Anthropology Course Long News Story Review

Description

The purpose of this assignment is for you to show familiarity with current trends in anthropology, identifying and describing topics and methods pertaining to each anthropological subfield as you do so. By reading and writing about particular news items, you will make connections between current events and the discipline of anthropology and reflect on the significance of your chosen items. This will also prepare you to critique the nature, value, and limitations of the basic methods of the social sciences. Throughout the term, monitor the news for stories that are relevant to the discipline of anthropology.  If you aren’t in the habit of reading newspapers or watching the news, there are lots of news services you can access online.  Here are some recommendations: https://www.bbc.com/news https://www.economist.com/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/ https://www.npr.org/ https://www.nytimes.com/ https://www.aljazeera.com/  (Links to an external site.) At least five times during the term, you will write a short paper about a particular news story of your choosing. The story should be no more than 2-3 years old (so 2016 or later). If an article you find is on the older side, do a little searching to be sure there’s not a more recent one on that same topic. Each paper should be at least 500 words long and should briefly summarize the article, identify the subfield(s) of anthropology present in the article, and explain the significance of the article has to anthropology. To be clear, this means that you should be making explicit connections between material from the class and the content of your article. Make sure to include all the components of a normal academic paper, including citations.  Once you have written your five review papers, you should prepare an additional 500 words critiquing the nature, value, and limitations of the basic methods of the social sciences. Use what you read in the text this term and what you learned by reviewing the news articles to compose your answer. These papers should all be submitted as one document.