Cultural Studies Minor
Academic Convenor
Professor Chua Beng Huat
Email: ophelp@nus.edu.sg
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The
import of “culture” for understanding human activity and
the history of its many uses provide the initial basis
of Cultural Studies, an interdisciplinary field formed
over forty years ago, primarily in the US and UK. Since
then, interest in the field has grown exponentially. Incorporating
a diverse range of new theoretical inputs, methodological
innovations and objects of inquiry, Cultural Studies takes
up a number of issues related to contemporary culture
while being aware of their specific historical formations.
The research field broadly includes: analysis of contemporary
urban cultural practices, including the consumption and
politics of mass media, popular literature, consumerism,
lifestyles and urban architecture and spaces, the construction
of individual and collective identities and formation
of subjectivities and, the politics and interests in knowledge
production and reproduction.
Students who take up this minor will leave it with a knowledge
of contemporary debates in cultural studies and with a
theoretical tool-kit capable of analyzing a range of social
processes and cultural forms and practices including cinema,
cyberspace, popular fiction, popular music and television.
Although central to daily life in contemporary, high-technology
based society, many of these contemporary cultural phenomena
have been placed outside the boundaries of established
disciplines such as sociology, history and literary studies,
in part because the concepts developed within singular
disciplines are unable to capture their complexities.
Through multidisciplinary methodologies,
Cultural Studies combines and adapts qualitative research
strategies to specific analytic interests, including textual
analysis, ethnographic observations and different theories
of interpretation, including semiotics, psychoanalysis,
post-structuralism and post-modernism.
The general aims of the Minor are:
(1) To provide coherence to possible combinations
of the different modules offered by different departments
elected by undergraduates,
(2)
To provide conceptual and
methodological tools for students to gain depth of understanding
and skills in analysis of contemporary cultural practices,
(3)
To provide students with
analytic and conceptual skills which are increasingly
demanded in a service oriented and information base economy. |
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