Part IX: Capstone Projects
The capstone is where the course becomes yours.
Throughout this book, you have been a reader, an analyst, and a critic. You have evaluated evidence, identified theoretical tensions, and applied frameworks to specific cases. The capstone projects ask you to do all of that while making a substantial original contribution — designing something, deconstructing something, or analyzing something in depth that could not have been produced without the knowledge and judgment you have built over the course of the semester.
There are three options. They are genuinely different from one another in what they ask and what they produce. Read all three descriptions before committing to one.
Choosing Your Project
A few questions to guide your choice:
Are you drawn to empirical research design? Do you find yourself most engaged when asking "how would we actually test this?" Do you gravitate toward the methodology chapters? Capstone 1 is likely your project.
Are you more interested in how systems work — especially commercial and algorithmic systems? Do you find yourself thinking about the Swipe Right Dataset, platform design, and the commodification of intimacy? Capstone 2 is likely yours.
Do you have a strong humanities or cultural studies background, or do you find yourself most engaged when analyzing narratives and representations? Is Chapter 35 on media one of your favorites? Capstone 3 is probably where you should be.
All three options require the full range of the course's frameworks. None of them is "easier" than the others — they are differently demanding.
Capstone 1: Designing a Cross-Cultural Study
You are an extension of the Okafor-Reyes team. The Global Attraction Project has concluded its primary data collection, and the team is soliciting proposals for follow-up studies that the original design could not accommodate. Your task is to identify a specific question raised but unanswered by the original study and design a rigorous mixed-methods investigation that could address it.
A strong Capstone 1 project does not simply ask "what would be interesting to know?" It grounds the research question in the actual gaps and findings of the literature covered in the course, proposes a methodology that is appropriate to the question (not just the methodology the student finds most familiar), engages seriously with IRB and consent challenges in a cross-cultural context (as Chapter 5 established, these are real and substantial), and demonstrates an understanding of what "cross-cultural validity" requires methodologically.
This capstone draws most heavily on Chapters 3, 5, 8, 10, 25, 28, and 40.
Capstone 2: Deconstructing a Dating App
Pick a real, currently operating dating app. Your task is to analyze it as a system — not simply as a technology, but as a sociotechnical artifact that embeds values, produces behavior, and shapes the experience of attraction for its users.
A strong Capstone 2 project examines the app at multiple levels: its design logic and user interface choices, its explicit and implicit policies around identity and matching, the algorithmic structures that are publicly known (and the ones that aren't), the ways it produces different experiences for users with different identities (using the race, gender, class, and sexuality frameworks from Part V), and the harm vectors it creates or exacerbates (drawing on Part VI). It concludes with a design critique: what would this app look like if it were designed with the course's ethical framework as a constraint?
This capstone draws most heavily on Chapters 20, 23, 24, 25, 26, 29, 33, and 38.
Capstone 3: Analyzing a Seduction Narrative in Media
Choose a film, television series, novel, or substantial piece of long-form journalism that contains what you would characterize as a seduction narrative — a story substantially organized around one or more characters pursuing romantic or sexual connection with another. Your task is to analyze it using the course's theoretical frameworks.
A strong Capstone 3 project does not summarize the narrative. It identifies the specific theoretical frameworks most relevant to its analysis (biological, psychological, sociological, communicative, ethical), applies them with precision, and argues for a claim about what the narrative does — what it normalizes, what it subverts, whose desires it centers, what it assumes about the nature of attraction, and what effects those assumptions might have on audiences who internalize them. The best Capstone 3 projects treat their chosen narrative as a form of data: something to be interpreted rather than simply evaluated.
This capstone draws most heavily on Chapters 2, 4, 23, 24, 29, 31, 35, and 41.
A Note on Scope and Standards
Each capstone should be substantial — think of it as a research paper or analytical project of the kind expected in upper-division social science and humanities courses. Your instructor will provide specific formatting requirements, length guidelines, and grading rubrics. What this introduction can tell you is that the best capstone projects share a quality that is hard to fake: genuine intellectual investment. They ask a question the student actually wants to answer, or analyze something the student finds genuinely interesting, and they bring the full weight of the course to bear on it.
Nadia, Sam, and Jordan are each working on a capstone in the framing narrative of this final section. They have chosen different options — predictably, each consistent with their character — and they are each struggling with something specific about it. Their process is worth watching, not as a model but as a mirror.
In This Part
- Capstone 1 — Designing a Cross-Cultural Study: Extend the Okafor-Reyes Global Attraction Project with an original follow-up research design.
- Capstone 2 — Deconstructing a Dating App: A multi-level sociotechnical and ethical analysis of a real dating platform.
- Capstone 3 — Analyzing a Seduction Narrative in Media: Apply the course's theoretical frameworks to a film, television series, novel, or long-form journalism piece.