Going Places - Travelling Smarter (UNIB20018)

Travel is an ambition for many cosmopolitan-minded students, either as part of a study program/exchange or as an independent project. Aimed to enhance any travel experiences, the Going Places – Travelling Smarter subject provides interdisciplinary methods to observe and interpret new environments, identify positive educational, professional and personal opportunities, and report and record reflections and experiences before, during and after travelling. Lectures from diverse disciplinary areas will present fundamental precepts relating to travel, such as cosmopolitanism, cognitive benefits of travelling, stereotyping, global and developing economies, environmental concerns, identity and alterity. Through regular preparatory research and participation in tutorials, students will develop expertise in a particular region and learn more about the rest of the world from other students in themed modules, covering subjects such as architecture, urban and rural environments, conflict, tourism, language and communication, economics, geography, gastronomy, music and creative arts. This expertise will be demonstrated through oral participation in tutorials and in online blog posts. An emphasis on ethnographic methods for negotiating intercultural encounters and new technologies for disseminating information on travelling will assist students from all faculties and disciplines to improve their ability to engage with their own and others’ mobility and deepen understanding of what it means to be a global citizen. Students will test their ethnographic skills through a collaborative research-mapping project focusing on new ways of engaging with familiar places (ie an environmental analysis of the Docklands, or multiple histories - indigenous, settler, migrant - of Port Phillip Bay). The final individual research/case-study project will draw together the broad disciplinary approaches, including ethnography, geography, communication, mapping, tourism, economics and the arts, in a more distant or unfamiliar place-based case-study (city, region, sacred site, monument, factory, etc) to expose the interconnectedness of nature and culture, business and science, people and politics, in building identity and understanding through travel and technology.