READING AND DRAW A DIAGRAM

Week 8 assignment: Draw the argument

One of the tools that we have sometimes used to make sense of the theoretical texts that we read is a path diagram that uses arrows to represent relations among concepts.

Here is an example from the video Lecture 2.4. The diagram records a discussion with students in which we tried to diagram precisely how, according to Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah, sedentary culture contributed to the ruin of the city.

For example, reading across the bottom of the diagram, addiction to luxury led to population decline and to cowardice, both of which undermine the ability of a city to defend itself; the causal pathways here are addiction to luxury -> population decline -> ruin of the city and addiction to luxury -> cowardice -> ruin of the city.

This diagram is debatable as a representation of Ibn Khaldun's argument, and other ways of diagramming his argument might be better. I offer this example only to illustrate the general approach to understanding Ibn Khaldun's argument, and other arguments like his: we can take a textual argument and represent it simply, by listing the key concepts and using arrows to represent causal relations among them.

The assignment for Friday of Week 8 is to  draw your own  such diagram to represent Kwame Ture & Charles Hamilton's argument about the causes of what they call, in chapter 7, "dynamite in the ghetto." You will need to make your own decisions about which concepts to list, and how to represent the relations among them, but the aim here is to represent the argument that is present in the text--that is, to diagram their theory, not your own.