How do we best make sense of contemporary Japanese society, a non-Western, highly technological, post-modern democracy, recently dubbed "Cool Japan"? 

Japan simultaneously exports to the world hi-tech hardware (e.g., cars, computers, Nintendo DS and Wii) and soft popular culture (e.g., games, anime, manga, fashion, and J-pop). 

Yoshio Sugimoto is La Trobe's Emeritus Professor of Sociology, globally regarded as one of the most prominent sociologists of contemporary Japanese society, with a long list of publications. Drawing on his most recent edited volume, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Japanese Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2009), and in reference to La Trobe undergraduates' reviews of this book, he will talk on how the world can better understand contemporary Japan.

Copyright 2009 La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.

Pursuing Invisible Japan

Podcasts concerned with the study of social life and human behaviour - the structural arrangements and cultural patterns which shape behaviour at every level of social action, whether personal, local, national or global. It examines how we are shaped by the world around us but also how we also shape and construct the social and cultural world within which we live.

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What are the issues of safety and social inclusion experienced by migrants? This lecture discusses how migrants access housing, work and study, and how they use public urban spaces, locating these everyday practices within the context of local planning and social policy. 

Featuring Dr Julie Rudner (Planning, La Trobe University) and Noemi Cummings (Executive Officer, Loddon Campaspe Multicultural Services)

Copyright 2014 La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.

Migrants' Sense of Safety in Bendigo

Professor Peter Murphy (School of Creative Arts, James Cook University) argues that technology and medicine produce research that makes exciting promises but delivers fewer real results. This lecture will discuss the cultural and social forces driving this desertification of the imagination.

Copyright 2013 La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.

The Collapse of Creativity

Dr Ian Coller (European History, La Trobe University) talks about the 'disease of the soul' and how different researchers - historians, social scientists, anthropologists, neurologists, and scientists of different backgrounds might be able to come together to start to bring insights into this question that we've never had before.

Copyright 2013 La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.

Why do we Hate?

Bernie Geary OAM (Principal Commissioner for the Commission for Children and Young People) on how  young people make a life after school and their need to make meaningful connections in their community.

The 2013 Kerferd Oration, delivered on 28th July in Beechworth.

Copyright 2013 La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.

Pursuing Invisible Japan

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