Assessment Information
Completion requirements
Assessment 1: Essay, 2500 words, 50% of final mark
Deadline for submission: 12/12/23
This assessment is designed to: (a) evaluate your understanding of the different theoretical traditions and ideas explored in weeks 1-5; and (b) assess your ability to apply a critical geographical understanding to your own research interests.Q: Discuss how an issue related to your own research might be framed as a problem of geographical knowledge.
Draw upon the work undertaken to provide you with some of the
references you will need. Focus in depth on what one particular approach or
methodology offers (or perhaps even fails to offer) the process of intellectual
inquiry in your chosen areas. The purpose of the essay is twofold:
1. To encourage you to think of intellectual problems through a specifically geographical lens (as a problem of space, place, scale, context, method, and so on).
2. To sharpen your appreciation of the ways that the choice of guiding assumptions or theoretical framework (whether implicitly or explicitly) shapes the manner in which you actually go about creating new knowledge and understanding. Every approach has its strengths and weaknesses, but how are these shaped by the context in which a piece of research is undertaken?
The assignment has two parts (two assessment points):
1) the discussion of a theoretical approach/lens (i.e., black feminism, critical race studies, decolonial approaches, critical development etc.);
2) the application of that theoretical approach to a case study (the case study might be related to your dissertation idea but does not have to be).
