Reflection 15

It's finally here. The end of the semester. Among other things, this mean's its time for the final World Politics reflection. I'll try and keep it as sappy, saccarine, and long-winded as possible.

I've thoroughly enjoyed this class. It's been the highlight of my first semester at American and one of the best classes I've ever taken, period. In part, I liked the class because I thoroughly enjoy the subject matter. But the greater part of it is because the class has made me grow as an intellectual and taught me to think more rigorously. Professor Jackson did an excellent job of challenging our logic and the assumptions on which our arguments rested, but so did my classmates -- in particular, I'd like to shout out to BoVice and Antonio Ipparalde. it's a sharp contrast from high school, where I could generally get away with any gaping hole in my logic as long as I used pretty metaphors and cited sources properly. Although most people came away with a positive opinion of the class, not everyone enjoyed it as much as I did. One complaint, voiced by several people, was that it had "too much theory". Although I don't agree with this complaint, I do think it suggests ways in which the class could be improved.

International relations is the study of the goals that international actors use to make decisions. If you want to learn about the processes by which decisions are made, take a class in Comparative Politics (which should really be required for international studies majors) and if you want to learn about the issues that states decide on, read The New York Times or The Weekly World News. The goals that we study in international relations generally fall into three categories: realist, liberal, and constructivist. In order to argue about the merit of any actual foreign policy, we must first decide what we want the policy to accomplish. Is it important that our actions support an identity of the United States as a champion of freedom? Or is it more important that our actions support the security of the American government?

However, I do think the class could put greater emphasis on asking students to analyze particular policy solutions from different ideological perspectives. The second half of the semester (the security, prosperity, and justice part) seemed designed to do this, but I think it could have been more explicit in asking: how should we design a system of international justice in order to maximize mutual economic gain? to maximize sovereignty? to support our identity? What perspectives do the policies of great powers most reflect, and how, knowing this, can we engage with these great powers? Although having students teach can be pedagogically useful, in this case I think it undermined making a strong argument for the relevance of international relations theories. We simply didn't have that goal in mind when we were teaching.

Also, a few other comments:

I would have liked to see ProfPTJ interact with us on the blogs more. The syllabus provides a quite reasonable pedagogical explanation for keeping blogs: they create a more dynamic intellectual environment than writing and submitting short papers to the professor. But while I certainly have learned from my peers, feedback from someone who is A) a professional scholar and B) going to be giving us grades is also useful

I didn’t like the simulations all that much. First, I’m not really sure how they tied into the rest of the class. They asked us to form positions and adopt stances on issues that most of us had little to no background on, from the perspective of countries that most of us had little to no background on. Second, the timing of tsecond simulation in particular was very inconvenient. I would have enjoyed the project if I wasn’t worry about several end-of-the-semester research papers at the same time.

How Soccer Explains the World seemed useless. I learned a lot about soccer, which I enjoyed, but I didn’t learn much about the world.