Adjunct Lecturer
Media Effects Theory: Beyond the West
Hokusei Gakuen University, Sapporo, Japan
This course consists of two 90-minute sessions per week. The first session is a lecture based on Glenn Sparks’ Media Effects Research: A Basic Overview (2013). This sets the stage for comparing and contrasting Japanese scholars’ research on similar topics covered in Sparks’ textbook. Students read one Japan-related paper per week, covering issues such as uses and gratifications of media, news and politics, persuasion, media violence, sexual content in the media, Internet psychology etc. Assessment is in the form of an original research project, based on original data collected by the students. A full syllabus which I developed, including references, can be found on the class website: http://hgu-media-2014.tumblr.com/.