This course is not currently offered, please contact the school or faculty of your program.

Course description

This extensive writing course aims to promote the creative process and develop critical reflection through writing in religion and spirituality. As a process of engaged scholarship, the course focuses on the role and portrayal of religion and spirituality in a host of creative mediums and genres in popular culture. Religious discourses are mediated, marketed and popularised though film, music and television series, argued over in cyberspace and debated through the media; this is the working terrain of the course. Students will be asked to write reviews, design websites, develop blogs, conduct seminar presentations, and produce critical accounts of religiously-based media products as religious, aesthetic, social, entertaining and informative practices. Students will participate in peer review processes using appropriate assessment criteria for courses in Studies in Religion to develop an understanding of approaches to good essay writing. Topics covered in the course will be both local and global, and will be drawn from a range of mediated and popular culture themes including the supernatural, celebrity, online ritual and religion, sport and spirituality, and Indigenous film and music.