Produce a brief presentation for documentary film-maker
Focus of the assignment
This assignment is intended to particularly assess your skills of presenting to a non-psychologist audience. For this assignment you have been asked to provide a brief (15-minute, 8–14-slide) presentation to some film-makers who are looking to make a documentary about one of the topics covered in Block 3 of the module. Therefore, you need to create a set of presentation slides which look professional, and which cover the relevant content in a way that would be understandable to people who do not already know anything about psychology in general, or this area in particular. The idea is to draw on your psychological knowledge of either a) paraphilias or b) sex workers, and communicate this concisely in layperson terms to a general audience.
For this assignment you need to pick just one of the two topics to focus on: paraphilia or sex workers. Whichever you choose to use, the task is the same: to produce a presentation on what counselling and forensic psychology can tell us about this area.
For this assignment, it would be appropriate to draw on additional material beyond that contained within the module website and textbooks; in particular, relevant research that you have accessed using the Open University Library.
Please be aware that we always provide two possible topics for this assignment because some of the topics covered in this block of DD310 may be challenging for some students. If either of these topics is particularly difficult for you – perhaps because it relates to something you are going through personally at the moment, or is something you have very strong beliefs about – we would suggest choosing the other topic for your assignment.
Sex workers
focusing on sex workers you will need to draw on the material from Week 15. The following topics will be particularly useful:
Section 3 ‘Sex worker voices and ethical research’, which deals with including sex worker voices
Sections 4 ‘Criminalisation and decriminalisation of sex work’ and 5 ‘Structure and agency’, which deal with criminalisation and decriminalisation
Chapter 12 ‘Sex work’, pages 173–186 from Mad or Bad? A Critical Approach to Counselling and Forensic Psychology, which also covers these issues, and goes into more depth about what psychology can tell us about sex work and the treatment of sex workers.
Feel free also to draw upon material from anywhere else in the module that is relevant to your answer. For example, you might well find some of the material from Block 1 to be relevant in terms of diagnosis (Week 5 Diagnosis and categorisation) or media representations (Week 4 Media representations of crime and therapy).
You should also consider including additional relevant material that you have found in your independent study time, such as research findings that were not covered, or only briefly covered, in the module materials.
