Search results for ""author michael watts""

This book demonstrates alternatives to the lecture and chalkboard approach that dominates the teaching of economics, providing a range of innovative teaching techniques and examples aimed at engaging undergraduates in the learning of economics.The editors provide a brief history of the teaching of economics in higher education, as well as a review of current undergraduate teaching practices. Some of the field's leading educators then demonstrate alternative practices in three main sections: 'Active and Cooperative Learning', 'Writing, the Internet, and Discovery Through Sampling', and 'Examples from the World Around Us'. The topics in the twelve chapters of the book have been carefully selected based on their high potential for adoption by other instructors. Detailed, 'hands-on' examples are included within each chapter, illustrating how suggested approaches can be used in different courses and classroom situations at the undergraduate level. Also included are lists of 'Dos' and 'Dont's' to guide instructors through the successful implementation of activities.This book will be of great practical value to teachers of economics as well as administrators responsible for undergraduate instruction.

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This volume provides students with a series of critical insights into the economic, political, social, cultural and ecological dimensions of change at every geographical scale from the global to the local.

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"Oil is a fairy tale, and, like every fairy tale, is a bit of a lie."—Ryzard Kapuscinski, Shah of Shahs The scale and reach of the global oil and gas industry, valued at several trillions of dollars, is almost impossible to grasp. Despite its vast technical expertise and scientific sophistication, the industry betrays a startling degree of inexactitude and empirical disagreement about foundational questions of quantity, output, and price. As an industry typified by concentrated economic and political power, its operations are obscured by secrecy and security. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that the social sciences typically approach oil as a metonym—of modernity, money, geopolitics, violence, corruption, curse, ur-commodity—rather than considering the daily life of the industry itself and of the hydrocarbons around which it is built. Subterranean Estates gathers an interdisciplinary group of scholars and experts to instead provide a critical topography of the hydrocarbon industry, understood not solely as an assemblage of corporate forms but rather as an expansive and porous network of laborers and technologies, representation and expertise, and the ways of life oil and gas produce at points of extraction, production, marketing, consumption, and combustion. By accounting for oil as empirical and experiential, the contributors begin to demystify a commodity too often given almost demiurgic power. Subterranean Estates shifts critical attention away from an exclusive focus on global oil firms toward often overlooked aspects of the industry, including insurance, finance, law, and the role of consultants and community organizations. Based on ethnographic research from around the world (Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, Oman, the United States, Ecuador, Chad, the United Kingdom, Kazakhstan, Canada, Iran, and Russia), and featuring a photoessay on the lived experiences of those who inhabit a universe populated by oil rigs, pipelines, and gas flares, this innovative volume provides a new perspective on the material, symbolic, cultural, and social meanings of this multidimensional world.

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This comprehensive and impressive volume presents the first book-length, multi-country investigation of reform of economic education in transition economies. Authors from the West and from transition economies describe the major changes in economics content and instruction that occurred in schools and universities throughout nations in Eastern and Central Europe and the former Soviet Union from 1989 to 2000. Nine of the chapters discuss specific countries - Belarus, Bulgaria, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Russia, and Ukraine. Other chapters describe reforms in the undergraduate economics curriculum at Moscow State University, Kiev State University, and Belarus State University. One chapter reports the findings from a five-nation study of the effect of economics programs to retrain teachers on the economic understanding of secondary students. Another chapter explains the important role of economic education in creating support for public policy reforms in a nation. The results from multi-national surveys of public attitudes toward economic reforms and the market economy are analyzed in one chapter. The book concludes with an insightful explanation of the major 'change agents' responsible for the reform of academic economics and the teaching of economics in the transition economies.Anyone interested in economic education, transition economies, or educational reform in schools and universities will find this book a unique and fascinating reading.

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This book demonstrates alternatives to the lecture and chalkboard approach that dominates the teaching of economics, providing a range of innovative teaching techniques and examples aimed at engaging undergraduates in the learning of economics.The editors provide a brief history of the teaching of economics in higher education, as well as a review of current undergraduate teaching practices. Some of the field's leading educators then demonstrate alternative practices in three main sections: 'Active and Cooperative Learning', 'Writing, the Internet, and Discovery Through Sampling', and 'Examples from the World Around Us'. The topics in the twelve chapters of the book have been carefully selected based on their high potential for adoption by other instructors. Detailed, 'hands-on' examples are included within each chapter, illustrating how suggested approaches can be used in different courses and classroom situations at the undergraduate level. Also included are lists of 'Dos' and 'Dont's' to guide instructors through the successful implementation of activities.This book will be of great practical value to teachers of economics as well as administrators responsible for undergraduate instruction.

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Do environmental problems and processes produce violence? Current U.S. policy about environmental conflict and scholarly work on environmental security assume direct causal links between population growth, resource scarcity, and violence. This belief, a staple of governmental decision-making during both Clinton administrations and widely held in the environmental security field, depends on particular assumptions about the nature of the state, the role of population growth, and the causes of environmental degradation.The conventional understanding of environmental security, and its assumptions about the relation between violence and the environment, are challenged and refuted in Violent Environments. Chapters by geographers, historians, anthropologists, and sociologists include accounts of ethnic war in Indonesia, petro-violence in Nigeria and Ecuador, wildlife conservation in Tanzania, and "friendly fire" at Russia's nuclear weapons sites. Violent Environments portrays violence as a site-specific phenomenon rooted in local histories and societies, yet connected to larger processes of material transformation and power relations. The authors argue that specific resource environments, including tropical forests and oil reserves, and environmental processes (such as deforestation, conservation, or resource abundance) are constituted by and in part constitute the political economy of access to and control over resources. Violent Environments demands new approaches to an international set of complex problems, powerfully arguing for deeper, more ethnographically informed analyses of the circumstances and processes that cause violence.

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This fascinating sequel to the 1998 Teaching Economics to Undergraduates provides more alternatives to the lecture and chalkboard approach that dominates university economics teaching. Distinguished contributing authors provide a wide range of innovative teaching techniques and examples aimed at more effectively engaging undergraduates in the learning of economics.New topics covered in this volume include game theory, using active learning techniques in large classes, a streamlined content agenda for macroeconomic principles, distance learning, and assessment of student learning. Other chapters revisit topics from the first volume, though often from different perspectives or with new approaches provided by different authors. Topics covered in these chapters include cooperative learning techniques, using technology in the classroom (including dozens of websites), bringing the work of the Nobel Laureates into undergraduate classes, and teaching with experimental economics, case studies, or team writing assignments and presentations. Teaching Economics is an invaluable and practical tool for teachers of economics, administrators responsible for undergraduate instruction and graduate students who are just beginning to teach. Each chapter includes specific teaching tips for classroom implementation and summary lists of dos and don'ts for instructors who are thinking of moving beyond the lecture method of traditional chalk and talk.

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This fascinating sequel to the 1998 Teaching Economics to Undergraduates provides more alternatives to the lecture and chalkboard approach that dominates university economics teaching. Distinguished contributing authors provide a wide range of innovative teaching techniques and examples aimed at more effectively engaging undergraduates in the learning of economics.New topics covered in this volume include game theory, using active learning techniques in large classes, a streamlined content agenda for macroeconomic principles, distance learning, and assessment of student learning. Other chapters revisit topics from the first volume, though often from different perspectives or with new approaches provided by different authors. Topics covered in these chapters include cooperative learning techniques, using technology in the classroom (including dozens of websites), bringing the work of the Nobel Laureates into undergraduate classes, and teaching with experimental economics, case studies, or team writing assignments and presentations. Teaching Economics is an invaluable and practical tool for teachers of economics, administrators responsible for undergraduate instruction and graduate students who are just beginning to teach. Each chapter includes specific teaching tips for classroom implementation and summary lists of dos and don'ts for instructors who are thinking of moving beyond the lecture method of traditional chalk and talk.

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