Course Schedule

This course is an introduction to contemporary Chinese popular culture. It explores popular culture's relations to social change, public spaces, the state, individual freedom, collective justice, national identity and globalization.

This course will explore contemporary Japanese society by investigating its colorful, dynamic, and rich output of visual culture. More specifically, we will look at manga, cinematic anime, and items of material culture, illustrating how these examples of popular art teach us about the various aspects of life in Japan.

In this course, we will explore our contemporary world through a lens of popular culture that has saturated our everyday life. In so many ways, we are spectators, be it movies, TV shows, popular music, animation, video games, etc. Sometimes, we go beyond being just spectators and actively engage in producing, circulating, and re-creating such cultural forms as fans or users. How does popular culture affect the way in which we see our world and define who we are? How do the values of cultural industries become the dominant economic logic of our era? How does popular culture interact with politics? This course will allow us to explore these questions. The focus on Korea will offer us unique contexts in which we situate our questions and answers. We will use our personal experiences as motivation to delve deeper into this topic and consider an extensive range of Korean pop culture from music to drama, cinema, online gaming, and Internet culture.

This course introduces four basic aspects of Chinese popular culture: mass media, everyday life, folklore, and arts. It examines how the development of mass media (print culture, radio, film, television, music, the internet, and social media) reflects changes of Chinese culture, society, and politics since the early 20th century. Moreover, the course discusses how popular culture is practiced in everyday life by exploring such topics as work and employment, labor and migration, leisure and consumption, housing, individual creativity, collective justice, gender, sexuality, and arts.

This course will explore contemporary Japanese society by investigating its colorful, dynamic, and rich output of visual culture. More specifically, we will look at manga, cinematic anime, and items of material culture, illustrating how these examples of popular art teach us about the various aspects of life in Japan.

This course will explore contemporary Japanese society by investigating its colorful, dynamic, and rich output of visual culture. More specifically, we will look at manga, cinematic anime, and items of material culture, illustrating how these examples of popular art teach us about the various aspects of life in Japan.