The topic I wrote about in my previous post was not quite so simply arrived at as it may have seemed. In fact, i struggled for a while to figure out how exactly i wanted to attack the cultural issues I was seeing, wondering how I was going to unpack them and make them accessible to people who weren't necessarily thinking the way i was.
So I used a tool that I just recently learned about called the Topoi. Topos is Greek for place, and basically the topoi is a set of tools that allow you to take your argument to different places, to look at it through different lenses until you find one that is the clearest, the most interesting and the most relevant for you and your audience. The topoi helped me get specific, and helped me narrow down my examples to the On The Beach ones I mentioned before. I was on Leave it to Beaver, The Honeymooners, academic discourse on family structure and partridges in a pear tree before that. And if nothing else, the topoi is just fun. It's a really enjoyable mental exercise, almost like a game to tease out a concept and just see what you can do with it.
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