Singapore

Idols and celebrities are an integral, highly visible and pervasive part of contemporary Japanese and Korean culture. As the most prominent characteristic of Japanese and Korean media and cultural industries, idols have also come to saturate the everyday lives of people outside of Japan and Korea, especially in the wake of the Japan mania, Cool Japan campaigns, and the Korean waves. Through an interdisciplinary approach—combining Japanese and Korean studies, cultural studies, media studies, and celebrity studies—this module examines the idol phenomenon in Japan and Korea. Students will be introduced to key concepts in the study of idols and celebrities, and address the production, representation, circulation and consumption of idols and celebrities in contemporary Japan and Korea (and beyond) within their historical, social, political and economic contexts. By the end of the module, students will not only gain a deeper understanding of Japanese and Korean society, they will also gain conceptual and analytical tools for understanding today’s global media landscape.

This course introduces a broad spectrum of performance practices that may be identified as local cultural expressions found in Singapore. Such practices occur in varied spaces and mediums, and include street opera, getai [song-stage], animal performances, theatre, film, religious festivals, national day parades, YouTube video performances and mobile gaming. The course explores the rich performative histories of these practices and studies concepts of performativity, liveness, and mediation. It also covers the ways in which technology and media play a crucial part in cultural expression and identity formation. 

The Anthropocene is a proposed new geological era based on the scientific evidence that human impacts on natural environmental processes now rival geological forces in influencing the trajectory of the planetary system. This course provides insight into contaminant transport and new complex physical interactions between human activities and natural processes. Major topics include energy fundamentals and need for new energy resources, depletion and contamination of natural resources (including minerals, groundwater, air), transport processes in the multimedia environment (advection, diffusion, dispersion, interphase mass transfer, reaction kinetics), as well as introduction to man-made climate change and its ecological and societal implications.

This course discusses a number of economic, social and environmental challenges that exert massive demands on the urban environment. The critical urban issues, focused on the built environment, include public housing, urban transportation, sustainable development, building conservation and resource management. The course is oriented towards public policies and urban management based on an interdisciplinary approach which includes urban planning, laws and regulations, land management, stakeholder engagement, technology and governance. 

This is an introductory course on the science of colloids and interface with specific reference to the application in food systems. The course covers the definition of a colloid, the fundamentals of colloidal stability such as the forces leading to the instability of colloids, as well as how colloids can be stabilized. Some examples of the application of colloid science in some food colloid systems such as emulsion, gel, foam etc. are discussed.