Anthropology

In this course, we attempt to understand humans and their surroundings specifically the culture and the society. The concepts in this course help students to change their usual perceptions of cultural situations newly through the "reading the culture" method. Furthermore, this course aims to provide exposure to different kinds of research methods and traits of anthropology, and by applying these observations, it helps students to learn how to perceive various aspects of modern society and how the contexts of these relate to each other.

This course resituates Japan in a global context from a transcultural perspective to consider how popular culture emerges, whose interests it serves, how it is disseminated, and what messages it communicates. It aims to identify Japan’s major historical and cultural developments; understand the long history of popular culture in Japan and analyze cultural products considering the contexts in which they emerged and the audiences towards which they are targeted. The course provides opportunities to acquire methodological and theoretical skills necessary to analyze and critique primary sources and construct a logical argument. 

Darwinian approaches can contribute to our understanding of human behavior, including our demography, health, psychology, culture, and can be applied in hunter-gatherer, small-scale agricultural/pastoralist and post- industrial societies. This course is about the evolution of behavior in humans and examines how much of the variation in human behavior can be understood in terms of individuals making choices that are adaptive in different ecological and social circumstances. The course introduces classic theories of social evolution (kin selection, reciprocal altruism and indirect reciprocity). It covers aspects of our behavior and life history that have parallels in numerous species, as well as those that are (more or less) uniquely human (such as menopause), and discusses how cultural evolution has influenced our behavior. Topics include basic behavioral ecology (as applied to both animal and human behavior) and some evolutionary psychology and cultural evolution, mate choice, parental investment, life history evolution, evolution of cooperation and kinship and marriage systems.

This course provides students with a theoretical and historical overview of the field of contemporary digital interactive factual (non-fiction) narratives. It is a course for storytellers from all backgrounds that want to use digital platforms (web, mobile, tablet, apps, VR, AR, MR, AI, immersive theatre…) to speak about our “shared world” by innovating and involving the user/inter-actor within their story world. Whether you come from journalism, documentary, film, ethnography, social communication or any other field, the challenge of creating for digital platforms is to move from a story-telling to a story-experiencing approach. This is the creative journey that the course proposes: to delve into the history of interactive narratives since the invention of the World Wide Web, learn about its current genres and platforms and be ready to navigate future trends in immersive media. 

Employing recent theories from gender and postcolonial studies, as well as media studies, this course analyses a wide range of case studies from contemporary visual culture, across a broad scope of genres and technologies. The course requires participants to critically think about concepts such as visuality, visual culture, representation, and technology. A novel approach to art, culture, and technology by challenging the primacy of vision and by mobilizing an intersectional perspective is provided. Visual methodologies and analytic tools from the fields of semiotics and psychoanalysis to be able to critically assess how social and cultural norms are disseminated in visual ways are learned. The course provides a toolkit for thinking through the growing and often overwhelming array of images we are confronted with daily in our media-saturated culture.