CCGL9044 Global Issues

Mobile Identities: Person, Place, and Global Flows

[This course is under the thematic cluster of ‘Sustaining Cities, Cultures, and the Earth’.]


 

Course Description

This course will engage students with their own sense of place and sense of self in their neighbourhoods, in Hong Kong, and in the larger world. It will ask how place and identity are interwoven; how each interacts with other concepts such as “space”, “non-place”, “city”, “home”, “modernity” and, “earth”; and how the local and global traverse all of our identities via the flow of travel, commerce, ideas, food, images, media, money, migration, and digital technologies. Through discussion, short reflective writing, and student projects — using media such as video, photography, writing, map, art-installations, or sound — the course will deepen our understanding of the cultural dynamics of “self” and “other”, our attention to the intersections between the local and the global, and our capacity for analysis, site-based research, collaboration, and creativity.

Throughout the course, we will devote time in both lectures and tutorials to working on your projects. We will also use Michel de Certeau’s “Walking in the City” as a narrative through-line for the entire course. Come to each and every session awake, prepared, curious, and ready to be very active!

Course Learning Outcomes

On completing the course, students will be able to:

  1. Explain key terms such as ‘place’, ‘space’, ‘differential identities’, ‘local and global intersections’, and ‘modernity’.
  2. Demonstrate an understanding of what ‘mobility’ means in relationship to identity and place.
  3. Represent, both creatively and critically, relationships between identity, neighborhood, Hong Kong, and global flows.
  4. Demonstrate university-level reading, writing, and analytic capacities.

Offer Semester and Day of Teaching

Second semester (Wed)


Study Load

Activities Number of hours
Lectures 24
Tutorials 10
Fieldwork / Visits 24
Reading and preparation 24
Assessment: Essay writing 20
Assessment: Project 36
Total: 138

Assessment: 100% coursework

Assessment Tasks Weighting
In-class assessments 10
Project (Part 1 – Mapping your Neighbourhood) 25
Project (Part 2 – Identity, Hong Kong and Global Flows) 30
Project notebook 10
Reflective writing 10
Essay 15

Required Reading

All Available Electronically on Moodle or on the Web

Readings

  • Aurigi, A., & Graham, S. (2003). Cyberspace and the city: The “virtual city” in Europe. In G. Bridge & S. Watson (Eds.), A companion to the city (pp. 489-502). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
  • Bauman, Z. (2000). On being light and liquid. In Liquid modernity (pp. 1-15). London: Polity Press.
  • Certeau, M. d. (1984). Walking the city. In S. Rendall (Trans.), The practice of everyday life. Berkeley: University of California Press. From http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/DeCerteau-Practice-Excerpts.pdf
  • Collie, N. (2013). Walking in the city: urban space, stories, and gender. Gender forum: An internet journal for gender studies, 42. From http://www.genderforum.org/issues/gender-and-urban-space/walking-in-the-city-urban-space-stories-and-gender
  • Dreyer, E., & McDowall, E. (2012). Imagining the flâneur as a woman. South African Journal for Communication Theory and Research, 38(1), 30-44.
  • Jacobs, J. (1961). The uses of sidewalks. In The death and life of great American cities (pp. 55-88). New York: Vintage.
  • Lefebvre, H. (2004). Seen from the window. In Rhythmanalysis (pp. 27-37). London: Continuum.
  • Perkins, H. C., & Thorns, D. C. (2012). Place, identity, and everyday life. In Place, identity and everyday life in a globalizing world (pp. 11-24). Basingstoke, UK:Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Perkins, H. C., & Thorns, D. C. (2012). Everyday life in a globalizing world. In Place, identity and everyday life in a globalizing world (pp. 25-48). Basingstoke, UK:Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Poe, E. A. (1840). The man of the crowd. From http://poestories.com/read/manofthecrowd
  • Tam, D. (2016). Little Manila: The ‘Other’ Central of Hong Kong. In M. Chlana & J. Hou (Eds.), Messy urbanism: Understanding the “other” cities of Asia. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
  • Wong, E., & Wong, A. (2014). Seeking identity: Hong Kong people. The New York Times. From http://nyti.ms/1y2F6Tq

Course Tools

Recommended Reading and Viewing

A short list of recommended reading or viewing materials will be included on Moodle.


Course Co-ordinator and Teacher(s)

Course Co-ordinator Contact
Professor G.M. Kochhar-Lindgren
School of Humanities (Comparative Literature), Faculty of Arts
Tel: 2219 4956
Email: gklindgren@hku.hk
Teacher(s) Contact
Professor G.M. Kochhar-Lindgren
School of Humanities (Comparative Literature), Faculty of Arts
Tel: 2219 4956
Email: gklindgren@hku.hk
Mr T.G. Edwards
School of Humanities (Comparative Literature), Faculty of Arts
Email: gedwards@hku.hk