Screen and Cultural Studies

Who we are and what we do is all tangled up in our identity. This subject considers how identities are constructed and maintained through mediated processes of self and other. The subject investigates the myriad demands and devices that figure in constructing our senses of self and other (including language, leisure, beliefs and embodied practices). By exploring identity in diverse contexts, across time and place, the subject maps varying conceptions of self and other and how these conceptions are constructed and maintained. A key focus is on how these mediated conceptions of self and other are translated into material practices of inclusion, exclusion, discrimination, violence and criminalisation.

Language plays a central role in the central disciplinary areas in the humanities and social sciences. This subject gives students tools for thinking about language in a range of disciplines, including linguistics, history, sociology, politics, literary studies, anthropology, language studies, psychology and psychoanalytic theory. It shows how language can be analysed as a system, but also how language features centrally in politcal and social contexts: for example, in the processing of the claims of asylum seekers, in developing views of ethnicity, race and nation, and in colonialism; and in the construction of gendered and sexual identity. The role of language in the psyche, and the process of acquisition of languages in children and in adults, are also important topics. Knowing how to think about language, and familiarity with the main thinkers who have discussed language in a range of humanities and social science disciplines, provide an indispensable basis for study in any area of the Arts degree.

The idea of power is a way to grasp the character of social relations. Investigating power can tell us about who is in control and who may benefit from such arrangements. Power can be a zero-sum game of domination. It can also be about people acting together to enact freedom. This subject examines the diverse and subtle ways power may be exercised. It considers how power operates in different domains such as markets, political systems and other social contexts. It also examines how power may be moderated by such things as regulation and human rights. A key aim is to explore how differing perspectives portray power relations and how issues of power distribution may be characterised and addressed.

Reason, many believe, is what makes us human. Until recently, most scientists and philosophers agreed that the ability to use the mind to analyse and interpret the world is something intrinsic to the nature of our species. Reason has a long and extraordinary history. We will explore a number of inter-related themes: the nature of reason from Ancient Greece to our contemporary world; the ever shifting relationship between reason and faith; reason's place in the development of scientific experimentation and thinking; shifting perspectives about the uses of Reason and, finally, how reason relates to theories of the mind, exploring the tensions between reason, the passions and the will.

Reason will take you on a journey from Plato's cave to the neuro-scientists' lab. We will visit revolutions in science, thinking and politics. We will explore the impact of some of the great philosophers of history, including Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Bentham, Coleridge, Marx, Nietzsche, Foucault and many more besides. By the end of this subject you will have a deep understanding of the importance of the idea of reason to human history and philosophy. You might, even, be able to answer the question: 'does reason exist?'

Reason is an Arts Foundation Subject and we will argue that understanding the history and philosophy of reason provides great insights into many aspects of the humanities from political philosophy to understanding history. We will, of course, be paying particular attention to the foundational skills that will help you successfully complete your Arts major: particularly critical thinking and argument development.

This subject will provide students with an introduction to the complexity, challenges and richness of Australian Indigenous life and cultures. Drawing on a wide range of diverse and dynamic guest lecturers, this subject gives students an opportunity to encounter Australian Indigenous knowledges, histories and experiences through interdisciplinary perspectives. Across three thematic blocks - Indigenous Knowledges, Social and Political Contexts and Representation/Self-Representation - this subject engages contemporary cultural and intellectual debate. Social and political contexts will be considered through engagement with specific issues and a focus on Indigenous cultural forms, which may include literature, music, fine arts, museum exhibitions and performance, will allow students to consider self-representation as a means by which to disrupt and expand perceptions of Aboriginality.

Humans grapple with representations of themselves and their contexts. They also like to imagine other possible worlds. We use words, language, images, sounds and movement to construct narratives and stories, large and small, about the trivial and the profound, the past and the future. These representations can help us to understand worlds but they can also create worlds for us. This subject explores how different genres such as speech, writing, translation, film, theatre and art generate representations of social life, imagination and the human condition. A key aim of the subject is to develop a critical appreciation of how language, images and embodied gestures are used to construct empowering and disempowering discourses.

This subject provides students with a comprehensive introduction to the study of film language and theory. It is organised around these two separate but related areas. The film language component covers two interrelated topics that are essential for an understanding of the cinema; film aesthetics and film history. The subject begins with the early cinema and progresses through to an analysis of contemporary Hollywood. Key topics of narrative, editing, sound, mise-en-scene, cinematography and the studio system are studied in this historical context. The film theory component of the subject presents a study of the key theories, including: genre theory, auteurism, the classic text, gender, psychoanalysis, entertainment and new media theory, that have informed film aesthetics and the history of the cinema.

Media saturate almost every aspect of our experience, and provide a powerful lens through which we come to understand our selves, other people, and the world around us. This subject offers an introduction to cultural studies by focusing on the media and their impacts in everyday life. Case studies are drawn from a range of popular transnational media including advertising, television, film, Internet cultures and social media. We focus on approaches to representation and social practice; and consider how people interact with media in everyday life, especially how our identities are constructed through our media practices. The subject provides students with a reflexive understanding of the media’s cultural significance today, and advanced critical skills in evaluating media discourses and texts. It offers students a deeper understanding of many naturalised aspects of their own everyday media experience, and a grasp of the complex relationships between formations of social power and audience pleasures.

How do we come to experience ourselves as having a gender and a sexual orientation? How do social constructions of gender relate to understandings of sexuality? How have categories like masculinity and femininity; heterosexuality, homosexuality and bisexuality transformed over time? This subject approaches gender and sexuality as historically and culturally contingent rather than as natural expressions of a private self. It provides the historical and theoretical frameworks for understanding the rise of specific genders and sexualities in relation to available medical, psychoanalytic, philosophical, political and popular discourses. Drawing from recent formations in both feminism and queer studies, this subject engages with a diverse range of cultural texts from the proceedings of court cases to personal advertisements, from celebrity gossip columns to popular film. On completion of this subject students should be able to explicate the complex imbrications of gender and sexuality and to analyse the representation of gendered and sexual identities and desires in selected cultural texts, which may include television, film, Internet and print media.

This subject focuses on contemporary Asian cinema and media with a special emphasis on their transnational aspects. Students will encounter examples mainly from cinema (both popular and 'art' film), but the subject also engages with other forms of media culture like television, computer games, music video and Internet cultures. These texts will be approached through analysis of the contexts of their production, distribution, and consumption as well as through textual analysis. Students will learn about new approaches to contemporary Asian cinema and media that understand these cultures as formed through transnational flows rather than as the product of discrete and bounded 'civilisations' as in traditional area studies approaches. On completion of this subject students should have an understanding of the transnationalism of Asian cinema and media today, knowledge of some of the key recent movements in Asian film and media, an appreciation of the historical contexts that underlie these patterns, and a sound grasp of the major scholarly approaches used to analyse these phenomena. Students completing the subject will be familiar with case studies including those from Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Japan, Thailand and India.

This subject is a study of many manifestations of the love story represented in Australian, Italian, French, British and North American art cinema traditions. Through detailed close-analysis of a range of films, the subject explores topics such as romantic love, Surrealism and mad love, the marital gothic, adultery, gay and lesbian love, inter-racial romance, perversion, loss and melancholia. Concentrating on art cinema treatments of romantic comedy, melodrama, the backstage musical, horror and gothic romance, the subject highlights the various formal strategies employed to create the love story in art cinema. The subject looks at the way in which film theory has explained the idea of love and desire in the cinema by drawing on Freudian psychoanalysis, mythology and gender studies. In addition to the close reading of the love story through prescribed films, the subject also explores the way film intersects with theatre, television, literature, art and popular music on the subject.

This subject provides an introduction to a variety of ways in which city cultures have defined and articulated popular culture and critical social theory. Students will be introduced to contemporary urban narratives of places and spaces through a focus on city cultures, from Melbourne, New York, Hong Kong and Dubai. Students will explore and analyse issues around immigration and mobility, social identities and urban spaces, environmental sustainability, post-industrial economies and creative industries, in order to consider how cities have become central to our theoretical understanding of contemporary cultures.

This subject explores the impact that digital technologies have had in the world of screen media and in mediating the world around us. Film and television has, over the last century, become an integral part of our reality but, since the advent of the digital era, screen media have become even more integrated into the social sphere. This subject will focus on: applying diverse and interdisciplinary interpretative tools to analyse the impact of digital special effects on the cinema; the forms of player engagement made possible by the digital nature of video games; the advent of digital technology and the rise of the theme park; the phenomenon of the second screen and television viewing; the impact of screen media on the urbanscape.

This subject offers a close study of the phenomenon of film noir from its precursors in silent cinema, through classical and B film noir, to digital cinema. Film Noir: History and Sexuality will invite students to consider the way in which cultural, political and technological factors influence the aesthetics, narrative form and style of film noir. A key focus of this subject will be the changing representations of gender and sexuality and the challenges posed to regimes of censorship in cinema. Movements studied will include the silent film; German expressionism; classical Hollywood noir; noir revised by New Wave directors (particularly in France and Hong Kong), postmodern noir, post-noir and digital noir in the broader media ecology. Students should complete the subject with an understanding of various approaches to film historiography (including an exploration of archival histories, media archaeologies, intersections of memory and history as well as digital histories), a comprehensive synthesis of noir and its variants and an opportunity to connect theory and practice using digital tools.

This subject introduces students to some of the major theoretical traditions in the field and considers these with a contemporary and future focus. Emphasis on historical, textual, ethnographic, institutional and other theories will be grounded in examinations of various contemporary screen examples and cultural case studies. This combination of theoretical traditions and contemporary approaches will allow students to apply their knowledge and skills to a range of diverse, real world projects. By apprehending diverse theoretical frameworks, students will be given opportunities to explore some of the significant challenges of the cultures we inhabit. This subject will also allow students to consider a range of ways of extending their degrees into research and professional pathways.