Project Proposal

As part of my involvment in the Teaching Advancement at Universities (TAU) initiative, I will be working on  a teaching-related project. My project involves revising the course “Introduction to Comparative Politics”, a term-long module taught to first-year students in the Department of Political and International Studies at Rhodes University. In revising this course, I intend to change the course content as well as to change the way in which it is presented.  

In his recent book (pictured left), Robbie Shilliam argues that comparative politics is informed by "colonial logics" in that its way of comparing different states both affirms and disavows difference. Non-Western countries are described as different and then instructed on how to become more like the West, which is treated as normative. My project attempts to acknowledge and resist this colonial "paradox of comparison" by finding a way to do comparative politics that does not treat most countries of the world as if they are the deviant others of the normative West. 

In the two documents below, I outline my planned project in more detail. The first document is a project proposal while the second outlines my planned strategy for achieving the goals laid out in the proposal.