Researching Cultures

This subject is not offered in 2014.

120 hours

For the purposes of considering request for Reasonable Adjustments under the Disability Standards for Education (Cwth 2005), and Student Support and Engagement Policy, academic requirements for this subject are articulated in the Subject Overview, Learning Outcomes, Assessment and Generic Skills sections of this entry.

It is University policy to take all reasonable steps to minimise the impact of disability upon academic study, and reasonable adjustments will be made to enhance a student's participation in the University's programs. Students who feel their disability may impact on meeting the requirements of this subject are encouraged to discuss this matter with a Faculty Student Adviser and Student Equity and Disability Support: http://services.unimelb.edu.au/disability

This seminar/workshop series will examine cultures, focusing on how the humanities deal with culture, including cultural production, forms and practices, across the axes of time and space, and incorporating both the virtual and the material dimensions. Together we will examine uneasy tensions in the hermeneutics of culture; ranging from histories of material culture to the expanded terrain of mediated, transnational culture, as discussed by different theorists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, such as Walter Benjamin, Raymond Williams, David Harvey, Rey Chow, Sara Ahmed, Arjun Appadurai. The range of topics covered during the semester will be framed from the micro- to the macro-level perspective and back, and may include concepts of the everyday, of bodies, affect, hybridity, aesthetics, the function of technology, and the effects of global communication networks.

This year-long, fortnightly workshop will also provide graduate students with an opportunity to utilize a range of research methods in the expanded humanities. Individual sessions will enable close reading and discussion, as well as the development of particular case studies that construct the study of past and contemporary cultures in a self-reflexive and critical form. Positioning cultural research in relation to gender, race, geography, commodification and the intermediality of culture, individual research projects will be given attention as the workshop evolves.

Successful completion of the Research Workshop will enable students to have an enhanced awareness of the range of contemporary scholarship in the discipline or interdisciplinary area. In the assessment, students will be expected to demonstrate the ability to critically evaluate the contemporary research literature that is relevant to the thesis topic. The Research Workshop will also enable students to formulate and present the research proposal for confirmation.

• one 2,500-word literature review positioning essay. Due at the end of first semester (50%)
• one 2,500-word research essay. Due during mid-second semester (50%)

This subject is not available as a breadth subject.