This course provides an overview of contemporary popular culture in Korea, with a focus on media’s role in expressing and shaping it. Students will learn theoretical concepts to analyse Korean popular culture from an academic perspective, covering topics such as gender, collective memory, music, Korean wave, film, journalism, broadcasting and more. The course includes group research projects and class discussions.

Cultures and societies stand at the intersection of diverse traditions, ethnicities, race, value systems and other categories of identification. Among the many nodes that constellate this colorful landscape, members of certain communities who bear social markers that stand apart from the perceived mainstream or the upper strata of social hierarchy are labeled “minority,” and are often represented in ways that frame their presence as alien— strangers in their own home land. Whether it be outright discrimination, unsavory stereotypes, or their satiric appropriations that seemingly subvert but also insidiously reinforce deeply ingrained prejudices, mechanisms of alienation permeate our society on countless fronts. Situating the contemporary mediascape in this broader context of minority discourse, this class invites students to problematize accepted metrics of normalcy and investigate their modes of delivery across different mediums, asking questions such as the following: could the use of racial, ethnic, and cultural stereotypes be justified when framed as critical commentary? How are we to demarcate the thin line between appropriation and inordinate reproduction? What happens when “otherness” as concept becomes translated (in other words, technologized) across mediums such as from written text to visual media, and how may we understand the gaps and misalignments that constitute this process? How does technology, in communicating indexes of otherness or as a source of power in the age of global capital, serve as a double-edged sword in addressing the issues of alienation when specifically applied to the Asian context? The course will provide an introduction to theories and critical reflections that pertain to key concepts in postcolonial/decolonial discourse, including the ‘other,’ hybridity, identity, and ethnicity through works by scholars and explore contemporary media productions that represent the multivalent facets of otherness across TV, film, written fiction, and more. Students will engage in group presentations, in-class writing, plenary/small group discussions, and media projects (or written papers as an alternative track).

This is a course on money and basics of financial intermediation. It is assumed that students have already taken a class in principles of economics and are familiar with the basics of economic reasoning. This means you should have completed either a one-semester course in Principles of Economics or a two-semester sequence in Principles of Microeconomics and Macroeconomics. Students should NOT take this class if they are currently enrolled in Principles of Microeconomics (ISC 202) or Principles of Macroeconomics (ISC 203). We will study the role of money and financial markets in modern market-oriented economies. We will examine the unique roles played by banks and other financial intermediaries as well as the role of organized markets for financial assets, such as the stock and bond markets. We will examine the role of the central bank or monetary authority both as a regulator and as the ultimate controller of a nation’s money supply. We will consider the potential role that monetary policy plays in economic stability and the interaction it has with exchange rate policy. A familiarity with calculus and basic statistics is an advantage in this class but is not a hard prerequisite. Students should be familiar and comfortable with algebra.

As Marshall McLuhan presciently claimed over half a century ago, media indeed appears to have become “extensions of [hu]man” in the algorithmic age. While electronically networked computational systems have amply demonstrated their centrality to the contemporary lifestyle as social infrastructure in the throes the pandemic, and also amidst the rise of generative AI over the past several years, their woes are also pressing us with ever-growing urgency as we willingly cast ourselves down the rabbit hole of automated cognition. As such, it is high time we recalibrate the reach of McLuhan’s seminal statement in order to capture what, and how, our algorithmic environment is and works. Rather than simply channeling and amplifying our existent capacities or intents, algorithmic media has come to shape and control who we are and what we (can) do, seemingly in correspondence with but in effect engendering the coordinates of our values. Placing weight on the interactively agential dimension of both the human and nonhuman agents involved in light of the growing import of artificially intelligent algorithmic media, this course invites students to creatively respond to key issues of algorithmic (artificial intelligence: AI) ethics, looking at our technological landscape as an ecology not merely of mediation but of multivalent power dynamics across cultures, times, identities, and mechanisms.

This course is designed to provide an introduction to North Korea. More specifically, starting from the analysis of the country’s history, we will look into the political foundations of the regime, its ideological precepts, the problem of economic sustainability and reforms, its foreign policy and relations, and the nuclear issue. We will also try to understand how the regime works, by looking at the organization of its political system and, above all, to the characters who populate it. We will also devote our attention to the North Korean society, analyzing the population’s relationship with the regime and, more in general, how people live in the DPRK.

This course analyzes the daily life, historical, political, social, and cultural changes in North Korea from 1948 to present day. North Korea has often been referred to a country where time stands still by Western media. However, a closer examination of the nation- state will reveal a contradictory and counter-intuitive outlook on the tumultuous evolution of the culture as it affects the experiences of the people living there. This course will provide a deeper insight into the elusive country, and it will provide the students to critically approach and understand the culture and daily life of the DPRK.