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University Program Information

Programmes

The University of Hong Kong offers various programmes through its Department of Sociology. These include:

• Undergraduate programmes:
  • Criminology Major/Minor
  • Media & Cultural Studies Major/Minor
  • Sociology Major/Minor
• Taught postgraduate programmes:
  • MSocSc Criminology
  • MSocSc Media, Culture & Creative Cities
  • MSocSc Sociology
• MPhil / PhD Sociology

Courses

The Department of Sociology offers a range of courses, including:

• SOCI7007: Globalization and cultural mosaic: An Asian perspective
  • Offer semester: 2nd semester
  • Lecture time: Friday, 19:00 – 21:50
  • Lecture venue: CPD-2.58
  • Credits awarded: 6

Course Description

This course is designed to understand what globalization is all about in today’s world. Globalization is a buzzword we frequently hear and use, a concept that from the 1990s has become part of our everyday ways of understanding and describing the world. Yet when we look closely at it, we find it is a contested concept with slippery meanings. Among the few agreed-upon meanings of the concept, there is an underlying idea that the world feels today smaller thanks to the technological advancements in transportation and communication, leading to a level of interconnection and exchange flow unseen in the world’s history.

Course Learning Outcomes

1. Have greater insights into the processes of globalization, a process taking place across the world today and shaping all of our lives of which we ought to know the general background.
2. Demonstrate a fuller understanding of different aspects of globalization in various domains of life, including those involving recent history, economics, consumption, migration, terrorism, nationalism, heritage, and cultural identity.
3. Unpack the diverse dimensions, causes, effects of globalization and debate them from a critical point of view.
4. Use some of the tools provided by this course, engaging with the main concepts and theories to assess globalization as encountered in the everyday.
5. Comprehend and discuss both the costs and benefits of contemporary processes of globalization to individuals, societies, and the world.
6. Better appreciate their own culture and self, considering their everyday lives and choices in a globalizing world.

Assessment

• Tutorial and lecture participation, weekly tasks: 20%
• Film response paper: 30%
• Ethnographic project (including Group Presentation 20% and Individual Report 30%): 50%

Required Reading

All required and recommended readings will be provided at the beginning of the semester.

Recommended Reading

There is no textbook for this course, however, the following titles might provide you with an outlook on the debates on globalization:

• Ritzer, George. 2007. The Blackwell Companion to Globalization. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell.
• Robbins, Richard H. 2014. Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism (6th ed.). Boston: Pearson.
• Lewellen, Ted C. 2002. The Anthropology of Globalization: Cultural Anthropology Enters the 21st Century. Westport: Bergin & Garvey.
• Steger, Manfred. 2020. Globalization: A Very Short Introduction (5th ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Sassen, Saskia. 1998. Globalization and Its Discontents. New York: New Press.
• Held, David and Anthony McGew, eds. 2005. The Global Transformations Reader: An introduction to the Globalization Debate (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Polity.
• Burawoy, Michael, Ed. 2000. Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections, and Imaginations in a Postmodern World. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Monbiot, George. 2016. How Did We Get into This Mess? Politics, Equality, Nature. London: Verso.