What kinds of data will you collect (e.g. documents, newspaper articles, photos/videos/visual data, direct observation)? How will you collect your data (e.g. library research, archival research, survey, field research)? How will your data answer your project’s questions?
Deadline: March 29th Friday 5 pm
In my research, I aim to address both sides of the relationship between neoliberalism and mass incarceration: how neoliberalism has led to mass incarceration and how mass incarceration perpetuates neoliberalism. I do not have the means to conduct primary research, including direct observation or field research, on this topic, so I will primarily rely on literature about neoliberalism and the prison industrial complex to inform my paper. I intend to research scholarship about neoliberalism in order to decide what aspects of neoliberalism I specifically will explore from each side. My data collection on neoliberalism will resemble a literature review, where I collect scholarship that explores neoliberalism to enhance my own understanding of the topic. My data collection on the prison industrial complex will be more broad sweeping, likely including scholarly research, news articles, and numerical data about prison populations in the U.S. over time. I will conduct library research in order to identify my sources. Once I have collected data on both neoliberalism and the prison industrial complex, I will synthesize my findings together, to create an argument about how neoliberalism and the prison industrial complex inform each other.