Monday, December 01, 2008

December 1

Whoops, I just noticed that I didn't post on Friday, sorry about that!




I started today's class by outlining possible ways of organizing your in-class position paper tomorrow. As you should have seen, on either side of the issue, there are a multitude of ways of organizing it, depending on which arguments you use, case studies, arguments and evidence you choose to emphasize. To quickly summarize, on the essay question "To what extent does economic globalization contribute to sustainable prosperity for all people?" you could take the side that it does contribute to sustainable prosperity for all people, in which case you would emphasize the economics-based definition of sustainable prosperity. Some possible ways of organizing the positive side of the issue would be to focus in on the global financial institutions as one of your arguments, you would be arguing the benefits of the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO, with supporting evidence. Another body paragraph could center around the benefits of economic trading blocs, such as the EU (you could use the case study of Ireland to illustrate the benefits of membership int he EU and how it has raised the standard of living and quality of life in Ireland) and NAFTA. You could also look at the benefits of TNCs by using some information from the video "Globalisation is Good" particularly the case study of Nike in Vietnam. You could also look at the benefits of contemporary economic globalization on the developing world and newly industrializing countries such as India and China. On the flip side of the issue, you could organize your essay around criticizing global financial institutions like the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO. By focusing on just these three global financial institutions, you would just criticize each institution in each of your body paragraphs. You could also group them all together into one paragraph as well, if you wanted to criticize other aspects of modern economic globalization. You could be critical of large economic trading blocs like the EU (giving up some aspects of your country's sovereignty to be part of the EU), and NAFTA (look at the NAFTA chart in the PowerPoint presentation "The Expansion of Economic Globalization", this goes for the positive side of the argument as well). You could also emphasize the negative aspects of TNCs in the world today (have a look at the companion website to the documentary "The Corporation", or have a look under Social 10-1 Links for hyperlinks to other companion websites for films that I showed in Unit 3). You could also argue the detrimental side of contemporary economic globalization on the developing world and newly industrialized countries, such as India and China (is everyone benefiting from globalization in these countries?), or look at Jamaica as a case study as well (could be used to criticize the World Bank and IMF and to a lesser extent, the WTO, look at the companion website for the film "Life + Debt"). If you are arguing that economic globalization does not contribute to the sustainable prosperity of all people, you would want to emphasize that not all people are benefiting from the spread of globalization, and you would also want to define sustainable prosperity in your first paragraph to include economic, social and environmental aspects of that term. I hope our brainstorming session helps you with tomorrow's position paper, please remember to go directly to the Blenheim Room.



I gave you the remainder of class time to complete your homework assignment (hopefully all you have to do tonight is send it to me by e-mail): 7 high quality Jeopardy! style questions and answers sent to me by e-mail TONIGHT! We will be playing a review game on Wednesday.



I finished off the presentation called "Nations, Nation-States and Internationalism", with some supplementary material on the United Nations in it. I will send this presentation to you today, so please check your e-mail inboxes. Also, we watched a short CBC News in Review on the role of peacekeeping operations in the 21st century. I gave you a reading to go along with this CBC News in Review that you should read. I gave you the remainder of class time to do your Chapter 10 Key Terms and Questions, which will be due on Wednesday, December 3rd. We will be moving through this Unit 3 material VERY quickly, so please make sure that you keep up with the homework assignments.

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