In ENV/GEG4104, you have been asked to assemble a polished research proposal on a topic of your choice in Geography or Environmental Studies. Regardless of whether your imagined audience is an academic one (such as a dissertation proposal or an academic funding request) or another organization, a key component to your proposal will be the section that outlines exactly what you plan to do with the time and funds that your readers can offer to support your work. They will want to know what they can expect you to do. Your material should be on the order of 1250-1500 words. Please consider it a work-in-progress. In other words, you should consider it a well-written draft of material that you are likely to incorporate (likely with some more revisions later in the month) into your polished research proposal at the end of the term on 04 April. With this portion of the assignment, you will first need to identify the title, topic, and the specific research question(s) that you wish to address. You should have done this already on the first page of your submission for Part B. You can copy that material verbatim from the earlier assignment, or you can continue to make minor tweaks and revisions. You cannot change your topic at this point, but you can decide to make some changes that take your research questions in directions that would create a more feasible research project. - Please keep the conditions of the imagined grant possibility in mind. Yours is to be a grant proposal to fund some original research, even though there is no actual grant to be allotted at the end of the term. Imagine that the competition is tough: there are a lot of other researchers who are looking for funds, and there's not much money to go around. That means your polished research proposal will need to meet two parameters. Both of them limit what you can actually do. First, first, you will need to design and propose a research project that generates original results within 12 months, during which time all your work on the project will be voluntary. That means you will need to outline a workplan where your time is allocated on a part-time basis over 3-12 months – maybe one or two days per week on an ongoing basis (you earn money at a regular job on the other days to pay your rent and put food on the table), or maybe two or three weeks of intensive fieldwork (using your vacation time) along with one day per week in the months before and after the fieldwork. Second, you will need to design and propose a research project where all research-related costs (e.g. travel expenses, equipment, honoraria for participants, etc) do not exceed $5,000. That will be the upper limit, but of course proposals with even smaller budgets are welcome. All this means you will need to be thinking about how to answer your research question with some methods and forms of analysis that are persuasive, practical, and cost- effective - which are standards that often take you in opposite and conflicting directions (for instance, surveys that are conducted online are usually cheap, but not terribly persuasive due to their sampling problems). Once you have outlined your topic and research questions, the next step is to assemble some details about your research methods. This section should start by picking up on some specific material that you learned about in your literature review. Here you should consider two or three articles that you found that point to some methods and research designs that you would like to emulate. Perhaps you found an impressive research article that undertook a case-study looking at X, and maybe you are thinking you could undertake a different case-study using a very similar approach to examine the issues involved. Take these sorts of ideas into consideration, and write up one or two paragraphs that really focus on several research articles whose methods look promising. You should outline what their methods were, as well as the strengths of their approaches in addressing along with their methodological weaknesses. Assume the readers of your proposal will concur that no research project is perfect and will welcome a thoughtful critique of the methods used in your selected articles - basically, a discussion of what the authors of those few articles could and could not achieve with the methods that they chose to use. Next, you should outline the methods and the forms of analysis that you plan to use for your own research project. Feel free to make occasional references to the 2-3 articles that you discussed earlier (for comparisons, important points, caveats, etc), but you should focus on what you yourself plan to do. Where are you going to look for data and evidence, specifically? How will the information that you plan to collect help to answer your specific research question(s)? How do you plan to analyze or interpret the material that you would collect? Lots of detail will help, but keep in mind that the person who assesses your proposal will also be asking whether you are being too ambitious, taking on too many methods and questions that are not really feasible (with the time and money allotted), or not really focused on your research question(s), or both. That means you will need to keep the details about your methods well targeted. You will need to clearly outline the rationale as to why the methods you have chosen, and the forms of analysis or interpretation that you plan to undertake, are practical (given the limits of time and funding that we are imposing) and effective (given that your methods need to be clearly designed to answer the important research question that you wish to address, generating what others will consider credible and convincing evidence). Along with your methods, you should also sketch out a preliminary workplan. Think of this as a work- calendar (perhaps a table?) that outlines the stages of your proposed research project, the locations involved, the deadlines for meeting specific goals. Such a table should make it clear how you can accomplish what you set out to do without substantial difficulty. If there are some tight deadlines that can be thrown off with some delays (e.g. with air travel or weather events), it might help to add a sentence or two afterwards that let your readers know that you are aware of those potential bottlenecks and that you can be adaptable if necessary. Your workplan should include a portion of time in which your proposed methods will be subject to a review by some kind of research ethics committee within the relevant organization (e.g. university, a nonprofit sponsor, etc). If you suspect there may be significant ethical issues where such a committee may not quickly reach an agreement (where, for instance, you may need to engage in some discussion with the committee about methodological modifications), then you might schedule a large block of time (several months) for this stage of your proposed project. On the other hand, if you think your methods and the relevant ethical protocols (to be outlined later) will quickly gain approval, you might build just one month into your workplan for this stage of your project. Again, the result should take the form of a document that is 1250-1500 words in length. Those word limits do not include your tables (e.g. your workplan/calendar), nor the bibliography (which should be short but important on this occasion). Consider the result - the paper that you submit - to be a well- written draft of the central part of your research proposal. This is, after all, the part where you tell your readers what you plan to do, how, where, and when you plan to do it, and why your plan is an effective one as a way to answer your key research question(s) in a significantly original way - perhaps with strong predecessors in the literature that, you might tell us, are serving using as guides or models. Basically, this part of the assignment creates the heart of your research proposal.