Chinese University of Hong Kong

The "Arab World" today refers to a large geographical area: from the Atlantic coast of North Africa in the West to the border of Iran in the East. Arabic is the principal spoken language of this region, which is also linked by shared cultural and religious traditions. The course presents a historical survey of the "Arab World" from pre-Islamic times to the modern era. The first part surveys the rise and spread of Arab political rule and Arab language and culture with the advent of Islam in the 7th century, with later emphasis on some of the principal political, economic, social, religious, and cultural developments and their relevance to the contemporary "Middle East" region. Two main themes referred to throughout the course are the unity and diversity of the "Arab World" and how various Arab cultures and societies have interacted with other peoples in this region and beyond.

This course addresses the ways in which social media and other related interactions in cyberspace have become a central element in the everyday lives of humans across the globe in the 21st century. Modern lives are now largely interwoven with digital technologies that have not only changed our own cultures, but also have brought forth new cultural forms through mobile phone technologies, networked “smart”-products, and cultural groupings only possible through digital means. The course approaches the anthropology of these digital cultures through its main themes—the transformation and expansion of social media, social research online, the intermixing of our online and offline lives, critical social issues of online lives, and the question of posthumanism. These themes are addressed explicitly in the course, and are also the subtexts of the different lectures, readings, and project work. The course presents the techniques of online fieldwork and referencing; explores a diverse array of new ethnographies on social media: on gender, political movements, online dating, hacking, and gaming culture. These ethnographies also serve to model online social research and provide examples of methodology and design. The social consequences of cyberspace are addressed in the topics of internet pornography, addiction, surveillance, activism, and social networking. Gender and identity issues are a continuous theme throughout the course, highlighting how online lives accentuate already existing dynamics. Hong Kong connections to these subjects will also be critically discussed, often drawing on topical themes presented on blogs and forums.

This course covers the principles of data mining, exploratory analysis and visualization, as well as predictive modeling for complex data sets. It introduces modern tools for regression and classification for high-dimensional or ultra-high dimensional data from the perspective of statistical decision theory and makes comparison to traditional methods. The course explores statistical principles, computational issues, and hands-on data analysis on high noise, observational data.

It is interesting and useful to understand why people do what they do in everyday life. Sociology helps us understand human behaviors by examining the social settings in which people live their lives. The primary goal of this course is to help you think sociologically—to think about the social factors that shape people's actions and beliefs—and to show you how such thinking is useful. Through systematic examination, we will try to use sociology to make sense of people's behavior and ideas. The course is divided into three parts. It first starts with the question: Why do people do what they do? We develop the basic building blocks or tools of a sociological perspective to begin to answer this question. Sociology is fundamentally about patterns (we will sometimes call them “structures”) of social relations and interaction and how these patterns influence what people do and think. We introduce ideas and concepts that help analyze and explain how behavioral patterns differ from person to person, from culture to culture, from one time to another. Second, questions: Who gets what? And why? Here we look at structures of inequality and try to make sense of uneven distributions of valued resources among individuals, groups, and societies. We investigate the social mechanisms that maintain or change those inequalities. Third, questions: Why do things change? And why do they sometimes stay the same? Our focus here is on the great social institutions common to, yet different in, all societies, starting with family and marriage and moving from there to religion, politics, and criminal justice. The course also examines sources of social change that shape and challenge inequalities and institutions.

This course is a study of the basic concepts of probability and statistics. Topics include elementary probability, Bayes theorem, random variables, distribution and density functions, mathematical expectation, conditional distribution, stochastic independence, correlation, special univariate and multivariate distributions, transformation of random variables, sampling distributions, law of large number, moment generating function and central limit theorem.

This course introduces issues in the study of first language acquisition from a linguistic perspective. The topics covered include universal stages in first language acquisition; examining the child's phonological, lexical, and syntactic development; and language socialization. Major theories of language acquisition and the critical period hypothesis are examined and evaluated. While the primary focus of the course is on monolingual acquisition, issues in the study of children acquiring two first languages simultaneously are also addressed.

This course addresses a host of issues that are salient in understanding China and its position in the contemporary world. It is primarily informed by an anthropological perspective that is particularly good at making sense of macro-level issues through studying day-to-day details and processes in a small locale. The course also draws from disciplines other than anthropology—for example, history—and some of the finest journalist writings on China. The overall intention is to provide a well-rounded and nuanced understanding of China today. This course starts with examining China's revolution-packed modern history and the making of the powerful Communist Party. The course covers classical anthropological topics on family, kinship, religion, education, ethnicity, identity, and morality. While anthropological holistic and comparative perspective reflect on Chinese culture with alternative views, this course also addresses how these cultural and social institutions interact with global processes such as modernization and late capitalist development. The class does so by introducing emerging social concerns including unofficial culture, the popularization of religion, environmental challenges, sexuality and LGBTQ identities, and mental health and the pursuit of happiness.