Oxford Student Competition

* * * Winners of the 1st round! * * *

Politics in Spires is pleased to announce that the prize for the best blog published from November 2011-January 2012 will be awarded to the joint authors of ‘How are election preparations unfolding in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)? Hope or failure? Two perspectives’—Hubertus Juergenliemk, PhD student at POLIS, University of Cambridge and a Visiting Doctoral student at the University of Oxford during the academic year 2011-12, and Lindsay Scorgie,  PhD student at POLIS, University of Cambridge. Please read their blog here.

Scot Peterson, of the Oxford Politics in Spires Oversight Committee says, ‘The blog was really interesting, original and thought-provoking It was well argued and incorporated material from students’ field work for their degrees. This is exactly what we are looking for – congratulations!’

Congratulations also to Amber Murrey and to Erwin Kippenberg, who received honourable mentions for the following posts:

• ‘Connections between the Hydrocarbon Scramble and US Troop Deployment in Uganda?’—Amber Murrey, DPhil student in Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford. Please read the full text here.
• ‘Many Trails to Freedom: Islamic Democracy is not an Oxymoron’—Erwin Knippenberg, MSc in Economics for Development in the Department of International Development (QEH), University of Oxford. Please read the full text here.

The Editorial Committee was pleased that two undergraduate students, Tim Wigmore (How the ICC can help Kenya) and Abrar Nurani (What Obama didn’t say about Iraq) have contributed to Politics in Spires and hopes that more undergraduates will be encouraged to do so.

The next round of the blog prize will run from February – April 2012: please send blogs to Oxbridge.blog@gmail.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

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Politics in Spires is offering three prizes (each of £75 in Amazon vouchers) for the best blog post by an Oxford student on the Politics in Spires blog the over the course of this academic year. We are looking for originality of topic, assessing the quality of argument and of analysis and will take into account factors such as the number of hits, likes etc. (please see the small print below for the criteria).

The judges for the prizes will be the Oxford blog oversight team and their decision will be final. A prize will be awarded in each of the following three periods: Monday 7 November to end January 2012; February – April 2012 and May – July 2012, but the  judges reserve the right not to award a prize in any particular period. Please note that all first student blog posts will undergo editorial review before they are posted online.

The competition is open to all Oxford undergraduate and graduate students. Please send blogs to Oxbridge.blog@gmail.com.

 

Criteria for judging the posts:

1.  Originality of topic: post contains interesting and original content that has not widely been published elsewhere.

2.  Quality of analysis: analysis of the subject matter has been carefully thought through and clearly presented, and where possible, raises points which may be useful for further discussion.

3.  Quality of argument: a well-supported argument, providing evidence where available and where not available, acknowledging when a statement is opinion rather than fact.

4.  Account will be taken of the popularity of the post – looking at the number of hits, likes and tweets it generates.