Introduction to Comparative Politics / Timothy Pachirat
Take-Home Essay #2
– No Credit for Late Submissions; We do not accept technical excuses for non-submissions. It is your responsibility to make sure your essay has been successfully submitted to Moodle before the deadline.
– All essays automatically checked by TurnItIn for plagiarism.
– See course syllabus for details on extension policy (basically, there are no extensions; students with a documented accommodation from Disability Services must agree on an extension with their Teaching Assistant within 72 hours of receiving this prompt).
Essay Prompt and Read Carefully and in their Entirety Before Beginning your Essay!
Inequality menaces every moment of Lixin Fan’s Last Train Home and Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers. We have covered many faceless facts and statistics in weeks five through eleven of our course: that the 85 richest people on earth have more wealth than half of the world’s population combined; that people in the worst off countries live substantially shorter lives than people in the most well off countries; that human activity since the industrial revolution existentially threatens the health of the planet; that China will become the world’s largest economy in the next few years; and that Indian democracy grapples with enormous religious and linguistic diversity. These faceless facts are dramatically embodied in the everyday lives of the Zhang family in China and the residents of Annawadi in Mumbai, India. And inequalities of other kinds also pervade Last Train Home and Behind the Beautiful Forevers: inequality within countries; inequality between urban and rural areas; inequality between undercities hidden behind billboards advertising luxury goods and the rich residents of the overcities; inequality between men and women; inequality between boys and girls; inequality between religious majorities and minorities; inequality between parents and children; inequality between those with political connections and those without them; and, not least, inequality between humans and the natural world.
Your second and final essay for this class invites you to grapple with inequality on these various scales, and to demonstrate your ability to both zoom-in and zoom-out (see Istvan Banyai, Zoom, from our first week), to relate large, abstract facts to the messy, embodied flesh-and-blood of everyday life in a compelling way.
In a typed, double-spaced document not exceeding 2,000 words (excluding bibliography), you will write a single letter addressed directly to Qin Zhang, the teenage girl in Last Train Home, and one of the following four young people from Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Abdul, Manju, Sunil, or Meena. The goal of your letter will be both to introduce yourself to your letter recipients and to introduce your letter recipients to each other, with a clear emphasis on describing, explaining, and grappling with the inequalities in your lives. Your letter should be specific and local in its knowledge of the recipients’ lives and daily experiences but global and historical in its ability to place those lives and daily experiences in a larger political and economic context. If you wish, you may use maps, graphs, and other visual aids in your letter. These visual aids will not count against the 2,000 word limit.
Your letters will be evaluated against the following three criteria:
1. Clarity: Is your letter clearly written? Does it have a clear organizational logic? Is it free of spelling and grammatical errors? At the end of it, will your recipients know something about you and your location in the global political and economic order? Will they know something about each other and their respective positions in the global political and economic order? Will they have an enlarged understanding of the histories and possible futures of the inequalities that they face? Will they have a clear sense of what you think of these inequalities, and what, if anything, you believe should be done about them?
2. Incorporation of Key Points from the Readings and Lectures: Does your letter demonstrate a careful, thoughtful synthesis of the readings and lectures in weeks five through eleven? Some references and terms that you should consider drawing upon in your essay include, in no special order:
a. The Human Development Index
b. The causes of the Industrial Revolution
c. The consequences of the Industrial Revolution
d. China’s politics and economics
e. India’s politics and economics
f. World distributions of GDP per capita
g. Colonialism
h. Capitalism
3. Specificity: Does your letter draw deeply, extensively, and specifically on Last Train Home and Behind the Beautiful Forevers to convincingly demonstrate that you know the details of the lives of your recipients?
All letters must have the following heading:
First Name Last Name
Introduction to Comparative Politics with Timothy Pachirat
First Name and Last Name of Teaching Assistant, along with date and time of section
Date
# of Words in your letter (excluding bibliography and visual aids)
All letters should be addressed directly to their two recipients and signed with your name at the end.
Formal academic citations of readings and lectures in your letter should come in the form of endnotes, so as not to interrupt the flow and readability of the letter. Remember, this is a letter, not an academic essay, and your tone can be direct and personal, just as it would be in a letter. You should use the first-person (I), just as you would in a letter. You are still responsible for avoiding plagiarism by citing direct quotations and ideas that are not your own, but use an endnote format to do so.
Letters should be saved as a Microsoft Word Document and submitted via the “Short Essay Assignment Two” link in Moodle before the due date and time. Note as well that “TurnItIn” will automatically check submissions and flag possible cases of plagiarism. Do not submit a PDF or an Apple Pages Document.
Your Teaching Assistants are available to help you as you work on your letters. Please be sure to make good use of their office hours; do not wait until the last minute to start working on your letters!
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