Over the course of the first month in our ASTU class, we have touched upon many aspects regarding scholarly writing. One specific point that was touched upon in class that I thought was most interesting is, scholarly writing is like scholars having a conversation with one another. In UBC’s Global Citizen’s course, along with ASTU we also study sociology and politics, and within both sociology and politics we have came across numerous examples of scholars having a conversation. For instance, in sociology class, we touched upon Anderson’s idea of nationalism versus functionalism. In politics discussed the different views on “justice”, John Rawl’s theory versus Robert Nozick’s theory of justice. Even in our politics discussion groups, though students are not scholars, we had a short and sudden debate about whether or not history repeats itself as seen through political structures in history. All these conversations are opinions and endless debate of the individual shown through the genre of scholarly writing. Many of the writings are related to large, wide scale issues that affects many people, however as discussed in our sociology class about sociological imagination, public issues are issues which cannot be solved by the individual alone, then how would scholars reach a consensus?

Having gone through my first month of university career, the most interesting aspect that I have came across is the sheer amount of knowledge that I have not been exposed to, and the endless amount of knowledge and perspectives being produced by people all around the world. Yet the one question I have in mind is how would people use these pieces of knowledge and opinions? How would knowledge evolve or change? Personally I think that knowledge would evolve, and some things that we know today would be completely different in twenty to thirty years time. I think that the international debate on a particular subject would sooner or later come to a consensus of a generally accepted theory and alter the way we think. However, I think that abstract concepts would never have a general agreement. Consider, for example the concept of “justice” as mentioned in my politics class, I would think that everyone has their own idea of what “justice” is. Different social and historical backgrounds, experiences would all change a person’s perspective on “justice”. To conclude, from my initial encounter of scholarly writing, I believe that a general acceptance of knowledge in certain fields could be achieved, however abstract concepts would constantly be debated between scholars.