In this blog assignment you are asked to critically reflect on the literature you read for your firstassignment on this course. On the basis of your fieldwork experience please explain how yourviews have either changed or been reinforced, with respect to one of the main issues you raised inyour research proposal.
- Your blogs must reflect or speak to the core theme of your pathway.
- Blogs should be referenced. The Harvard system is recommended but footnotes (e.g.Chicago) can also work well.
- Your blog may overlap with your essay in topic, but not in specific words. To submit thesame text for both the blog and the essay will be seen as self-plagiarism and penalisedaccordingly.
Assessment Criteria
- Ability to capture the key points accurately and presenting them in a simple and logicalway. Less academic terminology is expected (this is for a wider audience) but this shouldnot detract from clarity or precision of meaning.
- Quality of the points raised rather than quantity
- Quality of the argument: evidence of knowledge and understanding of the keydiscourses
- Use of examples
- Referencing
Creativity and originality in presentation format will be viewed positively, so there is not a rigidformat to follow in this assignment. The best blogs will be posted online.
What should the blog be about?
Your blog should be aimed at the general UK public and critically reflect on a developmentchallenge faced in Uganda. Naturally, this must relate to your pathway theme and should berelated to the readings and discussions. Blogs that do well will:
- Avoid jargon – Your blog should appeal to a general UK audience, not an academic one. Thismeans you need to use accessible language and find simple but clear ways to explainacademic concepts and theories. This is a skill worth practicing and key for thisassignment.
- Be specific – General broad commentaries don’t work well – name specific problems, issues,and policies give examples and evidence of their impacts. In general, as long as you havedata to support your arguments, you can be as specific as you like in the focus of yourargument.
- Be positional – choose a topic you feel you can make an argument about. Don’t say: “it’scomplicated” or “more research is needed”. Do say: “what currently approaches fail to dealwith is X” and so on. This is not a call for empty rhetoric – all your points must be balanced,nuanced and evidenced – just don’t sit on the fence.
- Give evidence – Use examples and references to support your arguments
- Show theoretical depth – while avoiding jargon. Theories explain how things work in theworld, your analysis and proposal should demonstrate awareness of different ways ofunderstanding how things work in the world (theories), reference them and position yourreflections in relation to them.
- Think creatively – A blog is a distinct format for communication – it should be lively andcatch people’s attention with a clear, passionate and convincing argument.
You can chooseany format for presenting and illustrating your argument (cartoons, pictures, case studies,quotes, analogies etc.).
Examples of blogs
The blogging workshop will give you a better understanding of the blogging assessment criteria,and you may want to look at some popular development blogs to give you ideas:
- blogs.worldbank.org/growth
- http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com
- http://robertreich.org/
- http://mastersofdisasters.wordpress.com
- http://www.roslingsblogger.blogspot.co.uk
- povertyblog.wordpress.com
- http://www.oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/
- http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.co.uk/
Referencing Fieldwork Interview Material
For all secondary sources (e.g. newspapers, reports, documents, books, journal articles, books,maps) please use the suggested referencing style above. However, for primary data, please noteespecially for the following:
Interviews
Remember that interview data are considered non-recoverable data. This means for these data, itcannot be usefully expected that another person/researcher who follows up on this source can getthe same interview and responses in the way they were expressed. As a result no reference to thisis required in the reference list. You may, however, cite the interview within the text as a personalcommunication.
For Example in text referencing for an interview with Mr Singoman held on March 28 2017 wouldbe referenced in text as:
- (J.M. Singoman, personal communication, March 28, 2017)