These dynamic subjects will allow you to explore shared themes in the humanities and social sciences and introduce you to different ways of understanding complex issues.
The Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Melbourne is designed to provide students with excellent interpersonal and communication skills and to enable students to be active global citizens through academic excellence, interdisciplinary knowledge, community leadership capabilities and cultural awareness. Graduates will be able to apply these qualities and skills in diverse careers and life situations.
The Faculty of Arts has developed six first-year Arts Foundation Subjects, which offer multiple perspectives on a number of historical and contemporary themes. These subjects are designed to:
Through studying Arts Foundation Subjects, students will be part of a common first-year Arts learning community, and will benefit from an interactive online learning environment, forums and discussion groups. Studying one of these subjects forms part of the first-year core program for Bachelor of Arts students.
At first-year level, you will be required to select one Arts Foundation Subject from the list of six. Each subject is worth 12.5 credit points. Students are encouraged to undertake their foundation subject in the first semester of enrolment. The remaining seven first-year subjects will include up to two subjects (breadth) from outside the Faculty of Arts, and up to seven subjects from Arts disciplines, which in later years will inform your choice of major and minor specialisations.
| Subject | Description |
| Aboriginalities | This subject will provide you with an introduction to the complexity, challenges and richness of Australian Indigenous life and cultures. Social and political issues will be considered through engagement with specific issues both local and national. You will have the opportunity to understand Indigenous histories and apply disciplinary perspectives through the experience of Indigenous cultural forms including music, fine arts, museum exhibitions and performances. The focus on Australian Indigenous issues will be complemented by consideration of Indigenous issues around the world. |
| Identity | Who we are and what we do is all tangled up in our identity. This subject considers how identities are constructed and maintained through mediated processes of self and other. The subject investigates the myriad demands and devices that figure in constructing our senses of self and other , including language, leisure, beliefs and embodied practices. By exploring identity in diverse contexts, across time and place, the subject maps varying conceptions of self and other and how these conceptions are constructed and maintained. A key focus is on how these mediated conceptions of self and other are translated into material practices of inclusion, exclusion, discrimination, violence and criminalisation. |
| Language | This subject provides students with a cross-disciplinary introduction to human language which allows for reflection on its nature and myriad aspects from a range of perspectives. It explores a number of paradoxes in language, such as how languages create representations of the world to form new insights (eg in poetry and in scientific hypotheses), but can also be used to prevent understanding (eg in propaganda), and how languages bind social and cultural groups, but also divide them. The subject will allow students to develop insights into these paradoxical features of language, and how they constrain and enable individual consciousness, face-to-face interaction, and social life more broadly. |
| Power | The idea of power is a way to grasp the character of social relations. Investigating power can tell us about who is in control and who may benefit from such arrangements. Power can be a zero-sum game of domination. It can also be about people acting together to enact freedom. This subject examines the diverse and subtle ways power may be exercised. It considers how power operates in different domains such as markets, political systems and other social contexts. It also examines how power may be moderated by such things as regulation and human rights. A key aim is to explore how differing perspectives portray power relations and how issues of power distribution may be characterised and addressed. |
| Reason | Reason is one of the ways that humans attempt to describe, explain, predict and imagine things. How we reason can range from methodical procedures of analytical thinking through to imaginative and intuitive constructions of possibilities. We can also reason alone as we attempt to figure things out by ourselves, and together, in dialogue and in dispute. This subject considers these variations in the human use of reason. It examines the historical origins and philosophical debates over the idea of reason and its relationship to imagination, and the way that different forms and styles of reasoning have arisen to take account of different phenomena, such as the rise of science and its method, debates in ethics and over human identity, and the relationship between reason and the passions. |
| Representation | Humans grapple with representations of themselves and their contexts. They also like to imagine other possible worlds. We use words, language, images, sounds and movement to construct narratives and stories, large and small, about the trivial and the profound, the past and the future. These representations can help us to understand worlds but they can also create worlds for us. This subject explores how different genres such as speech, writing, translation, film, theatre and art generate representations of social life, imagination and the human condition. A key aim of the subject is to develop a critical appreciation of how language, images and embodied gestures are used to construct empowering and disempowering discourses. |