Tutor’s responses

Thanks for these – don’t forget to keep updating the blog! I’d like to see you engage a bit more personally with it – your reflections from Weeks 3 & 4 read more like a generally summary, and they are useful, but I really like how you engage with your first blog posts with more personal reflections on your engagement with the material. Remember this is not a test of your academic ability, it is just about seeing your engagement with materials, it doesn’t matter if that’s the seminar, the texts, or even just something random you have read that made you think about something in the course. Let me know if you’re not sure about it.

Reflections week 3&4

Week 3

It was interesting to see how a lot of nations that became decolonised were still heavily influenced by the countries/empires that invaded them in the first place. For example, America started to emulate Britain by meddling in the affairs of other countries and tried to manipulate them, such as in the “Banana Wars” in the late 19th century/early 20th century. Thinking about how “white” our education system is was quite difficult as I’ve no other experiences with other curriculums . I can believe that it is most likely very white as the Northern Irish system has been described as very protestant biased with what they teach so its not a stretch to think its the same when talking about colonisation and how biased it is towards Europeans.

Week 4

Week 4 was a little less thought provoking for me and felt more like a warning going forward with the module and when we get round to writing assignments. There is a full list of terms to describe indigenous communities and each community has different preferences as to which one they identify with and to what terms they take great offence to being called. Therefore I feel like it was a clear warning that I need to start being cautious when handling the subject matter the module deals with as to not mislabel or misidentify the different communities.

Reflection weeks 1&2

So this is my blog for the course I guess, I’m not sure how personal or therein professional this has to be but I feel if I make it more personal I can be more open with my thoughts and opinions on the course. Hopefully then it will be a tad more interesting to read, although if I’m wrong I’m sure I’ll be told to be more prim and proper with it and we’ll adjust for that.

Going over my notes for week 1, I feel like  I have a clearer idea of why I picked this module and what I want from it. Initially, I chose this because I simply didn’t like the look of the other modules that were available to me but now I feel a little more interested/committed to this topic. I have already seen slithers of postcolonial life in Latin America thanks to the project I did last semester and I think it would be more interesting to see the post colonial eras of other countries to give me a broader sense of the topic. So that’s what I want from this module. To deepen my knowledge and understanding of what life was like during those time periods and how that has affected them in the present day.

For week 2, I was a little nervous going into it based off of how many words were in the list/table that I couldn’t recognise. It was the same anxiety you would get looking over a translation exercise and being unable to figure out what an unknown word could mean, even with the benefit of it being in a sentence to give it a little context. A lot of it is still foreign to me but I feel like I have a bit of a better grip on it. I think I might just have to revert back to my notes every now and again to keep it fresh in my head.