Topic Reflection

The year is 2019. Global issues are polluting the planet and individuals far and wide are more informed than ever on these topics. People are now more inclined to become activists, fighting for the justice they believe the world needs. While there are hundreds of problems that require immediate solutions, it is incredibly difficult to solve them especially due to their controversiality. By the end of this semester, intense research will have been completed in order to find a solution to the topic of my choice. Throughout this paper, I will discuss three possible topic choices for my research paper with hopes to narrow the options down to one.

In the past couple of years, the news has been flooded with stories of police officers attempting to arrest individuals without probable cause. Many other stories tragically end with officers murdering innocent people. Almost always, the victim is a minority, commonly African American men. Police officers are viewed as the people meant to protect us yet, there are hundreds of cases that showcase corrupt officers abusing their authority, leaving communities and families terrorized. My question asks what can be done to prevent these situations from occurring any longer. For this topic, I feel as though there are more cons to researching it than pros, so I’ll discuss the cons first. To start off, almost all evidence of these kinds of incidences are filmed. It is easy for people to misinterpret a video or for details to be left out of them. This would mean that the research collected on this topic may not be strong. Police officers are also authoritative figures so they have the upper hand, allowing for stories to be misconstrued further by their attempts to defend their case. Plus, since most cases deal with minorities and white officers, assumptions are that the officers are racially profiling which is at times hard to judge even if it is true. Some pros are that many of these kinds of cases are taken to court and there are plenty of examples of officers being fired due to their corruption of power. These cases prove that there is villainy involved but the issue on paper is a pretty slippery slope. To add on to the list of cons, narrowing this topic to a certain discourse community is tricky. Both qualitative and quantitative research would be necessary, including video footage, court, and other legal documents, and statistics of who the victims and criminals are on average.

My second topic of consideration deals with the largest example of ocean pollution to date. Floating in the Pacific Ocean is a patch of garbage that is estimated to have a surface size of 1.6 million square kilometers. My question considers what can be done to sustainably remove this large floating mass of waste from the ocean. There are several pros to researching this topic. For one, in present day people are increasing awareness of climate change and pollution worldwide. There are thousands of articles, scientific journals, documentaries, and other outlets of information on this topic. Conversations on how to recycle and reuse waste more efficiently have become much more prominent in the media and world of science. There are also several companies that have recently pledged to reuse waste, such as plastics, in their products in order to help clean the environment in some way. Plus, there has been a lot of research and discussion on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch specifically, allowing me to access tons of helpful information while researching. I will also be more likely to find a reasonable and realistic solution for this issue with so many resources available. While there are several pros to researching this topic, there are also a few cons that come along with it. One con is that the garbage patch has become so large at this point that there may not be an all or nothing solution to the problem. It is floating in the middle of the ocean, a bit far from land making it difficult to access. That I know of, there is no company or individual accessing the floating trash regularly and using it in their products which may make researching the costs and other specific details for a solution tough. Regarding the fact that my topic of choice must pertain to a specific discourse community, this topic is definitely in the clear. The specifics discourse community can be narrowed down from environmentalists to marine conservationists. Not only does this topic focus on a specific discourse community but it also is a real conversation being made today in this community that is especially focused on pollution in our oceans and how it affects marine life. The research collected on this topic will be both qualitative and quantitative, including sources such as scientific journals, news articles, shorts films, statistics and more. Since the research is so broad for this topic and it is something I am very interested in, I feel as though it is reasonable to find a solution for by the end of the semester.

My final topic considers how we can keep schools protected from mass shootings. In the past two decades in the US, mass shootings have terrorized several public places but most typically they occur at schools. Steps to prevent them have been made but none appear to be sufficient enough to entirely eliminate them. The pros of choosing this topic are that there are many examples of mass shootings to find information on, several solutions schools have tried out, and examples of laws that have been changed. The cons are that this topic is hard to research since it cannot be studied in a controlled setting and we don’t always know as much as we can from the shooter. It is also difficult to focus on attempts to solutions since many schools that add protection are not targeted. This topic as a whole is tremendously inconvenient to study but as it is a topic that sparks my interest I have been considering it. To add on to the list of cons, this topic cannot be narrowed down to a specific discourse community. The kinds of research needed would include, court and other legal documents, interviews, statistics, and articles about specific safety methods used in various cases.

While comparing the three topics I have considered, corruption in the police department and ocean pollution are the two that seemed more fitting with the requirements of the research paper. Due to my own interests and the fact that there seems to be more relevant data available on marine pollution, the topic I will focus on researching this semester is how we can eliminate the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.