Contemporary Africa is an anthropology examining ethnographic approaches to understanding contemporary African life. Most of the class' learning was conducted through reading short academic ethnographies of several different countries throughout the continent and discussing them in class.
That being said, we also wrote two essays.
Our first essay surrounded a topic of our choice. I chose to focus on examining Rwandan economic development in both a social and economic light. This included academic studies of Rwandan development but I also analyzed journalistic approaches to Rwandan development from inside the country and from the American media. This paper can be found here.
The second essay is about understanding the themes of our term-long analysis of ethnographies. The two ethnographies I chose to examine centered on a life choices education program for Tanzanian girls and female sex tourism in Mombasa. This paper can be found here.