Course overview
Asia's immense impact on the world over the last 2-3,000 years has often been obscured and is rarely part of Australian common knowledge. Asia and the World provides all students, but especially those doing International Studies and Asian Studies, with a basic introduction to notions of Asia. Many things which are taken for granted as being Western, often have their origins in the East in some way. This influence extends to language, hamburgers, philosophical ideas and ways of illustrating what we see. This influence is not limited to the ancient past. Today Asian pop culture is reshaping Western pop culture and ideas and products from Asia are changing our lives in fundamental ways even if the origins are not obvious. Asia and the World highlights the irony of how reactions to Asia shaped Europe's destiny and how its inventions and ideas have been adapted by Western states and often used to then dominate Asia in the colonial period. The contemporary rise of independent Asian nation states is reviewed and contextualised and the processes which obscure Asian influence are explained. Your view of why Australian/Western history and culture are the way they are may well change the way you see the world.
Course learning outcomes
- Understand the significant contribution of Asian societies to western culture
- Critically analyse the role of material culture in shaping many value judgments, especially where these involve notions of superiority and inferiority
- Investigate and apply the complex notions of diffusion, competition, adaption and assimilation etc, and the apply this knowledge to specific cases studies of global change, especially as this apply to Asian influences
- Recognise the complexity of the writing process where it involves correctly understanding questions, setting relevant contexts, writing explicit and developed arguments, explaining how such arguments can/should be supported by invoking sources, definitions and authorities in the field, and developing conclusions
- Relate practical and real life examples to the theoretical concepts and explanations covered in the course
- Understand the nature, role and formalities of key academic conventions such as referencing
- Recognise, discriminate and assess the differences between well and poorly constructed arguments and good and poor writing