The main purpose of this assignment is to have you practice making a product that informs the public audience about topics related to race, gender, and crime. You can pick any topic as long as they relate to race, gender, crime, and/or criminal justice. You are welcome to bring in the element of intersectionality if you see it fit for your product/topic. You are encourage to contact me about your possible topic to make sure that they are feasible and/or good fit for a product geared toward the public audience.
This assignment is more-or-less open-ended. However, the following information and components need to be in your final product:
Product Title and Author Name
Title should be either literal and/or engaging for the general public audience
Introduction to the product
A summary of the product: Explain what information audience can find in the product
Description of the topic/issue
Provide a basic information, overview, and/or background of the topic.
You should include data and/or data visualization.
Academic contextualization/knowledge of the topic/issue
Theories and/or empirical evidence that can help cnotextualize and explain the topic/issue.
Possible solution/program/policy recommendations
Theoretical and/or empirically informed recommendations on how to reduce/solve the issue.
Highly recommended to include real policy/program that is either related or something that you are looking for exactly as an example of what we can do. If you chose to find program/policy, you could consult Crime Solutions, which curates an assessment of different program/policy that has been implemented and is run by the National Institute of Justice (https://crimesolutions.ojp.gov). There are a lot of different crime-reduction programs and policies that have been evaluated. If you chose to produce your own, you would want to make sure that they are not necessarily a duplicate of existing program/policy. For example, if you are working on neighborhood and crime issue and suppose that your focus is a lack of resources. One of possible program recommendation may be to match risky youth with mentors so that they have legitimate resource that they can rely on (and a role model that they can look up to). There are already a lot of program like that, such as Big Brothers, Big Sisters program. If you want to propose your own, your ideas should add something to existing framework and/or tailor existing program to fit your topic/issue.
Basic conclusion
Quick summary of the important information in the product
References (Must in clude 10+ references)
Minimum of 4 sources are required to describe the topic/issue (e.g., news articles)
Minimum of 6 academic sources required
Including course materials is not strictly required, but highly encouraged if the topic/issue of
your choice can relate back to the course materials.
BOTH in-text and reference page citations are required and must be in APA or ASA format.
Moreover, in your product, you must include data to highlight the issue.
Data must be presented in a way
that is kind to the general public audience.
Make sure to cite sources, especially the data sources. You must provide in-text citations and reference
section citations using either the APA or the ASA format. For a presentation or a podcast, you must use “in-narrative” citations such as “According to data from FBI…” or “According to a study conducted by researchers at University of Georgia…” and submit your reference page citations as well. For a presentation, put all citations on the last slide. For a podcast, submit a separate document (PDF) with all reference
citations.
Emphasis: The main intended audience of this product is the general public audience. Accordingly, you must craft your narratives and/or your writing in a way that the general public – who may not know much about crime or how to understand crime statistics – can easily understand about the crime situation of a particular city. Accordingly, do not make assumptions on what people may know or may not know. Be sure to explain everything thoroughly using plain language. At the same time, in order to keep some “academicness,” you should consider including technical terms when they should appear. Make sure to balance our technical language and plain language. Also, do not make any references to “our course.” The audience does know what we learn or do in our class. For example, “In our course, we discussed A, B, and C” is not appropriate given the supposed audience. At the same time, your writing/narratives should be clean and more or less formal. Accordingly, follow the basic guideline on writing and use standard grammatical rules (e.g., do not use contractions).
Product Formatting
Your product may be a factsheet (or a written narrative formatted nicely), podcast, and/or presentation as
long as you include all the information needed as noted above.
As a general formatting guideline, (1) If you are working on a fact sheet, your product should fit within 2-3
pages (make sure to have a substantial amount of writing though), and (2) if you are working on a
presentation or a podcast, the length should be about 7-8 minutes (100-150 words per minute).
For a factsheet product, recommended fonts are Arial, Open Sans, Helvetica, and Roboto. Since this is a fact sheet, the spacing between lines should be single or 1.2-spaced (1.5 or double, for example, makes it difficult to read).
If you are doing a presentation, make sure that your recording will include slides (or whatever that you may
be presenting) and yourself presenting. The easiest would be to use Zoom to record your presentation
because it gives you an option to record the screen and also your webcam simultaneously
If you are doing a podcast, make sure that your audio is crystal clear and that you have compelling and
easy-to-understand narratives. If you have a good microphone, that’s great. If not, recording on your phone
usually provides good audio (especially iPhones).
If you are using images (encouraged to increase the visual appeal of the product), make sure that they are
HD. You’d also want to choose copy-right free (or Creative Commons licensed) materials (you can look up
those on Pixabay or Pexels; if you are doing Google Images, there is an option to only display Creative
Commons licenses).
When you are including data, make sure that they are modified in a way that they are easily readable by the
general public, such as instead of presenting a lot of numbers in writing, make a chart.
Your product must be submitted as: A PDF file for a factsheet; MP4, MOV, or MP3 for a presentation or a
podcast.
Last Completed Projects
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