This past weekend was crazy. It POURED almost non-stop from Friday to Sunday, so I was stuck in the apartment pretty much all weekend. In fact, it rained so hard one night that the power went off for roughly five minutes. During that time I was running around like a chicken without a head placing candles all over the apartment (thankfully I bought 2 packs of tea-light candles for emergency situations just like this!). The upside is now there are a bunch of tiny candles in different nooks and crannies of my apartment, so next time the power goes out all I'll have to do is light them.
Since I was trapped indoors for most of the weekend I spent my time editing my two Globalization & Global Governance essays, doing course reading, starting a presentation I have to give in two weeks, and formulating the research topic for my 5,000 word mini-research paper due at the end of the semester. My strategy is to use this mini-research paper as a way to start working on/thinking about my larger research paper for Integration Studies. The topic I have chosen to investigate is the relationship between democracy and regional integration. My plan is to use data from organizations like Freedom House, Transparency International, the UN, etc to show how well democracy has developed alongside integration in the Caribbean. The results of my research will not show a causal relationship but rather a correlational one. That said, the nature of this correlational relationship is important because it will allow for more specific questions to be asked in the future.
Right now the main area I am having trouble with is finding academic sources that discuss the relationship, if any, between democracy and integration. I have asked one of my professors for help on tracking down sources and am awaiting her reply. I find it is really hard to figure out who the "giants" are in a given field if you don't know anything about the subject to begin with!
That's pretty much all that's going on in my life right now, and sad to say, I am sure my happenings will become even less interesting as the semester wears on. Something tells me I won't even have time to post updates come late November when all my essays and many of my presentations are due, so enjoy my ramblings while you can!
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