Your First-Year in Critical and Cultural Studies
Critical and Cultural Studies offers three units at 100-level. Students in any degree program in the university can study one or more of these units.
CUL 100: Living Culture: Entertainment, Identity, Power is our main introductory unit and the usual prerequisite for study at higher levels. This unit looks at a variety of key topics in contemporary life (such as consumerism and shopping, the body and beauty, love and sex, war and religion) and shows how Critical and Cultural Studies looks beyond conventional and common sense accounts of things to find different explanations of how we make sense of the world.
In CUL 101: Seeing Culture: Vision, Visuality and Everyday Life, we study the ways in which visual media (photography, film, TV and multimedia) define our lives. So much of our experience of contemporary culture is visual, from how we present ourselves to the gaze of others, through the industries in which we work to the media that entertain us. How does visual culture work, and what is its place in the world?
What are universities for? What kinds of work does a Media and Cultural Studies degree help you to do? How else might Media and Cultural Studies change the world and the way people think about it? Our third first-year unit MCS 100: Academic Cultures gives you a chance to reflect on these questions. Unit assessment is based on your creative responses to real world problems. You will have the chance to write in a range of academic and non-academic genres, including blogs and journalistic articles, and practice your verbal skills not only in the classroom, but also in mini-podcasts and in a student conference setting.