Spotlight On...
Freeman Grant Opens the Door to New Courses
Thanks to the $2 million grant from the Freeman Foundation to enhance undergraduate education about Asia at IU, many new developments are underway. There are on-going searches for three new faculty positions, one each in the School of Education, the Kelley School of Business, and the College of Arts and Sciences. The purpose of these new positions is to pursue the grant's theme, which is called "Communicating East Asia." The various departments involved in these faculty searches hope to have the positions filled in time for the 2003-2004 academic year. In the meantime, current professors at IU are involved in either redeveloping old courses or creating new ones to provide a wider selection of East Asia-related classes in a variety of departments. On the whole, it is an exciting time to be pursuing East Asian Studies at IU.
A New Take on Old Courses
Rick Wilk in the Anthropology Department and Art Alderson in the Sociology Department are each re-working one of their courses to provide East Asian content. Rick Wilk's new class is "Food and Culture," an extension of a course he regularly teaches called "Global Consumer Culture" (E418/618). The course will be offered in Spring 2003 to graduate students and upper level undergraduates. Half of the work done in the course will be on Japanese and Chinese food culture. Rick explains that most of the best food scholarship in the last few years has been done in Asia, so the students will have a lot to work with. He is very enthusiastic about the chance to study this rapidly-growing field in depth.
Art Alderson's class, "Social Inequality" (S217), open to all students, has decided to make this year's course a systematic comparison of the U.S. and Japan. He believes that Japan will be a useful point of comparison on issues such as social stratification. Professor Alderson has been teaching this class for a few years, but he believes that the incorporation of Japan provides an exciting new direction, and one which will be of great interest to his students.
A New Business Chinese Course
Some current faculty are developing all-new courses as a result of the initiative. Jennifer Liu, the Chinese Language Program Coordinator at EALC, will be teaching a new Business Chinese course in the Spring. She explained that since the political and economic situations in mainland China and Taiwan are changing rapidly, so are the interests and backgrounds of the IU student body. A significant portion of the students taking Chinese have business-related majors (e.g., accounting, marketing, economics, finance). While the exploration of general cultural phenomenon or literary texts has its value, as emphasized by our current third-year and fourth-year Chinese curricula, business-minded students want a language course that takes into account their existing knowledge of the subject matter and equips them with linguistic as well as conceptual tools to handle business interactions with Chinese-speaking communities.
In fact, lower-level business courses (1 credit) were piloted during 1997-1999, and they were well received. However, due to the limited proficiency of students and the minimum contact hours, few topics could be covered and consolidated. Now that our program has a faculty member specializing in China's political economy, and as well as newly hired professional language lecturer, we are appropriately equipped to offer this course.
Students are encouraged to take this course and C302 Third-Year Chinese II concurrently, or at least to finish C301 Third-Year Chinese I before they take this course. Liu expects it to be offered every other year during the spring semester with an enrollment of between 10-15 students. If China keeps growing at the current rate in the world economy, however, we can anticipate an even greater demand in the years to come. TOP
Japan and Business: Two New Courses
Another new class on tap for the spring is "Japan Study Tour, Spring 2003" (D496/E496) a combined East Asian Languages and Cultures and Kelley School of Business class, proposed by Marc Dollinger, Professor of Management and co-taught by Marc and Yasuko Watt, Assosciate Professor in EALC. This class, which will be open to ten students each in the School of Business and EALC, marks the first combined effort between the Kelley School of Business and EALC and looks to be fun and challenging for all involved. The purpose of the course is to enable students in both programs to travel to Japan to study the culture, language and business environment. Students taking part in the class will be able to travel Japan at a greatly reduced cost thanks to the generosity of the Freeman Foundation.
The idea for this course originated several years ago when Professor Dollinger took a group of MBA students to Japan for ten days. During that trip, he began to consider how the effects of such an experience would be different for students who are younger. When he became the Chair of Undergraduate Studies in the Kelley School of Business last year, he realized that even though a short-term undergraduate study tour course had never been done before, it was possible, provided there was additional supervision and preparation by the faculty involved. With the teaching support of Yasuko Watt and funding from the Freeman grant, Dollinger is looking forward to seeing this course become a reality.
Though many of the students in the class will be coming from vastly different backgrounds, Professor Dollinger thinks that two important factors will unite them. The first is that they will all be self-motivated and eager to do well in their quests for a "great spring break". The second is that because most (or all) of these students will be going Japan for the first time, they will experience the sights, smells, and sounds of this unique country together. Watt explains, "It's exciting because it is a course where the students will be able to experience what they have learned and compare their classroom knowledge with life experience. I think I am as excited about this course as the students are!" Dollinger and Watt believe that their greatest challenge will be to help the students realize that they will encounter in Japan much more than they are initially able to process, and that their Japan experience will be one which impacts and shapes them for years to come.
Professor Watt will teach the sections of the course which cover Japanese culture, and Professor Dollinger will teach the students about aspects of Japanese business. It was Professor Dollinger, who has spent time as a visiting professor in Japan, who suggested they use the travel guide Lonely Planet Japan as the main text for the course. He believes it will give the students the points of reference they will need when encountering Japan for the first time. While they have also included important academic texts about Japan, they know that the students' actual experiences in Japan will be the true substance of the course.
A separate course "Management and Popular Culture" is being developed for EALC and LAMP (Liberal Arts and Management Program) by Professors Sumie Jones and Thomas Keirstead and will be offered beginning in Fall 2003. The course will be designed to train upper-level undergraduates in debates and public presentations focusing on issues of economics, management, environment, and trade in relation to contemporary Japanese culture. Because there is a strong tendency in Japanese popular arts to teach the public about the operations and goals of various forms of business, popular culture can be an accessible gateway to understanding the ways in which Japan's business and economy are thought to move. Students will explore this connection between popular culture and business by doing team research, taking field trips, and listening to presentations given by Japanese professionals.
A Chinese Film and Music Course
A new course called "Chinese Film and Music: Sounds and Images" will
also be offered in the Spring 2003. The objectives of the course are for the
students to become able to "read" Chinese film in relation to its
musical components, and for students to be able to "read" Chinese
films and listen to their soundtracks in relation to their representations of
Chinese culture. Taught by Sue Tuohy in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology,
the course will be offered for undergraduate and graduate students through the
Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology (FOLK F300 and F600) and cross-listed
in the Department of East Asian Languages and Culture.
The course begins with an introduction to Chinese music and film industry and to techniques for analyzing films. From there, students will view and discuss films produced in China from the 1930s to the present as well as Hollywood films about China. The course focuses on films that feature music and musicians as their primary topic or as a primary component. The films and music will be contextualized within the social-historical conditions of their production as well as the conditions which the films portray. Using a variety of media, the course will move from the portrayals of Chinese life within the films to discourse about the films and to other types of representations of Chinese culture and music. A portion of the course will rely on multimedia materials, coordinated through a website and CD-ROM. The development of these materials was made possible by a course development grant from the Freeman Foundation that is administered through the East Asian Studies Center. TOP
Welcome to Professor Soek-Fang Sim
The Freeman Undergraduate Initiative has led to one new hire. While the College of Arts and Sciences carries out a search for an East Asianist in either sociology or anthropology, the Freeman grant is being used to support a one-year hire in the Department of Communication and Culture; the cost of which will be picked up by COAS in the future. Soek-Fang Sim, who did her undergraduate studies in Sociology/Anthropology in Singapore, her PhD in Media Studies/Cultural Studies at the University of London and taught at UC San Diego for a year before coming to IU, has been asked to bring her Asian expertise to Bloomington. During her year at IU, she will be teaching two Asia-specific courses, one in the fall and one in the spring.
This fall, she is teaching a course called "Nationalism and National Identity in Asia and the West." In this class students study questions such as what is a "nation" and why does the "nation" command so much of our identity? In this course, Professor Sim encourages students to think of the concept of nation as being a product of culture and to look at how this concept is produced by the state, disseminated by the media and consumed by the citizens. Sim explains that in Asia we see many good examples of problematic nation-states (Hong Kong, Taiwan and Tibet) as well as national fractures within the state(Indonesia) that students can use as the basis for discussions about national identity. She also points out that because very few Asian countries have been culturally homogenized, we are still able to see active processes of government-sponsored nationalization being carried out.
In the spring, Sim will teach a course called "Media, Market and Democracy in Asia." The goal of this course is to systematically and thematically understand the various forms of media and ideological control. Students will investigate how market privization, professionalization of journalism and cultural nationalism have become tools of the government and focus on the nature of "Asian Journalism," and they will consider how "Asian-ness" may be used to legitimize certain forms of government and market systems. Written by Susan Furukawa
| • Faculty News | |
| • EASC Events | • Student/Alumni News |
| • What to Read | • Print Ready Newsletter |
|
• Profiles
|