For any Politics student, critical thinking is a central skill that they need to acquire and develop. Without it, it is impossible to engage in a meaningful way with the world around them or to have a sense of how their own ideas work and cohere.
I’m always a bit hesitant about taking relativistic views to an extreme, but certainly contemporary politics requires us to have an appreciation of the way in which we are manipulated – consciously or unconsciously – by political actors and by the media.
With this in mind, recent weeks have been very instructive for me, as I follow events in two conflicts – Ukraine and Gaza.
I’m not a specialist in either region, and their impacts on my own field of research is relatively small, but I am interested in what’s happening.
In both cases, we have multiple actors, each of whom uses a wide range of strategies to communicate their position and interests to a wider public, including me. As such, I find particular interest in the way that news is framed and the way in we encounter Lukes’ three faces of power.
This week has seen a couple of pieces that have made me think some more about these issues and which might be of interest to students when discussing either media effects or the cases themselves.
On Ukraine, The Guardian has a good debate on western media coverage, which opens up some useful questions.
On Gaza, a friend pointed me towards a piece by Ottomansandzionists that made me consider several aspects of what’s happening.
In both cases, it has been the process of reflection that I’ve appreciated, getting me to question what I hear, read or watch. And without questions, we don’t get to answers.
PS – as I finish writing this, I also notice a piece by Simon Jenkins (a man with whom I usually disagree vehemently), which also makes me reflect some more about how we commemorate the First World War. As with the other articles, it’s somewhat provocative and might stimulate some discussion and debate.