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 screen cultures. Key topics of narrative, editing, sound, mise-en-scene and cinematography are studied both in relation to contemporary cinema and within their historical contexts. The film theory module introduces key theories including: narrative and formalist theory, auteurism and genre, feminist film theory and the influence of psychoanalysis, new screen media theory and contemporary research methodologies, all of which offer insight into the discipline of Screen Studies.

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.

What is the relationship between gender and culture in everyday life? Why are some forms of gender more culturally privileged than others? How do gender norms take shape and gain dominance in contemporary culture? This subject explores key sites through which gender identities emerge, become dominant, and/or transform. Through these cultural sites this subject examines hegemonic ideologies around gender, the uneven value placed on certain gendered subject positions, and possibilities for resistance in relation to femininities, masculinities, and other gender formations. Sites include areas of concern to feminist cultural studies including digital culture, popular media, youth cultures, celebrity and fandom, sport, fitness and self-discipline regimes, beauty culture and more. Core to this exploration are issues of location, race, whiteness, and nation, which inform hegemonic ideals and lived experiences of gendered life. Beyond simply understanding how identities are transforming in a highly mediated and globalised context, this subject seeks to critically engage with questions of injustice and inequality in relation to gendered cultures.

Popular culture shapes how we think and feel, how we relate to one another; in short, how we imagine and live our lives. This subject examines the dynamics between popular culture, media consumption, and our social worlds. It will draw on students’ own consumption of popular culture as entry points to explore the various roles mass-mediated popular culture plays in our lives. From pop music and blockbuster films to viral videos, memes and selfies, this course interrogates: How can we define what is ‘popular’? What do debates about popular culture tell us about current political anxieties? And how does popular culture maintain, reproduce or challenge our existing social and political formations within and across cultures in an increasingly globalized world? The subject is organized around a series of questions about production, regulation and consumption that will introduce students to a range of key concepts in cultural studies. The goal is to familiarise students with debates in cultural studies about the politics of mass culture, popular culture and viral culture, drawing from examples of both twentieth century and contemporary computer-mediated cultural practices.

This subject explores developments in the American film and television industry since its beginnings. The evolution of contemporary styles, techniques and genres belongs to a history of refusal, reinvention and departure from older norms. The consolidation of streaming can only be understood when we know how Hollywood weathered earlier crises. US show business is the quintessential cultural industry, and allows us to explore the tensions between art and commerce, mediations of race and gender, the synergies of theatre, TV and pop music, the work of audiences and the significance of marketing strategies over more than a century of rapid social, economic and political change.

What is lifestyle? When and how did the concept develop, and what functions does it serve in consumer culture today? How is it represented and constructed through television? How does it relate to parallel concepts like taste, style and identity? This subject frames lifestyle as the site where consumer culture and individual identity intersect, where identities are produced through our interactions with the commodities and media we consume. It approaches lifestyle as the relatively recent invention of advertising, marketing, popular media and related institutions and discourses, contextualizing it within the broader rise of modern consumer culture, in order to provide a historical framework for understanding the rise and global spread of lifestyle culture today. The subject engages key theories for understanding consumer culture and media from Marxist accounts of commodity fetishism and alienated labour to contemporary television studies and social theories of DIY-selves and reflexive individualism. On completion of this subject, students should be able to analyse the complex relations between contemporary consumer culture, lifestyle discourse, popular media and individual identity formation, and to trace the workings of these relations through selected cultural sites that may include advertisements, television programs, and Internet sites, and everyday practices like shopping.

This subject is an introduction to the study of Australian film and television. Beginning with post-war Australian film and television, we will trace the emergence of the modern entertainment industry in Australia locating it within national and international frameworks and examining the growing debates around what constitutes a national cinema and television industry. The focus will be upon examining specific films and a range of media in television locating products within local and global contexts, analyzing cosmopolitan and nationalist impulses that drive the industry forward. We will study a range of indigenous and non-indigenous products and genres including feature films, video, documentaries, television series, sitcoms and news programs. Road movies, comedy, history films, animation, romance and melodrama are among the genres studied.

This subject re-thinks the enduring notion of authorship and its central place in the production and reception of films and other screen media. Through a detailed examination of films and filmmakers operating in global art cinema and Hollywood, students will encounter critical ideas about authorship and artistry beyond persisting misconceptions of filmmaking as the exclusive creative province of male auteurs and multi-national business conglomerates. This subject demonstrates the notion of ensemble authorship which takes into account the significant collaborating role of producers, writers, designers, technicians, actors, studios, critics, audiences and their relationships to other visual and performing arts. This subject’s focus on ensemble filmmaking critically asserts the historical and contemporary significance of female filmmakers in the re-evaluation of this tenacious industrial and critical paradigm.

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.

How have cities been imagined, navigated, and represented? What are some of the cultural, social, political, and environmental challenges that cities face in the 21st century? This subject examines how the city has been theorized as a core concept of modernity and modernization or represented through various aesthetic practices (photography, film, tv, literature, essays), moving from key cultural theorists of the city and urban life to case studies of city cultures and urban practices. By exploring everyday urban ecologies alongside creative and political interventions that transform urban life, the subject seeks to understand how cities are sites of pleasure, inclusion and diversity but also spaces of struggle, alienation and isolation.

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 theorizations 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.

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 explores the ecological implications of media technologies and the ways they mediate the world around us. We will investigate the materials and energy used in screen media today, and the ecological consequences of work practices and design choices. Far from dematerialising culture, the rapid evolution of personal computing, internet, mobile media and games intensify the involvement of production, distribution and viewing media in the physical world. At the same time, film, TV and other screen media makers respond to environmental crises and their own involvement in them. Applying diverse and interdisciplinary interpretative tools to global fiction, news, documentary, online and public screen media, we will explore how ecocritical aesthetics can address pollution, waste and the Anthropocene, and develop ways of bridging the gulf between human and non-human worlds.

Can media mediate between human and non-human? Can they do so without exploitation and extractivism? Is a capitalist ecomedia possible? What can feminist, anti-racist and decolonial perspectives tell us about environmentalism and ecomedia?

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 capstone subject will give all students majoring in Screen and Cultural Studies the opportunity to experience a research and/or industry guided learning program which seeks to locate the discipline in the wider context of contemporary issues, foster an adventurous approach to new knowledge and explore a range of innovative and creative presentation formats. Three distinct components inform the learning experience. We begin with an intensive workshop over two days where students will be offered a number of provocations on how Screen and Cultural Studies can be located in the contemporary landscape of humanities scholarship and how research within the discipline responds to pressing social, political, and cultural issues. Building on these reflections students will have the opportunity to formulate a semester-long supervised project aimed at building and enhancing experiential learning and working as part of a dynamic team. Although students will have the opportunity to choose their projects, they will work as part of a broad research theme with academic and industry supervision and engagement. The subject will culminate in the presentation of research projects in innovative and imaginative modes and in ways that are informed by the intended audience or outcome, including review blogs, policy reports, photo essays, video documentary, festival programming, and websites.

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 screen cultures. Key topics of narrative, editing, sound, mise-en-scene and cinematography are studied both in relation to contemporary cinema and within their historical contexts. The film theory module introduces key theories including: narrative and formalist theory, auteurism and genre, feminist film theory and the influence of psychoanalysis, new screen media theory and contemporary research methodologies, all of which offer insight into the discipline of Screen Studies.

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.

What is the relationship between gender and culture in everyday life? Why are some forms of gender more culturally privileged than others? How do gender norms take shape and gain dominance in contemporary culture? This subject explores key sites through which gender identities emerge, become dominant, and/or transform. Through these cultural sites this subject examines hegemonic ideologies around gender, the uneven value placed on certain gendered subject positions, and possibilities for resistance in relation to femininities, masculinities, and other gender formations. Sites include areas of concern to feminist cultural studies including digital culture, popular media, youth cultures, celebrity and fandom, sport, fitness and self-discipline regimes, beauty culture and more. Core to this exploration are issues of location, race, whiteness, and nation, which inform hegemonic ideals and lived experiences of gendered life. Beyond simply understanding how identities are transforming in a highly mediated and globalised context, this subject seeks to critically engage with questions of injustice and inequality in relation to gendered cultures.

Popular culture shapes how we think and feel, how we relate to one another; in short, how we imagine and live our lives. This subject examines the dynamics between popular culture, media consumption, and our social worlds. It will draw on students’ own consumption of popular culture as entry points to explore the various roles mass-mediated popular culture plays in our lives. From pop music and blockbuster films to viral videos, memes and selfies, this course interrogates: How can we define what is ‘popular’? What do debates about popular culture tell us about current political anxieties? And how does popular culture maintain, reproduce or challenge our existing social and political formations within and across cultures in an increasingly globalized world? The subject is organized around a series of questions about production, regulation and consumption that will introduce students to a range of key concepts in cultural studies. The goal is to familiarise students with debates in cultural studies about the politics of mass culture, popular culture and viral culture, drawing from examples of both twentieth century and contemporary computer-mediated cultural practices.

This subject explores developments in the American film and television industry since its beginnings. The evolution of contemporary styles, techniques and genres belongs to a history of refusal, reinvention and departure from older norms. The consolidation of streaming can only be understood when we know how Hollywood weathered earlier crises. US show business is the quintessential cultural industry, and allows us to explore the tensions between art and commerce, mediations of race and gender, the synergies of theatre, TV and pop music, the work of audiences and the significance of marketing strategies over more than a century of rapid social, economic and political change.

What is lifestyle? When and how did the concept develop, and what functions does it serve in consumer culture today? How is it represented and constructed through television? How does it relate to parallel concepts like taste, style and identity? This subject frames lifestyle as the site where consumer culture and individual identity intersect, where identities are produced through our interactions with the commodities and media we consume. It approaches lifestyle as the relatively recent invention of advertising, marketing, popular media and related institutions and discourses, contextualizing it within the broader rise of modern consumer culture, in order to provide a historical framework for understanding the rise and global spread of lifestyle culture today. The subject engages key theories for understanding consumer culture and media from Marxist accounts of commodity fetishism and alienated labour to contemporary television studies and social theories of DIY-selves and reflexive individualism. On completion of this subject, students should be able to analyse the complex relations between contemporary consumer culture, lifestyle discourse, popular media and individual identity formation, and to trace the workings of these relations through selected cultural sites that may include advertisements, television programs, and Internet sites, and everyday practices like shopping.

This subject is an introduction to the study of Australian film and television. Beginning with post-war Australian film and television, we will trace the emergence of the modern entertainment industry in Australia locating it within national and international frameworks and examining the growing debates around what constitutes a national cinema and television industry. The focus will be upon examining specific films and a range of media in television locating products within local and global contexts, analyzing cosmopolitan and nationalist impulses that drive the industry forward. We will study a range of indigenous and non-indigenous products and genres including feature films, video, documentaries, television series, sitcoms and news programs. Road movies, comedy, history films, animation, romance and melodrama are among the genres studied.

This subject re-thinks the enduring notion of authorship and its central place in the production and reception of films and other screen media. Through a detailed examination of films and filmmakers operating in global art cinema and Hollywood, students will encounter critical ideas about authorship and artistry beyond persisting misconceptions of filmmaking as the exclusive creative province of male auteurs and multi-national business conglomerates. This subject demonstrates the notion of ensemble authorship which takes into account the significant collaborating role of producers, writers, designers, technicians, actors, studios, critics, audiences and their relationships to other visual and performing arts. This subject’s focus on ensemble filmmaking critically asserts the historical and contemporary significance of female filmmakers in the re-evaluation of this tenacious industrial and critical paradigm.

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.

How have cities been imagined, navigated, and represented? What are some of the cultural, social, political, and environmental challenges that cities face in the 21st century? This subject examines how the city has been theorized as a core concept of modernity and modernization or represented through various aesthetic practices (photography, film, tv, literature, essays), moving from key cultural theorists of the city and urban life to case studies of city cultures and urban practices. By exploring everyday urban ecologies alongside creative and political interventions that transform urban life, the subject seeks to understand how cities are sites of pleasure, inclusion and diversity but also spaces of struggle, alienation and isolation.

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 theorizations 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.

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 explores the ecological implications of media technologies and the ways they mediate the world around us. We will investigate the materials and energy used in screen media today, and the ecological consequences of work practices and design choices. Far from dematerialising culture, the rapid evolution of personal computing, internet, mobile media and games intensify the involvement of production, distribution and viewing media in the physical world. At the same time, film, TV and other screen media makers respond to environmental crises and their own involvement in them. Applying diverse and interdisciplinary interpretative tools to global fiction, news, documentary, online and public screen media, we will explore how ecocritical aesthetics can address pollution, waste and the Anthropocene, and develop ways of bridging the gulf between human and non-human worlds.

Can media mediate between human and non-human? Can they do so without exploitation and extractivism? Is a capitalist ecomedia possible? What can feminist, anti-racist and decolonial perspectives tell us about environmentalism and ecomedia?

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.