(Political Identity): Anything about the politics of identity; these kinds of stories arevery common in US mass media, but they are also found in many other countries with greatfrequency. It can be related to race, religion, gender or gender identity, sexual orientation,caste, ethnicity, etc The link of the news is https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-47729119
What Needs to Go In an Entry?Each entry needs to have four things:
1) A link to the story you are using, if it is available on the web. If you find a story ina print publication, you should be able to find and provide the link to it online.Many radio and television stories also likely have web links to listen or watch.
2) A short description of the event being covered. You do not need to get in greatdetail here. Just tell enough to cover the main points of the story. This need notbe more than 2-3 sentences.**Important: Do not cut and paste text from the story itself and use that as yoursummary. This constitutes plagiarism. The summary must be in your ownwords!**
3) Somewhere, in either the summary or the questions, you need to make it clearwhy you see a connection between this particular event or news story and thetopic we have just covered. For example, one could write an entry on a story aboutthe poor condition of roads in Kenya and how that has contributed to a recenttraffic accident there. However, you should also make clear that you understandthat this story is related to the topic of The State (if you’re writing for thatparticular topic), in that even minimalists think that states should maintain roads,and the fact that Kenya does not do that very well is some indication of a weakerstate.
4) At least 2 questions that came to mind as you read the story. I anticipate that thesewill mostly be “how” or “why” questions. For example, if you’ve read a story aboutethnic violence in Myanmar (Burma), a question might be, “Why did Group Aattack Group B?” If civilians, or even children, were targeted in the attack, a goodquestion would be “Why did the attackers target children?”
A really good question integrates significant amounts of context from the story.For example, if you were reading a story from August 2013 about the elections inZimbabwe, and the story mentioned how then-President Mugabe’s ZANU-PFparty won quite a few seats in opposition strongholds (such as MasvingoProvince), and how the last election in 2008 had involved significant violenceagainst members of the opposition there, you could ask, “Why did people inMasvingo Province, who had voted for the opposition in the past, vote forMugabe’s party in this election? Wouldn’t the violence people in the regionsuffered at the hands of ZANU-PF supporters in 2008 have made them unlikely toever vote for ZANU-PF?”These questions should be something that intrigues, puzzles, or even confuses youabout the story. After a few weeks of this, you will hopefully be asking the typesof questions that political scientists try to answer in their work.Bad questions (for the purpose of this assignment) would be ones that are morestrictly factual in nature. For example, if you read an article on the 2013 electionin Zimbabwe, and it mentioned that ZANU-PF won in Masvingo Province, a goodquestion would *not* be, “How many people voted in Masvingo Province?” Otherinappropriate questions would be, “When did Zimbabwe get its independence?””How old is Robert Mugabe?” “What are the main crops grown in MasvingoProvince?” etc.Also, avoid questions that simply ponder what will happen in the future. Forexample, “How much longer will authoritarianism last in Zimbabwe?” is not agood question for this assignment. Political scientists mainly focus on analyzingthings that have happened in the past.
