Assignment: Industry Observation and Analysis
Miranda Banks, Emerson College
An assignment excerpt:
“This essay is your opportunity to take the critical thinking and analytic skills that you are developing in this class and apply them to the lived experience of analyzing industry organizations. If you have an internship, I suggest you use your work community as the subject of your paper. If you don’t have an internship or a place of work, then think about an on-campus pre-professional organization—either student-run or governed by students in conjunction with faculty and/or staff. Many of these organizations model themselves on—or are educational versions of—professional media organizations.
Your assignment is to write an analysis of these organizations, with an eye toward examining their structure and policies toward gender, sexuality, and race. What roles do different people have? Is there a diversity of voices in the organization? Who speaks at meetings? Who is in positions of power and how does power manifest in your organization? What kinds of roles do different people take? How well are women, people of color, and people who identify as LGBTQIA represented and included in organizations and in leadership?
Your paper might wish to examine:
- How the organization is structured and who has positions of power or speaking roles?
- How those with power assert their power AND how others respond verbally and physically?
- How the space of the room is used? Who takes up the most space literally and metaphorically?
- Who controls technology? Who is in front or behind the screen?
- What kinds of stories do different people within the organization tell about their work or about the workplace?”
Find the assignment here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NkFeRq-T_9zKJbkfe9pzRTudxZEBrcYcxgzJ56MYxyg/edit
Keywords: analysis, experiential learning, industry, internship
