Glendon College of York University
GL ECON 1680
Fall-Winter 2022
Course Director: JS Pinter, PhD
Take home test. Value is 25 points.
Due April 15, 2022 9pm on eclass
—
The questions are open-ended. You must define relevant issues within the topic and you need to select from readings. It?s always better to be specific and detailed and not general. See explainer below.
Please don?t think that open-ended questions mean that you don?t need to make connections to the text and to engage with them.
The essay length is about 1000 words per response. But you do not have to write 1000 words to respond. Good responses are often shorter. Just not too short.
Refer to the texts we use in this course only.
A minimum number of sources would be 2 per response.
A minimum of references would be 5.
Please highlight your quotes and paraphrases by colour coding the passages that you quote and paraphrase.
The quality of your quoted passages will have a lot to do with the quality of your essay.
The quality of your engagement with passages has a lot to do with the quality of your essay, ie don?t just include quoted passages that confirm a thing you?ve written.
Reference your sources; reference and reference again. Treat the sources you use with respect and stick close to them. Use MLA or APA style. Please always include page numbers. See library homepage for information on citation styles.
Collaboration is important for us these days, but in a test you are responsible for your own work. Any similarity, large or small, between student papers will result in penalties applied to all papers with these similarities.
—
Please respond to two statements. In all cases, the rules, described above, determine the value of your essay response.
—
1. political state ? administrative structures of state. For centuries, really, the political state in Canada was used to further private goals first of all. How did/do political leaders use projects of national importance (transport infrastructure, human resource policy, etc, even Champlain?s request to the French crown to bolster the colony?s human resource assets) as ways of building resources with which to buy off opposition and reward friends? Does the Neoliberal model (Steger and Roy) of privatization continue the same pattern? What are some similarities and differences?
2. Resources, land and where people live. Capitalism allows for ownership of resources without having to live anywhere near where the resource is. This means that owners or shareholders of a company whose interest is in resource extraction, can benefit from extraction, processing and sale of the resource without being anywhere near where this all happens. What are some of the consequences of this?
3. work and identity. Employment shapes gender identity. As the economy grew, it created jobs for men and work for women. Are there differences between these? What are some of these?
4. Indigenous ? settler relations. Accounts like that of Samuel Hearne in Shoalts? book (Ch 6) create specific impressions of indigenous people as part of the establishment of European dominance in Canada. In what ways does Manuel?s account of indigenous relations differ? How would you determine which account is closer to the actual truth?
5. Settler dependence on indigenous knowledge of the land and how to live on it exposed Europeans and indigenous peoples to each other at their worst and at their best.
6. Ideologies, assumptions, expectations. Economic growth depends on the imposition of a cis-gendered family structure. This in turn creates social exclusion and worse for many who are not part of this expectation. Write an outline of a chapter in The Ward or in Just the Usual Work, (hint: neither of these books has a chapter like this, so you can imagine one) in which this topic is dealt with.
7. Price system and European-indigenous relations during the time of exploration. Is the payment to Indigenous people for guiding cartographers across the river systems of the country comparable to the value of that knowledge to European companies and traders? (Shoalts, Innis)
Explainer.
In an in-person course we are able to move through material in a series of steps. My experience is that we learn through the association of material with certain events. So, in a classroom, we have discussions, debates, show films, listen to people explain their viewpoints, work in groups, etc etc . These events in class help us to solidify learning and to move from one step on a learning scaffold to the next. So we have a really good way of solidifying learning like this.
But in our environment now, with online and hybrid modes of delivery, it?s difficult to connect events with learning. In fact, for some of you, there may be no events to connect with. Your experience with the course and its materials is entirely through reading and writing assignments. This is a different way of going through a class. Not better or worse but different.
So these exam questions are meant to allow you to define the issues you have come to understand as being important in the course. I care about how you respond to the statements, but I also care a lot about your work from an academic skills viewpoint. So remember that your work is evaluated on both of these aspects.
From a practical point of view the thing to remember is that the topics reflect themes that we?ve discussed and that the readings pick up on. Just remember to clearly and explicitly define a topic for each statement that you reply to.
