Annotated Bibliography
This assignment asks you to write an annotated bibliography in preparation for
your final paper. In order to do so you first need to identify a topic that
you would like to explore in greater depth. You may choose topics covered in
past or upcoming readings, as well as class discussion. Exploring what others
have written on a topic will familiarize you with the questions and debates
that are salient in the academic literature on that topic. This will help you
situate your research project within a broader context. After finishing the
annotated bibliography, you will have a better sense of what people are
arguing about with respect to your topic, and how your own views fit within or
challenge that conversation.
When consider what sources to include in your bibliography, you should focus
on academic texts on the topic that touch on the issues that made the topic
interesting to you in the first place. Since this is a philosophy class, I
encourage you to first look at philosophical sources. A good starting point is
the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (freely available online), which has
entries on most topics that have been thoroughly discussed by philosophers.
Another helpful philosophical database is philpapers.org. However, feel free
to look at other sources beyond academic philosophy. Other helpful academic
databases that are broader in scope include Google Scholar, JSTOR, Project
Muse. The first one is freely available online, the other two you can access
via the university’s library.
Philosophy of Race and Racism
Spring 2023
Prof. César Cabezas
Once you identify all the relevant sources, you should pick five entries for
the annotated bibliography assignment.
Instructions for the assignment
Your annotated bibliography should start with a 1-2 sentence statement of your
paper topic.
After stating your paper topic, you should write an entry for each of the
sources you picked (for a total of 5). For each source, you must do the
following:
a) Write down the title and author of the article/book
b) Write a short summary of the author’s argument. Think of this as a
shorter version of the argument reconstructions you did for the explain-
and-evaluate paper.
c) Explain how this source relates to the topic of your paper.
For each entry, you should write no more than 200 words (excluding title and
name of author).