Going Places - Travelling Smarter (ARTS20002)

Aiming to enhance travel and/or transcultural experiences, Going Places – Travelling Smarter 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 unpack fundamental precepts and explore key concepts 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 peer review 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 collaborative participation in tutorials and in online blog posts.

An emphasis on ethnographic methods for negotiating transcultural encounters and new technologies for sharing information will assist students from all faculties and disciplines to improve their ability to engage with their own and others’ mobility. Students will test their ethnographic skills through a research-mapping project focusing on new ways of engaging with familiar places. The final research project will draw together the broad disciplinary approaches, including ethnography, geography, communication, mapping, tourism, economics and the arts, in a 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. These collaborative experiences and individual assessments encourage students to re-examine identities, develop transcultural competence and deepen understanding of what it means to be a global citizen.