Pitt in Sydney - Semester

This is a part-time internship (20 hours per week). In addition, you will attend weekly discussion-led sessions that include educational support and mentoring in a classroom environment, develop personal and professional skills, and learn to contextualize your internship experience socially and culturally. You will receive 3 credits for this course.

This course will increase the understanding of basic concepts and principles regarding communication between people from different racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds within Australia, including Aboriginal, and immigrant populations. The course will use theory and research in the area of intercultural communication, and will help you develop this knowledge in understanding and improving human interaction in both the study abroad environment and international contexts. It will develop effective intercultural communication skills for learning abroad in Australia, and focus on a study of the social, structural and historical dimensions of relations between and among racial, ethnic and gender groups in contemporary Australian society. This course is designed to increase student’s awareness and appreciation for the complexity of intercultural communication skills in everyday situations. It offers a critical perspective on current theory and research in intercultural communication. The primary objective of the course is to develop cultural relativist attitude.

This course examines contemporary Australian cinema and its attempt to describe a uniquely Australian identity. The course thus has two interrelated points of inquiry. First, we will attempt to appreciate the context of Australian cinema – from modes of production to distribution. Second, the course will investigate the notion of an Australian identity as it is expressed in some of the most significant films in the Australian tradition. We will look at Australian genre cinema, the 70s Renaissance and recent transformations in the Australian film industry. The course will focus specifically on the theme of national identity and the growing debates around what constitutes a national cinema. Indeed, a question to be explored is the extent to which Australian films have reflected or determined Australian values. Comparisons with appropriate U.S. values and films are encouraged. 

This course covers a wealth of literature from the Australian, Asian and South Pacific region, from Australia’s earliest colonial outback and horsemen stories to the city-focused cosmopolitanism of the 1980s, to the aboriginal literature of the 1990s, and in the 2000s, the contemporary Torres Strait and Polynesian literatures’ reformulations of place that respond to both contemporary and traditional understandings of islands, archipelagoes, and identity. 

This course is a creative writing workshop keyed to exploring the experience of travelling and living abroad in Sydney in either verse or prose texts. Along with the writing workshops, we will also read and discuss texts that focus on Australia in general and Sydney specifically from both native and foreign perspectives, noting particularly the literary techniques and strategies that various writers have used to express their experiences and observations. The class sessions will be divided almost equally between the reading and critical evaluation of selected texts and a written response to the stimuli. Half of our weekly time will be devoted to the examination of a text dealing with various authors’ experiences of Australia. These texts will provide us with a forum for discussing each author’s relationship to and the literary expression of place. The other half of our class time will function as a writer’s workshop in response to the set texts: each student will present his/her own work orally (accompanied by photocopies) to the group for reactions, critique, and suggestions for revision. 

This course is offered only during the spring and summer terms.

This course explores the multi-faceted dimensions of human interaction with diverse environments in Australia , New Zealand and the Pacific to illuminate the origins of environmental concerns and current debates in these regions from pre-European contact to now. From the peopling of the Pacific to the challenge of climate change, this course is broad in its scope while concentrating selected issues such as the impact of mining, clean energy futures, our vulnerability to natural disasters and increasing urbanization. In so doing, the intersection of culture and nature is explored. The course is embedded in the environmental humanities , but uses the approaches of environmental history, as well as insights from the disciplines of science, politics, sociology and cultural studies.

Using contemporary issues in Australia - race, immigration, culture, environment, politics and foreign policy - the course explains the historical origins of issues & provides critical analysis. This course begins in 2010 and looks back into Australia’s past, asking and answering a series of questions to explain contemporary attitudes and events, as part of an ongoing dialogue between the present and the past. What aspects of our colonial history help explain Australia early in the twenty-first century? What aspects of twentieth-century history will guide Australia in the twenty-first century? What is black armband history? Why do Indigenous Australians remain a disadvantaged group in society? What is the history of class, race and ethnicity in Australian society? What type of immigrants should we encourage? Why have refugees become such an important issue? Why is gender parity and sexual liberation important? What is popular culture and how does it change? How do governments decide on foreign policy, overseas trade policy and foreign aid? What are our obligations and expectations in time of war? What is the place of nationalism in Australia? We ask these and other contemporary questions, and provide historical answers based on an Aboriginal history that dates back 60,000 years and a recent history beginning in 1788. 

This course examines the government and politics of Australia and Australian engagement in Asia. It will do so by surveying similarities with and differences from the North American democratic model and by examining Australia’s substantial and abiding interests in the Asian region. By the end of the course, students will be aware of the magnitude of the influence that the Asia Pacific region has had on Australian foreign policy. Comparisons with the United States of America will be encouraged.

This course is designed to encourage students to engage in a critical analysis of the development of modern cities, in particular Sydney. It will trace Sydney's development from a "colonial outpost" into the "thriving metropolis" it is today. The course will examine how the forces of colonization, migration, modernization and globalization have affected the city and its inhabitants. Students will gain insights into the changing dynamics and identities of its inhabitants, and will also look at the forces which have shaped Sydney's relationship with the rest of the world. The course is organized thematically, with each theme examining different aspects of the city. It begins with an introduction to the city, then a discussion of Sydney as a colonial city, moving into an analysis of its identities, impact of migration and finally its commerce, cityscape and urban future. The course ultimately intends to help students contextualize their travels and encounters in the city, and will help them develop informed interpretations of Sydney while they are here.