English

This course gives an overview of the status, features, and use of Hong Kong English (HKE), the variety of English commonly used in Hong Kong. It introduces to the concept of ‘world Englishes’ and examines different theoretical frameworks for conceptualizing the evolution of new varieties of English. The course also examines the relationship between Hong Kong English and Hong Kong culture from cultural, social, historical, and educational perspectives, particularly in relation to and juxtaposition from Cantonese and Putonghua. The second part of the course examines both spoken and written features of HKE, including grammar, discourse particles, vocabulary, and pronunciation, as well as the practices of code-mixing and code-switching. This section of the course also focuses on the social impact of the use of these features in Hong Kong culture. In the third part of the course, language attitudes and ideologies towards ‘standard’ language varieties (for example American and British English) in relation to HKE are explored. The course also examines the relationship between the use of HKE and social identity as well as gender in Hong Kong culture.

This course introduces the influence of digital technologies on society, with a particular focus on the interplay between technology, disinformation, and society during political campaigns. As digital technologies continue to shape the political landscape, the spread of disinformation poses significant challenges to democracies worldwide. The course explores the mechanisms and impacts of false information dissemination on social media platforms, examining the sophisticated techniques employed to create and spread disinformation. A key focus is on disinformation related to elections, analyzing recent political campaigns to understand the strategies behind these efforts. The course also investigates the dual role of artificial intelligence in both generating and combating multimodal disinformation, including text, image, video, and audio. It discusses the ethical, fairness, and transparency concerns that arise from the use of Al in this context and explores strategies for identifying and neutralizing false information at scale. By engaging with these topics, students gain a comprehensive understanding of the societal, political, and economic implications of disinformation in the digital age, equipping them with the critical skills necessary to navigate an increasingly complex digital era.

The course engages with the self-legitimizing and framing of agency and identities —ethnic, gender, socio-economic— in the works of a range of early modern writers some of whom did not live in accordance to the contemporary expectations of their biological gender— from diverse locations across Hispanic territories in Europe and the Americas. Materials can include letters, novellas, drama, poetry, autobiography, chronicles and historical records from canonical authors as well as previously marginalized voices. Students explore the early modern Hispanic world from metropolitan, colonized and colonizing perspectives and engage with questions of (self-)representation within artistic, social and political structures in the early modern world. The study of various genres allows students to consider the multiple ways and implications of creating, defending, and circulating notions of identity as well as recording agency in this period.

What does it mean to study religion anthropologically? This course introduces students to anthropological approaches of studying religion. Students explore how anthropologists have struggled to define religion, and what debates and contestations about definition can tell us about the assumptions of classic anthropological understandings of religion, and how our thinking has changed since. Students explore multiple religious beliefs, meanings, experiences, expressions, and practices across diverse sociocultural environments. Through an engagement with anthropological works on ritual, self-cultivation, and joy, students learn how religion is understood, experienced, and expressed. 

This course introduces students to the languages of the Bible. It provides students with a basic orientation to the biblical languages: Hebrew and Koine Greek. It enables students to read and translate simple Hebrew and Greek phrases and constructions. Students are able to read and translate, with assistance, selected biblical passages.

How has race become a method for categorizing and ordering humanity? How has the politics of anti-racism sought to dismantle both racial orders and the categories they rely on? In this course, students grapple with these questions by exploring the diverse intellectual voices have sought to understand and theorize racism and anti-racism. These thinkers include those who were engaged in struggles against imperialism and colonialism, in addition to contemporary forms of racial domination.

This course examines the burgeoning development of contemporary Chinese art in relation to its shifting socio-political and cultural realities since the end of the Cultural Revolution. Structured around a series of thematic studies on major exhibitions and artworks made and displayed at different stages, this course addresses issues relating to art criticism, institutional censorship, public engagement and art market, investigating unprecedented transnational flows and cross-cultural exchanges within the increasingly interconnected, yet unevenly developed contemporary art world. This course draws particular attention to the practices of Chinese women artists, including Shen Yuan, Lin Tianmiao, Yin Xiuzhen, Lu Qing, Xing Danwen, Kan Xuan, Cao Fei and others, interrogating and challenging the unacknowledged, unquestioned and marginalized status of women in the mainstream discourses of Chinese avant-garde art. Prerequisite: One 1000-level Art History course.

This course offers a description of a system to make a link between the microscopic properties of the particles in the system and its macroscopic behavior at equilibrium. It is based on the idea that the macroscopic state of the system is realized as the average over a large number of independent microscopic states. This demonstrates the basis of these statistical principles and their applications to various problems in physics, chemistry, and material science as statistical thermodynamics bridges many disciplines as it makes the link between the physical description of a given particle and the behavior of a statistical ensemble of those particles. 

In this course, students focus on the alimentary system and supporting bony structures, learning about the macro and micro structure and the pathologies that may occur in this system.

This course provides students with an understanding of the wider social and environmental determinants of health and how the determinants impact health attitudes, behaviors, and health outcomes. This also addresses strategies and interventions at the individual, community, national, and global levels.