Visual Culture - Introduction

Today was our first lecture (in Hartlepool College, temporarily) with our other visual culture lecturer. He introduced us to the module and what was in the handbook and to some key terms;

• cultural appropriation - usage of one culture by another
• acculturation - reinforcing culture
• transculturation - cultural exchange
• agent - capacity for effective action
• hetergenous - different
• homogenous - same

Weeks 2-4 will focus on "Visual Culture as Rhetoric" which the lecturer pronounced as "retric" which really confused me. I've always thought it was "retoric". The slides were full of confusing words which weren't fully defined, but did have examples (I had to figure out the above definitions). I also find they read directly off the PowerPoints (which have many typos). I really struggled with this seminar and zoned out and panicked because of it. It might be a good idea to regroup as a class after the seminar to make sense of it and put it in our own words.

The deadline for this module is Friday 20th January, 12pm. We are allowed 10% internet sources like last year. He also introduced us to this website called "worldcat" which searches for key words in books which might be useful. Also, figure out the worth of the essay in evaluations!

I have one key question I will have to find out, is whether the journal has a word count, and how much we need to write. And how many topics from each seminar we need to research (two?).