Photojournalism Thesis

PHJ 396 is the final course of the B.F.A. in Photojournalism — the one in which you stop preparing to write a thesis and actually write it. Lesson by lesson, the course walks you from the first act of noticing a researchable problem in your own reporting to the last act of pressing submit: you will frame one sharp research question, read and join the scholarly record on your subject, write the ethics statement a witness owes the people in front of the lens, choose and defend a methodology, carry out the study, and shape what you find into chapters that hold together.

Every assignment is a working part of the real document: nothing in this course is an exercise for its own sake. By the eighth lesson your thesis is complete — introduction, chapters, conclusion, abstract, and references — and you submit it to the University for faculty review. Approved theses are published in the Light & Composition University research collection, where your work joins the public record of the field you have spent four years learning to serve.