POL107 Short Essay Instruction & Course Material
Instructions:
Answer one of the two essay prompts in an essay form. Your essay should not exceed 750 words (not including bibliography). Please provide a word count.
A good essay will make a clear argument.
A good essay will then bolster the argument theoretically by providing support (or critique) from relevant course readings.
A good essay will also provide support (or critique) of the argument by presenting examples from relevant empirical cases that we covered in class.
Discuss the essay questions in the context of our course material (no external source allowed!). In your essay discuss relevant arguments from two authors that we read for the course and support your thesis with evidence from two relevant empirical examples
Course Materials (Readings):
Weekly topic: Seeing like a State
Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press. Read pp 1-6 and chapter 7 (rural collectivization in Tanzania)
Rubin, Oliver. 2009. The Niger Famine: A Collapse of Entitlements and Democratic Responsiveness. Journal of Asian and African Studies, 44/3: 279-298.
Weekly topic: Are All Disasters Created Equal?
McEvoy, Arthur F. 1995. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911: Social Change, Industrial Accidents, and the Evolution of Common Sense Causality. Law & Social Inquiry, 20/2: 621-651
Walker, Peter. 1999. Natural Disasters Are Man-Made. New Perspectives Quarterly, 16/5: 15-16
Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. 2020. The Black Plague. The New Yorker. April 16.
Native Women’s Association of Canada. 2010. Fact Sheet: Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women and Girls.
Hideki Toya and Mark Skidmore. 2007. Economic development and the impacts of natural disasters. Economic Letters, 94/1: 20-25.
Weekly topic: Boiling Frogs
Hardin, Garrett. 1968. The Tragedy of the Commons. Science, 162/ 3859, pp. 1243-1248.
Bazerman, Max H. 2006. Climate Change as a Predictable Surprise. Climatic Change, 77/1-2: 179-193.
Schulz, Kathryn. 2015. The Really Big One. The New Yorker, July 20.
Weekly topic: Public policy and Economic Reform.
Blyth, Mark. 2013. The Austerity Delusion: Why a Bad Idea Won Over the West. Foreign Affairs, 92/3: 41-56
Weekly topic: Life Finds a Way
Sagan, Scott D. 1994. Organized for Accidents. Security Studies, 3/3: 509-520
Schlosser, Eric. 2016. World War Three, by Mistake. The New Yorker, December 23
You don’t need to include every single article; you just need to find the ones that are most relevant to the essay and that can support your argument (2 relevant arguments from 2 authors + 2 empirical examples)