Contextualizing Urinization: A Topic Worthy of a Dissertation

As English professors have admonished, context is everything. And, as I observe in this blog post, it's hard to teach four-year-olds.

Fresh back from a weekend camping trip, Levi stood at the edge of our front porch, pulled down his shorts and peed into the the hedges.

On one hand, the proper parental response is straight forward enough: "Look Levi, now that we've left the campsite, you can't pee outside anymore." On the other hand, it's worth acknowledging that there are complicated culturally concepts here: nakedness and clothing, the civilized versus the wild, nature and our attempt to return to it through the stylized activity of camping.

Then, once you've introduced camping, you'll have to note that black people don't do it much, poor white people to it differently than wealthy whites, and men and women have differing norms for urinating while doing it. So, you've got race, class and gender -- the essential ingredients of any dissertation. Just add "modernity" and stir for your dissertation topic:

"Contextualizing Urinization: A Critical Analysis of Modernity's Production of 'Camping'"