There are two components to this assignment, totaling 30 points.
An optional paper proposal.
A 4-5 page double spaced paper.
If you choose to do the optional paper proposal, then you will be graded for 5 points, and the paper will be 25 points. If you choose not to do the paper proposal, then your paper will be worth 30 points.
Additional directions for the proposal will be found in the assignment itself.
Directions:
Your paper will look critically at specific ideas of nature and/or an environmental issue using the theoretically frameworks used in class. I will give you a lot of leeway, letting you choose what you’d like to look at. This is an opportunity to deeply explore and think about anything concerning nature and the environment.
The paper must have the following:
An explanation of this environmental issue for non-experts.
An engagement with at least two sources from class. You should also include at least one additional peer-reviewed academic source that helps you either empirically or theoretically. You can use empirical sources, newspaper articles, media, and other sources on top of this.
Correct in-line citations and a bibliography.
Submission Requirements:
4-5 written pages double spaced. It is ok to go up to page 6, but no more.
Correct in-line citations and a correct bibliography. you can use Chicago, MLA, and APA. If you want to use another style, just name it at the top of your bibliography page.
A title, name, and course number at the top of the paper.
Page numbers.
Examples and Approaches:
By “engagement,” I mean that you will take the main argument and concepts in a reading and use them to help you understand your chosen topic. An “engagement” means you are using other’s work to build your own argument.
Some examples of a good engagement:
You want to think about the movement of capital and emissions into countries besides China. How does Malm help you understand the movement of capital towards certain kinds of labor and how does that boost emissions? Are you going to critique Malm? What might he be missing? You use other sources to help with your critique.
You want to think about the relationship between gender, sex, and nature in disaster films. You choose two films that help you think through these issues and engage with Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson to use a “queer ecologies” framework and Gergan et al., to think about disaster movie tropes. How does your chosen films expand on these two articles?
You want to understand what has lead to the issues surrounding an environmental issue in the town you grew up in. You engage with Bond to try to understand how environmental degradation is tied to underdevelopment and unequal ecological exchange. You also engage with Pulido to think about the production of environmental racism. You draw from newspaper articles from your home town to contextualize the issue and for other types of empirical data.
You want to make sure that you are using your chosen sources in good faith: engage with their main arguments, NOT with passing data, unimportant sub-questions, or empirical explanation.
What might a bad faith engagement look like?
You use statistics on production and emissions from Malm, but little else.
You decide to engage with forestry and cite Kosek as also talking about forestry, but without any context, or without engaging in his main points.
You misrepresent arguments, or concepts to suit your own argument.
Wrtie about the water pollution on New York City’s rivers
