This course aims to enhance students’ knowledge of popular music and its relation to society at large. It will also develop students’ critical understanding of the academic study of popular music. Students will have to examine popular music studies and apply them to analyze popular music in the special context of Hong Kong society.

This course aims to demonstrate the interrelationship between creativity and the critical spirit through the examination and discussion of the historical fiction. While it is generally believed that creativity and the critical spirit are two separate and sometimes even opposite approaches and qualities, this course hopes to show that they are two sides of the same coin. Through a study of the historical fiction, students will see the creative aspects of a critical research, and how being critical is an important step towards creativity.

This course aims to introduce students to the social functions and ideological meanings of leisure institutions, from museums, fairs, gardens to amusement parks, movie theaters, world expo and other themed spaces. We focus on the notion of leisure and play, and investigate the wide world of themed entertainment. While looking at particular case studies and particular leisure spaces, ranging from Disneyland to ethnic villages and Imax theaters, we look into the connection between play and modern life, the utopian elements of leisure spaces, the impacts of the increasingly global and lucrative contemporary tourist industry on the production of historical knowledge and the invention of traditions, and other issues related to cultural politics and management.

This course aims to enhance students’ understanding of globalization and its impact on society, economics and culture. Through the examination of different theories and issues related to globalization, it also aims to foster students’ critical evaluation of and reflection on globalization studies from different perspectives.

This course aims to introduce the complex issues, theories, and methods involved in understanding contemporary mediascape. Through reading classic and contemporary texts on the media, students will learn various theories of the media, the issues raised by these theories, the strengths and weaknesses of these theories, and the diverse methods of studying the media.

This course aims, first, to provide an overview and a critical examination of key themes, concepts, theories and issues in youth studies. Central issues such as inequality, underachievement, crime and deviant behaviours, political and civic (dis)engagements will be examined and they are discussed under the weekly thematic focus of class, race/ethnicity, gender & sexuality, governmentality, political and civic (dis)engagements, values and beliefs, and (sub)cultures and lifestyles. Existing theories and literature about youth transitions and youth cultures tend to take the “Western” experiences that are based on the global North for granted. Living in an ever-more interconnected age, it is not only encouraged but also urgent to think and engage with cross-national and comparative youth research. The second aim of this course is to inspire students to think beyond traditional national boundaries and to understand youth studies from different geo-political localities and cross-cultural comparative perspectives. The course seeks to diversify and broaden our understanding of youth issues by bringing in empirical examples from a wide array of countries of different socio-, cultural and political settings, ranging from countries in Europe to Africa, and from Asia to Australia.

This course aims to introduce the idea of modernity in the Western world, its genesis, development and its spread to the world. It will discuss the challenge of modernity and China’s response, thus achieving and understanding of how Chinese modernity came into shape. It discusses the historical, cultural, literary and artistic trends in China from the end of the 19th century to the 1980s as an expression of Chinese modernity.

In an era of globalization, capitalism has strengthened its important role in the world economy. It not only serves as an economic force that shapes our economic life, but also serves as a cultural force that shapes our cultural life. In recent years, there is an increasing research literature on the emotional dimension of capitalism which focuses on how the emotions are shaped, managed, manipulated, and distributed in the consumer culture and creative industries as well as the tremendous impacts of emotional culture, emotional consumption, emotional labor and emotional management. This course will explore the emotional dimension of consumer culture and creative industries. It will focus on how emotions are experienced, represented and produced in the industries. Drawing on different types of consumer cultures and creative industries, this course will examine various kinds of emotions such as pleasure, fear, grief, hate or terror in the construction of individual and social life. The course will also discuss how emotions are deployed in current philosophical, social and political debates.

This course explores the production, circulation, products and practices of Asian popular culture (television drama, film, popular music, animation, comics, game, fashion, celebrity culture, digital culture, etc.) in a transnational context; and how Asian popular culture as a diverse creative force influences people and societies within and outside of Asia. It offers an introduction to the development of Asian popular culture industries and their impacts to the regional and global markets. It introduces to students the characteristics of Asian popular cultures, and the social, cultural and political environments of major production sites. Major theoretical approaches to popular culture and Asian societies will be studied. Upon completion, students will be familiar with the various critical approaches used in the study of popular culture and industries, and the social, political and economic contexts of Asian popular culture.

This course will prepare students for the two-year study of the liberal and cultural studies. It will introduce the approaches and methods distinctive of interdisciplinary humanities thought, and it will compare these methods with those employed in other branches of learning, e.g. social and natural sciences. Significant texts concerning the approach, content areas, and ideas of the course in Chinese and English will be introduced. Students will learn to integrate different points of view through cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural readings. The course will also introduce the relationship between the Humanities and the university as an institution and an idea.

This course aims to introduce excellent works of literary and other art forms in English and Chinese of both traditional and contemporary domains. The course will demonstrate the excellence of human creativity in these works and attempt to understand their cultural and historical backgrounds, as well as the nature and development of the related media. The course will also encourage students to confront the contemporary controversy surrounding these canonical works, and exercise independently their critical, analytical, and creative judgments in assessing the value of such canonical works in the contemporary world.

This course aims to engage students in an independent research and the production of an extensive research or creative effort throughout an academic year.

This course aims to introduce the modern Western thought from Enlightenment to the 20th century. It aims at introducing the major trends in modern Western thought as a major driving force of political, social and artistic developments shaping the modern Western world. It helps students to understand how thinkers in the world respond to the challenge of modernity, and thus understand the Western world as we know it today.

This course aims to introduce students to a comprehensive overview of theories of digital media in contemporary culture. Based on a historical understanding of digital media developments, the course explores the role of new media in a globally networked world. It also examines the social, political and economic influences of new digital technologies on culture, industry, creativity and community from a cross-disciplinary perspective.

This course aims to help students comprehend major theories of culture of the 20th century from an interdisciplinary perspective. Students will familiarize themselves with seminal debates and how they are or are not relevant to contemporary Hong Kong society. They will also acquire a global and critical sensibility with respect to culture as manifested in both material and symbolic realms. Students will engage with issues and acquire knowledge and skills in identifying, profiling and discussing them. In brief, the course will act as a capstone of the programme where the culmination of inter-disciplinary knowledge can be actualized.

This course aims to introduce students to the representations of gender and sexuality in mass media. Students will be introduced to media representations of gender and sexuality in a variety of media texts including films, TV dramas, music videos, advertisements, comics and those in the cyberspace, and the embedded ideologies and cultural meanings. The course will offer critical perspectives to discuss topics such as pornography, queer representations, notions of gender and sexuality in new media and the intersection of gender, race, class and sexuality. Upon completion, students are expected to develop a critical understanding of gender and sexuality in media and be able to analyze media texts from a cross-disciplinary perspective.

The overall goal of this course is to enhance students’ understanding of traditional and contemporary Chinese Culture. The course also aims to open a window into Chinese cultural philosophy and to enlighten students about the profound historical backgrounds, problems and development of Chinese culture since the last century. As Chinese cultural philosophy has its traditional roots and has been developed across the Chinese-speaking world, including Hong Kong, it is meaningful to explore how this field gives a different perspective from the Western tradition in understanding culture and philosophy. Some important schools of contemporary cultural philosophy will be introduced to deepen students’ theoretical understanding of Chinese cultural transformation up until the present-day.

This course provides a broad understanding of human mobility, culture and patterns of migration in our contemporary social world. The movement of people, culture, capital, commodities, information and ideas has become a central theme in contemporary life. The course invites students to understand human mobility in a global context from different disciplinary perspectives and diverse theoretical backgrounds. It introduces to students different forms of contemporary human mobility and a wide range of topics and issues that are related to human mobility in contemporary world. They range from issues and debates surrounding contemporary migration, migrant cultures and communities, tourism in a globalized world, how human mobility is patterned by education, job opportunities and intimate relationship to how mobile technologies inspire new forms of mobile life or relationship. Upon completion, students will be able to possess the essential theoretical and empirical knowledge to understand how human mobility works to organize our social world and private life, and how our mobility or immobility is defined and confined by numerous private and public factors.