Undergraduate - UnitATS3627 - Global cultures, local traditions: Creating and consuming (popular) culture

This unit entry is for students who completed this unit in 2015 only. For students planning to study the unit, please refer to the unit indexes in the the current edition of the Handbook. If you have any queries contact the managing faculty for your course or area of study.

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6 points, SCA Band 1, 0.125 EFTSL

Refer to the specific census and withdrawal dates for the semester(s) in which this unit is offered.

Level	Undergraduate
Faculty	Faculty of Arts
Organisational Unit	Japanese Studies
Offered	Clayton First semester 2015 (Day)
Coordinator(s)	Professor Carolyn Stevens

Synopsis

Consumption (and re-creation) of rap in Japan, animated film in Kuala Lumpur curry laksa in Melbourne are just a few of the examples of transnational cultural flows which are visible the world over. The mass electronic media of cinema, television, and the Internet have speeded up the transnational flow of images of modernity and created local desires to consume cultures originating in distant places. Unit looks at the implications of globalisation for a variety of cultural phenomena, tracing transitions from local to global cultural practices. It looks at specific cases of local consumption of global cultures, including television, video games, popular music, fiction and comics, and the Internet.

Outcomes

Students successfully completing this unit should have:

A deeper knowledge of the concepts of modernity and tradition, and the problems of cultural ownership and authenticity, and an understanding of contemporary issues regarding copyright law;
Acquired knowledge about the challenges to cultural nationalism by transnational cultural flows, and the role of electronic media, especially the Internet in this;
Studied in depth some cases of cultural production and its local consumption, and critically analysed web-based and mass media material relating to these case studies;
Improved their oral skills by participating in tutorial debate, both face-to-face and on-line cross-campus, on specific instances of cultural flows and local identities created through their consumption;
Improved their written skills by producing a well-reasoned and well-documented essay on an aspect of the globalisation debate;
Developed independent research skills;
Developed the ability to critically assess the ideological implications of global cultural flows.

Assessment

Within semester assessment: 100%

Workload requirements

Minimum total expected workload to achieve the learning outcomes for this unit is 144 hours per semester typically comprising a mixture of scheduled learning activities and independent study. A unit requires on average three/four hours of scheduled activities per week. Scheduled activities may include a combination of teacher directed learning, peer directed learning and online engagement.