Assignments

1.  Map Exercise and map Quiz.

In week four, students will demonstrate in a short quiz that they know “almost everything there is to know” about Southeast Asian geography.

2.  Reading responses

During the course of the semester, students will post five separate reading responses to the course website. 

****Click here for guidelines on writing reading responses.****

3. Ripped from the headlines.

In this short blogging and midterm Essay Project, students will write an analysis of a contemporary Southeast Asian news event or social issue. Students will begin by tracking and maintaining a running blog about the news media of a Southeast Asian country. After following the news for a few weeks, students will choose a key event that either grabs their attention, or which they feel appears to command the attention of readers in that country. After zeroing in on a specific event or topic within a country, students will focus their blog entries on that event, embedding links to articles, commentaries, and other forms of media that they deem relevant, or otherwise worthy of commentary.

As a culmination of this projects, students will publish a final 1,500 word analysis of this media event to the course website.

4. Modern Problems, Southeast Asia.

In this open-ended 10-15 page Final Research Paper, students will write an independent study of “Modern problem” of their own choosing in Southeast Asia. Students may explore the transformation of a specific cultural tradition, offer a critical look  at a development project and the political economic factors involved, examine public health issues, security concerns, or any other project that fits in with, and complements, the general course subject matter.  Potential topics might include:

  • Debates about what to display in museums
  • Cultural traditions
  • Infrastructure projects
  • Factory labor
  • Migration
  • Urbanization
  • Class divisions, poverty, wealth, consumerism
  • HIV/AIDS
  • Sexuality and gender issues
  • And more…

Final papers will be published to the course web-site, where they will be made freely available to the public.