Cultures of Everyday Life
| Code | School | Level | Credits | Semesters |
| INCM1033 | School of International Communications | 1 | 20 | Spring China |
- Code
- INCM1033
- School
- School of International Communications
- Level
- 1
- Credits
- 20
- Semesters
- Spring China
Summary
This module offers an introduction to theories of everyday life. The module deals with everyday life not as a palpable reality to be gathered up and described. Instead, it addresses theories that have attempted to represent aspects of everyday life that remain hidden, making visible the invisible. While we may take the idea of the everyday for granted, associating it with routine, familiar and repeated experiences, our everyday lives are, simultaneously, punctuated by the exceptional, the random and the disruptive. Traditional theoretical attempts to account for the everyday tend to overlook aspects of daily life that refuse system and order: sociology, anthropology, cultural and media studies, for example, deal with activities such as work and leisure but neglect the unique texture of everyday experience. This course thus emphasises the everyday world as problematic and fraught with difficulty in terms of seeing, theorising and representing, and looks at a wide range of attempts to register it.
Please note: This module is assessed at the end of Spring semester. First sit/ Re-sit exams are scheduled normally in the summer and can take the same form as the missing/ failed component of the assessment (exam, essay etc.) or other form, as decided by the School.
Target Students
BA students in International Communications, International Communications with Chinese and International Business with Communications. There is a limited number of places on this module. Students are reminded that enrolments which are not agreed by the Offering School in advance may be cancelled without notice.
Classes
- One 1-hour workshop each week for 10 weeks
- One 1-hour-30-minute seminar each week for 10 weeks
- One 1-hour-30-minute lecture each week for 10 weeks
Assessment
- 30% In-class exam 1 (not in the exam period): 1 hour Multiple Choice Questions
- 10% Coursework 1: 1500 words
- 60% Coursework 2: 2,000 words
Assessed by end of spring semester
Educational Aims
To enable students to question the taken-for-grantedness of the 'everyday'.To provide students with the ability to appreciate the dense, complex and contradictory nature of day to day experience. For instance, to see how the everyday is both idiosyncratic and normative.To offer students an understanding of public consecrated representations of everyday life (e.g. soaps, dramas, museums and archives) with a view to unmasking their ideological effects.To gain understanding of everyday cultures such as fashion, film, tourism, music, love and the like.To enable students to critically discuss cultural, psychological and philosophical implications of everyday life in a modern world.To provide students with knowledge and understanding of theories of everyday life, refusing the taken-for-grantedness of their own everyday.To offer students a critical foundation to identify the ordinary and the extraordinary woven into the fabric of everyday life.To develop a creative approach to everyday life.Learning Outcomes
- Intellectual skills: Students will be able to critically discuss aspects of the everyday that are overall taken for granted. They will present their readings, reflections, impressions and insights about the everyday in both written and oral form, developing the skill of seeing it anew.
- Professional/practical skills: use theoretical source materials and examples across a range of aspects of the everyday, take notes summarising and articulating knowledge of theoretical concepts while developing an understanding of the evasiveness of day to day experience.
- Further skills: communicate clearly in oral presentations, display analytical skills, demonstrate well-structured written commentary based upon a critical/evaluative reading of sources, contribute to discussion, responding to and developing the ideas of others, use information retrieval skills, develop judgement.
Conveners
- Mr Thomas William Whyke