By Mira Sucharov, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science
An exciting byproduct of my fourth-year seminar on political opinion writing has been the phenomenon of students discovering politics — the “home discipline” of the course — around every corner. The class, which I developed this year as a special topics course, is intended to get students to both analyze and learn to master the op-ed writing form.
The course involves students writing four op-ed assignments (plus two required pre-read versions), plus orally presenting on two op-eds that they select from that week’s news. The writing assignments are hybrid ones, which is to say that students are required to footnote extensively and provide background data and additional empirical analysis in the notes.
And while it’s technically a “political science” course, I have encouraged students to think about politics in the broadest sense: anything regarding social and political understandings around identity (whether gender, sexual, ethnic or national) and power (whether material or ideational), or government regulation at any level (municipal, provincial, state or national); and policies at any level (local or international).
The breadth of topics students have chosen to write about reflects the benefits of casting the net wide. Topics have ranged from online gambling to media portrayals of Hillary Clinton to gender reassignment surgery to Black Lives Matter to learning policy lessons from history to urban hen farming to “voluntourism” to tuition fees to rock climbing and provincial park regulation.
What’s particularly satisfying for me is enabling students to discover analytical links as they navigate through their everyday life — whether by engaging in a favourite hobby (like sports, gambling or rock climbing) and wondering about the political possibilities of domestic regulation, or by watching the news and getting frustrated by seemingly arbitrary rules restricting urban hobby farmers, or by trying to uncover the less visible political and global implications of an activity they may be initially attracted to — like traveling abroad to volunteer.
Forging these kinds of intellectual links is the hallmark of critical thinking, which in turn forms the bedrock of strong democratic citizenship. I’m gratified, therefore, that a course that I developed to help shore up strong writing and analytical skills actually is proving to have far greater implications for the possibilities of democratic engagement.