Global Cultures

In the era of globalisation, contemporary cultures are increasingly shaped by transnational movements: of humans, commodities, and media, among other things. Global Cultures leads students to explore the human, subjective and cultural dimensions of these intensified transnational mobilities with a focus on the Asian region. Central concepts include mobilities, migration, cultural hybridity, translocality, precarity, and superdiversity. The subject introduces students to these concepts by drawing on theorisations from cultural studies and other disciplines in the humanities and, to some extent, social sciences, using contemporary, mainly Asia-based case studies to ground the conceptual material. The subject explores how lived experiences of mobility intersect with the power dynamics of gender, race, sexuality, and class, and engages with critical cultural theory to work toward not simply an understanding of globalisation as a series of social processes, but more importantly a cultural critique of globalisation. It introduces students to representations of mobility and globalisation across a range of popular media that may include film, television, Internet cultures and others, and explores how experiences of mobility––through migration, international education, tourism, mediated imagination and other modes––shape subjectivity.

• 1Discuss the theoretical context of current Cultural Studies research on globalisation and mobilities.
• 2Explain the disciplinary specificity of Cultural Studies approaches to globalisation and their inter-relationship with approaches in related disciplines.
• 3Critique current research on cultural globalisation, with a focus on the Asian region.
• 4Engage critically with scholarly debates on how intensified mobilities shape social power dynamics around gender, race, class and sexuality.
• 5Discuss modern historical events conditioning contemporary processes of cultural globalisation in the Asian region, including histories of European, Japanese and American colonialisms and imperialisms in the region.
• 6Apply independent research skills to produce a research essay based on a case study.