Notes

Emily Liang
Final Paper Workshop

When I heard about this assignment, I started thinking about discourse and how it affects how we think about certain topics, specifically mental illnesses. I think it’s very likely that some of the issues that people with mental illnesses are facing today are related to the way we talk and think about mental illnesses in everyday life. So the sociological concept I will mainly concept on is how Foucault describes the affects of discourse and how studying the micro interactions of people and how individuals think about mental illnesses can affect us all. I’m still not sure about how I will empirically study this. I feel like this would not be something that I could just gather some surveys or interviews in a short amount of time and be able to get an accurate analysis. I was thinking that a good study would be to find a small community that is small enough so that I can tell them all about my study but big enough that there are members of the community who have mental illnesses. After informing them about discourse, I would tell them about different ways to think about mental illnesses and to speak about them in everyday life and then see if in a few months these news ways that people in that community have been approaching mental illnesses has changed anything in that small society.