagnosed with anxiety disorders, depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or post-traumatic stress disorder. Due to these multiple factors, many children now require specialized classrooms in the public schools to meet their needs, and personalized attention at home.

Ninety-eight percent of the children at CSPH are placed through the County Departments of Family and Children Services or the juvenile court system. A child's average length of stay at Carrie Steele - Pitts Home is 2 ½ years, but children have lived with them for periods ranging from 3 months to 8 years or more. The children usually are at least six years old, but younger children are accepted if it allows siblings to stay together.

The Carrie Steele - Pitts Home is committed to the well being of every child. We work hard to maintain a level of excellence, a high 2.5 to 1 staff-to-child ratio, and a warm, nurturing environment. We are committed to the following: to ensure that every child feels special, to build trust, to encourage self-confidence, and to offer a source of strength, support and love.

Prison Performing Arts Program

1. What makes this field site a good field site in studying this subculture?
Since the subculture is Prison Performing Arts Program then prison is the only place you can go to to observe it and interview people that is part of that subculture.

2. What observations does the author make that is useful in talking about this subculture?
He describes the scenery of the prison and describes what kind of security he had to go through in order to get into the prison. He says that this is a level four high security prison. He is given a screamer which is an alarm for help while he is in the prison. He describes the thick iron doors and the cinder block class room that the prisoners rehearse in. He also describes the huge yard that he walks into where there is thousands of prisoners playing hand ball or lifting weights.

3. What are the norms and values of this subculture?
Big hutch described the hierarchy of prisons as the guppies which are the lowest, the killer whales which are the highest, and himself as the blue whale who controls everybody. There was also another prisoner that put these men into categories of sexuality which straight, gay, and in the closet. Each group knows who to associate with and they need to leave alone. Yet this play brought them all together.

4. What interview techniques work well to understand this subculture?
Talking to each prisoner in the play helped understand them and how things work within the group and to even better understand the play. You received the truth and how they felt about the character they played and if it affected them at all. It was a great way to get a better understanding.

There was one question that I asked myself about this subculture and it was why did these prisoners decide to participate in this play?
One said because he felt human again for just those two and a half hours with Agnes after doing so many humiliating things. Another said that it helped him keep his sanity and he wanted to explore new things. One prisoner said the he discovered that he was not stupid he was just uneducated. Mr. Word, also a prisoner, said he was influenced by his wife because he had been playing the guy all his life.

Topic: Orphans

Sources:
Bai, Xiaowei. "Helping the Least Fortunate of the Next Generation". China Today. March 2008. Vol. 57. Issue 3, p36-37.

Howe, D.K. "Hope Runs". American Fitness. March/April 2008. Vol. 26. Issue 2, p.36.

Lethchworth, William Pryor. Homes of Homeless Children. New York. Amo Press:1994.

Pazicky, Diana Loercher. Cultural Orphans in America. Jackson. Univesity Press of Mississippi:1998. p232.

Tubbs, David Lewis. Freedom's Orphans: Contemporary Liberalism and the father of American Children. Princeton, N.J. Princeton University Press: 2007.

Reflection:
I decided to write about orphans. My main attraction will be towards the orphans of Atlanta. My research only gave me information for orphans in other countries but this information will still be helpful in my research. I read an article called Hope Run which was a plan to help orphans in Kenya. It kind of shed light on orphans with HIV/AIDS. This gave me an idea of maybe focusing on something like that in my research project. This article also talked about how to help these orphans help themselves, which can also be another aspect of an orphanage. I am excited about this topic and ready to write.

Research 4 Pac

The process that I went through to find information for Tupac Shakur was not very hard. First I typed in Tupac skakur into the Google search box. I list up of entries came up but none of them interested me. So I added autobiography to the end of Tupac Shakur. Results came up but I remembered that he did not write his own biography so I took off auto and just left biography. That’s when I received entries that I was happy with. Fist I looked at a website called www.thugz-network.com. This gave me lots of information about Tupac Shakur that I never knew. After reading all that I went back to the results and clicked on a website called www.imdb.com. This website gave a mini biography with his music and movies career. It told what roles he would have been in also before his death. I then went to the results again and clicked on a website called www.2pac2k.de/bio.html. This just gave me the same information from the other sites. My internet then began to mess up and I had to start my research over again. Once I got back online I looked up four more websites that gave me the same information again. The reason I decided to choose these sources was because they provided information that I thought may have been interesting to know and it just gave me more information on the author that I was look up. The key words matched up and it just made since to choose those sources. The advantages for looking in these places were actually finding out information that I did not know about Tupac and they were easy to find. The disadvantage was not finding more information but just finding the same information on every page. This may not be the resourceful way to research but it is the easiest.

Cheryl Keyes-Female Rappers

Cheryl Keyes launched her musical journey in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Growing up in Louisiana’s rich musical culture from blues, gospel, zydeco, soul, jazz, rhythm ‘n’ blues, and funk, Cheryl Keyes began studying piano at age 7 and flute at age 11. Influenced by her older brother, Cheryl took an interest in jazz arranging, orchestration, and composing. She wrote her first band arrangement at the age of 13.
Keyes attended Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans on a music scholarship. Her musical interests shifted gears while taking a music history class in her senior year at Xavier. She remembered how her final class project on French Impressionist music piqued her research interest in African-derived music. Only then Keyes realized that few books then were written on this music by its originators that she pursued the study of African American music by the field of Ethnomusicology.
Cheryl Keyes is an Associate Professor in the Department of Ethnomusicology at UCLA, with a specialty in African American music. Among her noted courses include Women in Jazz, Cultural History of Rap as well as a course on the blues. She is also the author of the book Rap Music and Street Consciousness, which received a CHOICE award for outstanding academic books in 2004.
Cheryl wrote a journal called Empowering Self, Making Choices, Creating Spaces: Black Female Identity via Rap Music Performance. Critics and scholars have often associated rap music with urban male culture. However, females have been involved in the history of this music since its early years. This article talks about Black women's contribution in shaping rap music. This book was interesting to me because usually you only here about black women in the videos shaking their body but in this journal Cheryl explains the women that is apart of the music making business and their positive role in hip hop.
Cheryl Keyes was a good candidate for writing this book because she knows about the music. This is what she has studied and observed for years. She knows what she is talking about and that’s what makes a big difference between her and others that are looking from the outside in.

Shi 360-Israeli Rap

Shi 360, who’s real name is Shai Haddad, is an Israeli rap artist with TACT Records. He has been officially rapping since 1999. He grew up in Haifa, Israel until the age of eleven when his family moved to Montreal, Canada. Shai had to face new changes which he talked about on his first album. He received an undergraduate degree at Concordia University in Canada. At one point in his career he released an album in English called Chapters. He then decided to go back to Israel. SHI is an acronym for Supreme Hebrew Intellect and 360 represents the turn around he made to make it back to Israel. In 1997 Shai met Kobi Shimoni, another young adult interested in rap music. They became friends, and then by Shai connections with him he released his first album with TACT records in Hebrew. Shi 360 now owns his own record label called Emet Records.
Israeli rappers talk about more personal issues such as the struggles growing up in Israel. They also gear towards more religious themes since many of the rappers are Jewish or Muslim. Israeli hip hop has such a motivational theme behind it that local governments support the Hip Hop movement that has exploded among Israeli youth. The government has even supported Hip Hop groups who travel to other countries, viewing it as a good outlet for the rest of the world to view them through. Israeli Hip Hop is creating several positive movements among the people of the country that will continue to grow and become even more popular. Some of the things the Israeli rappers rap about can tend to be controversial as well. Most of the rap songs talked about real issues in society. The songs spoke of everything from terrorism and religion to children speaking up about abuse in their home.

Peer Review

The peer review method that my group used was talking about the problems we thought was wrong with our paper. Then we all read each other paper and answered the questions on the review paper. I believed it worked well because we identified our own errors first then we were told what else could be fixed in the paper. I feel like I received some very insightful information for my paper. Maybe I could conjure up a new idea for my paper. It also gave me new ideas about what I can do to improve my paper and what I can add to enhance the paper. All of theses suggestions worked well with the peer review. I really can not think of anything that did not work in the peer review process. I believe it went very well. Something I would do differently is change the way we went about our review process. There was nothing wrong with the way we did it but trying many different ways may be more effective than the method that we used today. I think peer review is a wonderful way t better your paper besides being lazy and not really wanting to do it, it is very helpful.

Thats Not A Protest Its A Cry for Help



“Their young they may not realize it yet. They got the same raging hormones the same, self destructive desire to get boldly trashed and wildly out of control. Look out that window. That’s not a protest that is a cry for help. Their begging us please have a party, feed us drinks, get us laid.”

I believe this scene in the movie is a genetic fallacy. He is saying that because those college students are protesting they are really just like every other student on campus. They are not really protesting just crying out for help. What he says in the quote above is degrading most college students at PCU. Comparing the protest to hormone raging teens are not inherently related.

Chris a Transcendentalists?????

Christopher McCandless was a very intellectual individual. According to society he was different from the normal. He was an idealist whose ideals did not mesh with the modern life. This is what caused him to go on his excursions in the wild. If one is to think back we could compare Chris to transcendentalists. They are people that live their life as one with nature and to have inner peace. They did not interact with “normal” people just amongst themselves. With the comparison of these two show that this why Chris’s story was so controversial. His life did not match the stereotype of college students usually perceived. Chris had good and bad qualities about himself. Yes he was smart and an intellectual yet he was impatient and self absorbing. While he was in college he pulled himself away from everyone else because most of his friends were into fraternities and sororities and was not with that. Even Chris’s mother said she could not understand why he took chances like that with his life. I believe that Chris was born with a different route of thinking. As he grew these qualities in him became stronger and stronger. He was more intelligent those around him and more into the free life with no strings attached. Even in high school as the cross country team Captain Chris would tell his teammates to think about all the evil and hatred in the world and imagine themselves running against the forces of darkness. As high school students his teammates were blown away by that kind of talk. After Chris graduated from Emory University he felt the time to be free and not have to worry about other worldly things. Even though he received a degree he did not put it to use. I believe if he had a choice of going to college or not he would not have gone because Chris was into achieving things in life without the things we think we have to have in order to live, things that are truly of no value. When Chris went on his escapades he burned all of his money, left all of his clothes and other tools. Chris felt the need to live amongst the homeless, pimps, and hookers just find out why they was doing what they was doing and would try to help them get out of there situation. I also believe that Chris was not afraid to be alone unlike so many of us in the world today. He was not afraid to die because in the end he got what he wanted and he was at peace with it. His mother may have not understood that but his sister did. Before he died there was a piece of paper that he wrote on and it said,

“Death’s a fierce meadowlark: but to die having made

Something more equal to the centuries

Than muscle and bone is mostly to shed weakness.”
“I have had a happy life and thank the Lord. Goodbye and may God bless all.”

Benningtons Tactics

At first glance of this picture I said to myself what in the world does this picture has to do with a clothing line and why would Bennington campaign this picture to sell clothes. Then I thought maybe Bennington is using this picture to get money for an aids charity but come to find out that was not the case but Bennington was giving money to a charity just for using the picture. Then I thought that this picture is very controversial and maybe that was a way to catch the buyers’ attention and from there Bennington could sell there clothe. Yet using this tactic would cause them to lose business also. What I must do is read between the lines. Again I thought to myself how I would use this picture to my advantage to sell clothing. I can get the consumers thinking hey if Bennington is trying to aid aids ridden people then it would be a good cause to buy there clothing and from there proceeds will go to charity. That way it makes the buyer feel good about doing a good deed. This picture does appeal to customers because it gets them to thinking about how this picture relates to buying clothing. It proposes many arguments within its self. That is why this photo for a clothing line was very controversial. This picture may also help some people with aids or people that have family members with aids or close friends to cope with society. Truly it kind of gives them hope that society will begin to accept them for who they are and not what they have. It also shows them that yes we might have aids but we can be representatives of other things rather than I am an aids patient and I’m trying to survive. I believe this picture shows more positive than negative. When this picture first came out it was around the same time when they revealed that people were getting aids other ways and not just from being gay, using needles, or being very promiscuous. Bennington is showing us that just because people have aids does not mean that we should not embrace them and buy them Bennington clothing. I believe that this picture really had nothing to do with aids patients at all but just a way for Bennington to increase there profits. So they used this make people feel sorry for aids ridden people and that caused a guilt trip which will make people want to help so they would buy there clothing and Bennington would make profit very easy with no intention of really helping the “community”. They thought this plan through very well and I believe that it worked. To prove this throughout that year Bennington produced more controversial photos to increase there profits. It was also a way to show that they were very versatile and was not afraid to show it. That wanted to include everyone and leave no out. Bennington made an appeal to the customers and it worked.