Beginnings CS, Fall 2007
Essay #2 Assignment: Politics of Location
For this 3-5 page essay, your task is to both narrate and analyze an experience in your life that
strikes you as significant in what it reveals about your social identity or social memberships.
You will tell a story about something that happened to you, and also reflect on its meaning in
terms of your social identity memberships.
The social and political structures in which we live shape both our experiences and how we
understand those experiences. The rank system and the socially ascribed memberships assigned
to us, such as our gender, age, religious culture, ethnicity/race, etc., operate continually, but we
are often unconscious of the way such systems affect us personally. For this assignment, you’ll
write about how an experience in your life was influenced by those social and political
structures.
Consider events in your life, and ask how your perceptions and your relationships with others are
affected by these social identities or memberships. Consider both target memberships, and the
oppression that comes with them, and agent memberships, and the privilege that comes with
them. For this assignment, you’ll analyze an experience in terms of two or three of these social
memberships.
What to do
First, briefly narrate an experience in your own life that strikes you as significant in relation to
your social memberships. (Note that just about all of your experiences are shaped in part by your
social identity or memberships, often in unconscious ways.) The experience you write about
need not be a large life-defining moment; it can be as simple as your first day at a new school.
Don’t try to write an autobiography. Limit your narrative to one experience – a matter of a few
hours or a single day. Describe what happened using your five senses: sight, hearing, taste,
touch, and smell. Use concrete language, dialogue, and physical descriptions abundantly.
Include both the exterior (your surroundings, other people, spoken words), and interior (your
own feelings, sensations, and thoughts).
Second, reflect on the experience and analyze it with attention to the role of social rank
memberships in shaping that experience. Identify your own ADRESSING memberships, and
consider which two or three of these rank categories were “hot” during that event – which ones
were most influential in the events of your story. You’ll analyze how each of these influenced
what happened, how you saw those events, what you and others did, and how you felt. This is a
reflection on the politics of location: how your “location” in terms of social memberships
influences what happens in your life, and how you interpret it.
How to begin:
Consider the experiences that first caused you to realize that you occupy a particular rank
category, such as gender, ethnicity, or social class, and how this is relevant in your life. When
did you first realize that you were a man or a woman? That you belonged to a particular ethnic
group? That you were gay, lesbian, bisexual, or heterosexual? That your family was wealthy, or
poor, or working class, or middle class? The religious community to which you belonged?
What have you learned in your life about the rank associated with these social memberships? In
what ways have you experienced privilege and oppression? You might also think about your
social landscape, and discuss how this helped to shape an experience as Mike Rose and Tim
Wise do in their books. You may want to consider your own use of specific agent skills or target
skills, and the role your skills played in the events of your story.
Focus your analysis on what this experience reveals about your social identity memberships,
rather than just your individual identity (personality, likes/dislikes, etc.). This focus on politics
of location allows you to express a meaning in this assignment that is relevant socially (to your
readers, for example) and not just to you personally.
Mike Rose’s Lives on the Boundary, bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress, June Jordan’s Report
from the Bahamas and Tim Wise’s White Like Me are all examples of works that address the
politics of locations. All of these texts provide models for narrating experiences and analyzing
what they mean with respect to larger social and political structures or systems. These authors
write about how their social rank categories or memberships, and their roles as agents and
targets, shape their experiences of learning and living. We can see their use of particular agent
and target skills in the stories they tell. These authors might provide inspiration for your own
analysis.
Format: Follow the usual formatting guidelines in the syllabus. A copy of each draft is required
with the final essay.
Due Dates
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Rough Draft Due: Wednesday, October 31st, (Four copies)
Revised Draft Due: Wednesday, November 7th
FINAL Draft Due: Wednesday, November 14th
Evaluation
This essay will be graded and is worth 15% of your final grade. The evaluation will be based on
the following criteria:
 Are the ideas clear, focused, fully developed, and interesting?
 Analysis: Does the essay show understanding of one or more key concepts such as
politics of location, rank, oppression, privilege, agent, target, status, or social identity
and link this concept(s) to the experience?
 Narration: Does the narration unfold in a logical and engaging way?
 Does everything in the essay contribute to a central main idea, your point?
 Does the essay make use of vivid and descriptive language that appeals to the senses?
 Does the essay use effective paragraph structures and overall organization?
 Does the writing make use of strong verbs and varied sentence patterns?
 Has the essay been carefully edited for grammar, spelling, and punctuation?