Week 2 Seminar Notes

Seminar Outline
1. HOUSEKEEPING (17.30-17.40)

2. ESTABLISH INTERCULTURAL TEAMS (17.40-17.55)

3. OUTLINE RAT PROCESS - TRIAL (18.00-18.20)

4. INDIVIDUAL RAT (18.20-18.40)

5. TEAM RAT (18.40-19.00)

BREAK (19.00-19.10)

6. CHALLENGES (19.10-19.20)

7. DISCUSS ISSUES/THEMES FROM READINGS/RATs

8. REMINDERS (20.10-20.20)

Key Seminar Points
Academic Reading Tips

NB These tips will save you time and increase your understanding of academic writing

1. Read first for 'the gist' (general understanding)
 * Read the Introduction (or Abstract) and the Conclusion
 * Read any subheading and the first sentence of each paragraph only - to ascertain the general development of the reading
 * If the reading is broken into sections, you can follwo this process for each individual section

2. Read again for detail
 * Now re-read the reading in full, building your understanding by reading for the detailed development of the argument


 * Also, for tips on annotating readings, please see the article on this topic posted to our Diigo group

Any notes or points on these matters from the RAT, the reading or our class?

Globalisation processes

Most theorists believe that globalization will make the world into a more unified and homogeneous place; that people are becoming alike regardless of their cultural background. However, this is an oversimplified way of thinking; these theorists are forgetting the fact that with the convergence of economy (money market), political system and technology, comes the divergence of human behaviors. Convergence of income, political system and technology across different countries/cultures allows people to express themselves according to their own culture and value system.

In the contemporary global situation cultural identities are being formed and reformed using a range of symbolic material.

Postmodernism

Postmodernism is a crtique of modernism, it is not a phase that occurs after modernism but a response to it. Postmodernism is defined as the awareness of the limits of the claims of modernity. It points to the problem of handling cultural complexity, from having to deal with what from the point of view of established, well ordered categories appears to be a disorder which cannot be adequately incorporated into existing classifications or ignored.

Sociologically, the interesting question is the relationship of postmodernism to postmodernity. Culturally, many theories of postmodernity give cultural factors the central role. These include the growing importance of the culture industries; the aestheticization of everyday life, in which an individual’s life is increasingly seen as an aesthetic or cultural project; the construction of identity by individual choice rather than by traditional ascription; the fragmentation of personal identity, which changes over the life-course and between different social settings; different ways of experiencing space and time; and postmodernism.

National identity

National identity is the representation of nation through a set of more or less coherent images and memories which deal with the questions of the origin, difference and distinctiveness of the people. One of the examples of this process is the evolution of nationalism in Europe around the eighteenth century.

Imagined Communities

According to Benedict Anderson,"all communities larger than the primordial village of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished not by their falseness/genuineness, but by the style n which they are imagined. In this sense even a nation can be considered as an imagined community because it provides a quasi-relegious sense of beloging and fellowship which are attached to those who are taken to share a particular symbolic place.

In the social sciences, community is a rather loosely used term which indicates a goup of people who have something in common with each other which in turn distinguishes them from other groups. there is a shared experience giving a sense of beloning. From the view of Anderson, a community whose members cannot know each other but whose nevertheless have a collective sense of beloning largely created in the imaginatinos of the participants, an important example is the nation. the media play a critical role in the formation of the imagined community of the nation by promoting and assuming the idea of nationhood.

Imagined communities in nations become more well-defined through power struggles with neighbours, are represented through a set of coherent image and memories of a people's origins and distinctiveness and require communications technologies to construct and sustain them.

Cultural Imperialism

Cultural imperialism is the imposition of foreign viewpoint or civilization on a people. It can also be under stood in terms the effect multinational corporations have on national culture of the nations they are situated. Their capacity to direct the flow of cultural goods and information from the domestic economic centers to the peripheries- is an example of cultural imperialism at work.

"Tourism"

Offers various levels of staged authenticity or performing, commodifies and trivialises cultures, establishing the host culture as exotica.

Glossary
Creole - A person of mixed European and black descent, esp. in the Caribbean

–noun


 * 1.
 * a person born in the West Indies or Spanish America but of European, usually Spanish, ancestry.


 * 2.
 * a person born in Louisiana but of usually French ancestry.


 * 3.
 * a person of mixed black and European, esp. French or Spanish, ancestry who speaks a creolized form of French or Spanish.


 * 4.
 * a creolized language; a pidgin that has become the native language of a speech community.