In this paper, you are to report on and critically examine some way in which global economic restructuring has affected your life or those of your family, friends, neighborhood, or home town. Chapters 11 and 12 in the Knox and Agnew text try to pull economic geography together in a framework of contemporary restructuring of the global economy as it affects (and sometimes is modified) by local circumstances. You should start by reading those to get some ideas that might jar your recollection of related events that may have affected you and yours.Some examples might suffice to get you thinking about this: corporate downsizing as it affects someone in middle management, plant closures as they affect industrial workers and the economic health of a community, the arrival of a discount super-retailer (such as Wal-Mart) in a town as it affects locally-owned businesses, the national sourcing of the clothes and shoes you wear or the foods you eat, how your dietary choices might be affecting lives thousands of miles away, outside investment in residential real estate pushing up home or apartment prices in a community so that the people who work there might not afford to live there (maybe people in your family do epic commutes to "affordable" housing and can't spend much time on their families or community activities?), maybe you or someone in your family went off to war to facilitate some economic interest, or ??? These are offered as stimuli to get you thinking about how global economic processes might have local, indeed, very personal effects.
Select one incident or situation from your own experience that illustrates some local impact of global restructuring processes. Describe what happened and then critically analyze the situation in terms of the concepts discussed in class or in the Knox and Agnew text (or even any parallels you saw between your situation and those in your first report). What, specifically, does the incident or situation you describe illustrate? On the basis of your personal experience, try to determine if these class and text concepts deepened your understanding of what happened or, alternatively, failed to clarify something important about it. This is where you interrogate theory against your own experience of the global economy. The descriptive and conceptual content of your paper count for 60 percent of your points on this paper.
Writing mechanics count! They account for 30 percent of the points possible on this paper, so pay attention to organization; spelling; grammar; the construction of correct, complete, and varied sentences; proper punctuation and capitalization; and avoiding sexist usage. You can find more explicit standards for writing mechanics here.
I would like you to include a formal reference list in this paper. Use the parenthetical reference system (an example is provided in my article on chaparral fire hazard). With this system, all references in the list must be cited at least once in the text. I don't care which form of the parenthetical reference system you use, as long as you're consistent.
I'd like you to include at least six sources, of which one may be the Knox and Agnew text. Your sources for this paper could include books or articles in newspapers, magazines, journals, or the Internet, which either provide background on your specific experience or which provide conceptual material relevant to understanding your example. Your reference list will contribute another 10 percent of the points possible on the paper.
As usual, late papers will lose 10 percent of the possible points for every campus working day they're late unless you have made prior arrangements with me (as for religious obligations, for example). I may reduce the point loss in the event of a very serious emergency that precluded prior notification, depending on the severity of the situation.