- 16 Mar, 2021
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How has academic research helped us to understand the politics surrounding austerity
Requirement
Essay title: How has academic research helped us to understand the politics surrounding austerity? Critically discuss.
Aims of the essay
In this essay, we want to help you to develop one of the most important academic skills that you will need to use in your work: the skill of analysis and critique. Students often find that they get feedback on their work that says it is too descriptive and not analytical enough. Following the tips set out below will help you to find ways around this problem. The aim is to help prepare you to do well in your assessed essays.
What do I need to do?
We recommend approaching the essay in three steps:
Step 1. Initial search for interesting topics: Search for sources on austerity. The essay title refers to academic research and so we do want you to use google scholar to incorporate books and articles from academic journals into your essay. It is fine to use reports by governments, NGOs and think tanks as well as media sources. However, we are looking for academic sources to make up most of your essay’s bibliography.
Step 2. Narrow your focus: Austerity is a huge topic and so you will need to make choices in narrowing down the focus of your essay. You can choose to focus on any aspect of austerity that academics have written about as long as you tell us in your essay why it is an important area to analyse. It is always important to justify choices like this in academic writing. In the past, students have focused on a wide range of areas such as the impact of austerity on elections, protests, poverty, government policies e.g. health policy, competition between political parties, or the effects of austerity on different countries such as Greece or Spain.
If you focus on an aspect of austerity that relates to a social issue such as healthcare, drug use, crime etc. then it is useful to assess the implications of the essay for government policy. Doing this will help you to bring out the political side of the topic and to connect with debates between political scientists.
Step 3. Critically discuss: We want you to tell us about the ways that academic research has helped us to learn about the politics surrounding austerity. Your essay should tell us about the findings of the academic work you have read, the conclusions that writers have made, and the approaches that they have taken as they have tried to study austerity. However, we want you to go beyond describing these things to ‘critically discuss’ them. By this, we mean that we want to know which writers you agree/disagree with; what you see as the main strengths and weaknesses of their work and whether you think they take a useful approach to the studying the topic.
Writing the essay:
We recommend the following structure for the essay.
1. Introduction (150 words)
Start by explaining why the topic that the essay explores is an important one to look at. Tell us about the most important perspectives or arguments in the reading and where writers have disagreed. Set out your main argument in relation to these debates. Are you trying to add anything to the debate by looking to new examples or material, or highlighting particular weaknesses in existing studies? Tell us which sections or themes the essay is structured around and why these were important ones to focus on rather than others.
We recommend that you structure your essay around what you see as the most interesting and important areas of the topic. However, try to also explain why these are the key areas that stand out. For example, why are they particularly useful areas to analyse as you answer the essay question? Have you, for example, selected them because they are examples of areas where academics have added a lot to our understanding; or are they areas where research has been limited, and remain areas that demand more attention; or are they ones in which we could learn more about through adopting a different approach?
2. The main part of the essay (approx. 700 words): In each paragraph:
1. Introduce the point you are trying to make: why does it matter?
2. Describe the material: that you are including this usually consists of: examples, arguments made by writers, ideas, evidence/data, developments/events.
3. Analyse and critique: (in other words evaluate). In the final third of paragraphs try to go beyond describing to find your own voice and to demonstrate your own thinking by doing one of the following:
a. Telling us how important you think the findings/arguments made by key writers are? In other words, how much do they add or contribute to our understanding of austerity? Which writers do you agree with or do you think tell us the most about the topic? Conversely, which writers do you disagree with and why? It is also useful to link the material to the argument you made in the introduction.
b. What are the strengths or weaknesses of the approaches that writers have taken as they have looked at the topic? Do you find the research that they present eg the material they use and their approach to gathering it, to be convincing?
c. Are there areas of the topic or questions that need to be addressed that writers have overlooked?