Dr. Julian Dierkes
271 Choi, 822-6237
j |dot| dierkes |at| ubc |dot| ca
Both meetings will be held in the meeting room of the Centre for Japanese Research, Room 270, CK Choi Bldg. for the Institute of Asian Research, 1855 West Mall. Interested students are encouraged to attend both meetings if possible and to contact the instructor to express their interest.
The Canadian and B.C. governments have made the Asia Pacific Gateway a central element of their international trade and domestic infrastructure policy. Many of the initiatives relate to improving the transportation infrastrucuture in and around the ports of Vancouver and Prince Rupert.
The sustainability of shipping with large ocean-going vessels has begun to be the focus of attention not only of environmental organizations, but of numerous stakeholders in the shipping industry, including ship-building, insurance, certification, port authorities, etc. Many of these stakeholders have expressed a frustration with the lack of international or even domestic standards to measure the sustainability of transportation gateways or to compare them among each other.
The Spring 2008 iteration of the Asia Pacific Policy Project will therefore charge participants to create an inventory of sustainability policies related to transportation (esp. shipping) gateways in Asia. Such an inventory can then become the basis for recommandations of sustainability policies that may be adopted by Canadian authorities.
Enrolment in the seminar will be limited to graduate students. Preference will be given to students in the MA, Asia Pacific Policy Studies, but graduate students from other departments would be very welcome, as an interdisciplinary mix of students has proved very productive in the past. Should enrolment exceed eight participants, the group will be subdivided into groups of no more than five participants. These groups will work in parallel.
While there are no specific course prerequisites, the project seminar is intended primarily for MAPPS students who have completed IAR 500: Perspectives and Methodologies of Asia Pacific Policy Studies, or some equivalent course.
Students who have not completed the methodology module but are particularly interested in the topic selected for the Spring should contact the instructor to discuss their participation.
This 3-credit graduate project seminar is intended to offer students in the Master in Asia Pacific Policy Studies and students in other policy-focused programs on campus an opportunity to develop their policy analysis and presentation skills. The seminar is organized entirely around the collective drafting of a policy report on a question set by the instructors and participants.
The project will be driven by participants' decisions with the guidance of the instructors. The first task of participants will therefore be to organize a schedule of meetings, deadlines, etc. While the first section of the semester will most likely be devoted to an exploration of fundamental issues involved and their treatment in the scholarly and policy literature, meetings will soon have to focus on concrete tasks associated with the drafting of the final agreement.
Participants will be evaluated on their individual contributions to the collective product. Evaluation will include presentation of the final draft agreement to interested parties.
"Higher education" implies that students acquire applicable skills, but especially that they learn to understand the world around them more thoroughly. While such an understanding does require specific techniques (writing and analytical tools, etc.), the biggest leap that social science students make is to find ways in which social relations can be analyzed to arrive at conclusions that can be accepted by other analysts and that can therefore form the basis of further research or applications.
This view of higher education dictates that the central objective of teaching is to foster a familiarity with the fundamental logic of social-scientific reasoning and to apply such reasoningto policy-analysis and policy-making. This is especially true of graduate education, which represents an in-between step form undergraduate education where knowledge is primarily consumed to academic and professional positions where knowledge is produced. Graduate students are at once consumers as well as consumers of knowledge and this will be reflected in this seminar.
Given the open-ended nature of the task assigned for the project, it will be especially important that participants regard this seminar as their own and push ahead with planning and making their own contribution.
Beyond gaining a greater understanding of the social world around us, a policy program like MAPPS strives to provide students with skills and tools to address contemporary policy challenges. The policy seminar emphasizes this latter connection more heavily and explicitly than typical graduate seminars. At the same time, the project will also emphasize that policy recommendations on a current topic can and must be based in academic literatures and in theoretical understandings of particular social phenomena.
The role of the instructor is to help seminar participants organize themselves in a fashion that integrates social scientific knowledge and its application as it will be expected in roles graduates might take on in the future. Beyond orchestrating the course and supervising its organization, instructors provide their own academic research and experience as a knowledge base to direct and guide participants' explorations.