After watching the movie “Bob Lazar Area 51 & Flying Saucer”, describe how Bob Lazar or any of the other people they interviewed, performed their believability.   Use your research notes to explain how at least three of the following were used to support these performances.  See additional tips about how to apply these concepts at the end of these instructions.

SOCIOL 101

Professor Kretsedemas

After watching the movie “Bob Lazar Area 51 & Flying Saucer”, describe how Bob Lazar or any of the other people they interviewed, performed their believability.   Use your research notes to explain how at least three of the following were used to support these performances.  See additional tips about how to apply these concepts at the end of these instructions.

Mythic themes (addition tips at the end)
Emotion work
Scripts
Front/back stage (manipulation of)

For the purpose of the essay, your discussion only has to summarize step 3 from your notes – the  analysis of the concepts, and their applicability to the meanings conveyed by the documentary. The essay is 3 pages minimum not including the reference page.

Citation Requirements

Use examples from at least two of these readings to describe the symbolic interactionist dynamics you discuss in your essay.   Use at least one specific supporting example from each of the readings you discuss.

From our class website:
Randall Collins, On the micro-foundations of macrosociology
Arlie Hochschild, Feeling in Sociology and the World
Georg Simmel, The Stranger

From Mapping the Social Landscape:
Reading 1, The Promise
Reading 10, Culture, a Sociological View
Reading 43, The Time Bind

Citing Sources in the Body of your Essay

If you are familiar with another citation style (for example MLA or APA style) please feel free to use it.  But if you are not familiar with either of these styles, please follow these guidelines.

You should reference all sources you use in the middle or at the end of each sentence in which this information appears.

This information should appear in parenthesis as follows.  For readings from our textbook, it is OK to cite the reading number.

For example:

In Reading 2, the author explains that ….

OR

The problem of teen suicide increased significantly in the 1980s (Reading 2).

If you are taking a specific quote from the reading, or summarizing a specific statistic or example, you should also include the page number.

For example:

The rate of teen suicide increased by over 65% between 1981 and 1992 (Reading 2, p. 15).

When you are citing examples from a journal article, include the author’s last name and/or publication year in parentheses.

For example:

Randall Collins’ (1981) idea that conversations are social rituals is central to his micro-sociological theory.

OR

According to radical microsociology, “everyday-life microbehavior does not follow rationalist models of cognition and decision making,” (Collins 1981, p.285).

Constructing Your Bibliography

At the very end of your paper you should provide full citation information for all of the sources you cited in the body of the paper.

For articles that are posted on the class website, finding this information is very easy.  Just open up the article file and look on the first page, which has all of the essential information, which includes:

Author name (surname first), Article Title (in quotes), Journal Title in Italics, Volume and Issue number (separated by colon), (Year published in parentheses): Page numbers (preceded by a colon).

Example:
Collins, Randall, “On the Microfoundations of Macrosociology.” American Journal of Sociology 86:5 (1981): 984-101.

For readings from our textbook, you do not have to list the author name.  If you choose to list author names, please note that Susan Ferguson is editor of the book  and not the author of any of the readings.  Each reading has a separate author.  But again, author names are not required.  You can use this method

Reading #: Reading Title,  Mapping the Social Landscape, 8th Edition

Although you are not expected to cite the Lazar documentary parenthetically, you should include full citation info for the documentary in your bibliography.  This information and citation format (for future reference) is supplied below.

Director/Production Co., Documentary or Clip Title, (Production Company, Year Released in Parentheses).

Corbell, Jeremy, Bob Lazar: Area 51 and Flying Saucers (JKLC Productions, 2018)

Organizing your bibliography:

List all readings from our text book first.

List journal articles from our class website second, in alphabetical order (by author surname).

List documentaries third.

 

Additional Tips for Key Concepts

You can use the following questions and definitions to guide your interpretation and application of key concepts to the  documentary.

Scripts

Textual or spoken language that is used to lend credibility to the story.
Scripts may include, but are not limited to:

Descriptive phrasing : providing cues about how you’re supposed to think and feel about the issue at hand.

Diagnostic language: that attributes causality to the issue/problem being discussed.

“Expert” terminology: that establishes the objectivity of the story that is being recounted

Mythic themes
Also: definition of the situation

Unproven statements about the nature of reality or of the social world, that you are supposed to take “on faith.”

Mythic themes establish the baseline premises that the “community of believers” who is participating in the conversation must “buy into” if they want to remain members.

Mythic themes can take the form of scripts, but they can also be unspoken assumptions that you have to decode from what it is literally said.

Emotion Work

What kinds of emotions are the storytellers trying to convey to their audience?

What specific things are they doing or saying to convey this emotion?

How are they using this emotion work to shore-up the credibility of the story they are telling?

Feeling Rules

What kinds of emotions is the storyteller trying to trigger in their audience?  In other words, how do they want the audience to feel about their performance?

What feeling rules are they appealing to in their performance?  Recall that the feeling rule is an unspoken norm that governs when and how you are supposed to show emotion.

Front and Back Stage (manipulation of)

Using a narrative to expose someone or something else’s back stage; revealing things that others want to keep hidden.

Whose back stage is being exposed?

What is the front stage that this person or institution is using to keep this back stage hidden? What are the scripts, emotion work, mythic themes or other social norms that define this front stage?

What specific things is the narrator saying or doing to define/describe and expose this hidden, back stage?