Photojournalism Master's Thesis

PHJ 498 is the final course of the Master of Arts in Photojournalism — the one in which you stop preparing to write a dissertation and actually write it. Lesson by lesson, the course walks you from the first act of claiming an original contribution to the last act of pressing submit: you will frame one sharp research question rooted in your own reporting life, map the scholarship of the press and the gap your study fills, choose and defend a theoretical framework, write the ethics statement a witness owes the people in front of the lens, design a defensible methodology, carry out the study, and shape what you find into chapters that hold together as one argument.

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 dissertation is complete — introduction, chapters, conclusion, abstract, and references — and you submit it to the University for faculty review. Approved dissertations are published in the Light & Composition University research collection, where your witness becomes scholarship and joins the public record of the field.