This assignment provides an opportunity to explore international connections through a narrative that incorporates sources from our class and outside reading you may find beneficial. To complete this assignment you will write an essay in the style of an autobiography. You may use your own experiences or create a fictional character who lives in the present, recent, past, or a historical period we cover in detail during this course. You will describe the life of your narrator from a first-person perspective. You may approach the narrator’s entire life, a particular period in their life, or even a single event if it fits the requirements below. Your autobiography should be at least 10 pages and double-spaced (standard margins and 12 pt. font). You should discuss how your experiences were similar or different from the ones we have addressed in the class. You should reference the readings, interviews, articles, and other course material we have considered this semester throughout the paper. This is a chance for you to be very creative as there are very few rigid guidelines for this assignment (which is, of course, very deliberate).
But each autobiography must include a few elements:
The experiences you describe must have a clear connection to international studies by engaging with subjects covered in our course in a way that demonstrates their global significances.
At some point in the paper you must compare and contrast your experiences with another individual or group that the narrator encounters. The goal here is to demonstrate your understanding of our subjects from multiple perspectives.
You must find at least two scholarly journal articles (JSTOR is a great source) along with resources from the class to provide context for the topics you discuss. While it is true that you have a myriad of sources available to you in the form of assigned readings and other course materials (and you should refer to as many of them as possible in your paper), this requirement will give you the opportunity to explore scholarly journals. Your articles could come from any academic field we cover in this course (ex. history, economics, geography as well as international studies itself). Please contact your instructor with any questions about this.
You may consider incorporating audio, video, or other elements into this assignment. If those play a significant role, you will still need to identify outside sources. As an alternative to one of the journal articles, you may use an interview conducted by yourself or someone else, regarding another person’s experiences that fit with the main points of your essay. You instructor will accept a shorter written essay in these situations depending on the length and number of audio/video/interview sources included.
Your autobiography should have an introduction and a conclusion, footnotes as necessary, and a bibliography. It should be free of spelling and grammatical errors. It should be well-organized and the ideas presented should flow in a logical, systematic manner.
Please know that if you do choose to share personal experience, your privacy is absolutely guaranteed; your instructor will not be talking to anyone about what you write in your autobiography and these will not be posted for the rest of this class. The autobiography will be worth 200 points. It should be written in a Word or .rtf document and submitted through the dropbox.
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