Category: Cultural Perspectives

Below you will find 10 online lessons/links to original content for a course I designed and teach at SAE Creative Media Institute called CIU211 Cultural Perspectives.

This unit takes a “critical theory” approach to analysing media and culture. In this unit students will explore critical cultural theories, popular cultural aesthetics, modalities of consumption, cultural institutions and systems of classification that inform creative media practices. Drawing on a range of creative media texts and analytical frameworks, the unit encourages students to develop ways of thinking about media and culture that demonstrate a broad awareness of aesthetic principles and stylistic trends; subjectivity, agency, ethics and relations of power; contexts, disciplines and discursive formations.

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Cultural Mainstreams Tutorial Task

Cultural diffusion is the process of one culture influencing another and has existed for as long as humans have. However, determining the ethics of the use of another culture’s aesthetic is not always an easy task as it can be difficult to determine the point at which one crosses into the unethical terrain of cultural appropriation. This tutorial activity is designed to help us understand the way cultural artefacts are subsumed into the mainstream and how to avoid cultural appropriation.

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Aesthetics and Ethics Guided Discussion

This tutorial activity is a guided discussion and debate on the topic of aesthetics and ethics. The total time required is two hours. By the end of this lesson, students will be able to make a value judgement on the ethical nature of media content that is supported by research; defend this value judgement by using Socratic reasoning and identify the ethical position they are assuming in exercising this judgement.

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Making Sense of the Mainstream

The mainstream is a value-laden category that frequently derives its meaning in association with its multiple corollaries such as counter-culture, subculture, underground, indie, folk, alternative, experimental and avant-garde. In this lesson, we problematise our perceptions of mainstream culture and examine … READ MORE