This GE course aims to let all UG students gain a solid knowledge and an in-depth understanding of the historical and contemporary Greater China (mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan). This course examines the Sino-Western interactions and the introduction of Western ideas to China via Macao and missionary activities; traces the development of modern China from the first Opium War to the present; explores the issues and challenges China faced and is continuously facing in its transformation and rise; and help students to understand Macao from historical, political, social and cultural perspective.

This course will introduce students to the development of historical and contemporary world languages. The rise and decline of several historically significant world languages (e.g. Latin, Portuguese, English, etc.) will illustrate the historical forces that shape the forms and function of world languages. The course will consider both standard and non-standard varieties of world languages as well as the socio-cultural factors related to the development of a standard language.

Is there and can there be ‘global justice’? Can someone lie and say the truth, be guilty and innocent, smile and glower, be happy and sad, or happy and poor as well as sad and rich at the same time? What defines and drives the ‘creative economy’? Is it money and profits, work or satisfaction, or physical or mental labour, efficiency or creativity, or competition or cooperation ? And how are global justice and the creative economy intertwined? These are only a few selected questions that point to a deeper problem encountered in the 21st century, which was also referred to as the Age of Paradox (Handy, C., 1995). It is a problem that also connects the two concepts ‘global justice’ and ‘creative economy’ . Already each of the two concepts alone currently poses serious challenges to individuals, municipalities, regions, states as well as the world community as a whole. In combination, the complexity of their meaning rises drastically, often leading to a sentiment of confusion, paralysis, or disorientation. Thus, the challenges they pose are reflected in the many thousand decisions that we take on a daily basis, whether consciously or unconsciously, individually or collectively, as well as wisely or foolishly. The two concepts have in common their nature as, what has been called, ‘essentially oxymoronic concepts’ , which are oxymora, contradictions in terms, or paradoxes. These essentially oxymoronic concepts all share that, by uniting apparently opposite statements or truths, their meaning contains some varying degree of contradictions, which pose a problem to a classical or binary logic of someone being either right or wrong, but not both at the same time.

In the case of ‘global justice’ , the contradiction can be found in the presumption that ‘justice’ is already difficult to establish within a single country or its legal system and even more so at the global level, with its multitude of different legal systems, cultures and languages. Similarly, the term ‘creative economy’ has evolved from the oxymoron ‘culture industry’ , i.e. two terms representing cultural activity on the one hand and economic activity on the other, which in the past were widely regarded as not only separate but also incompatible. Together they give rise to many more such concepts, like ‘glocalisation’, ‘coopetition’ , or the many ‘paradoxes of happiness’ , which, in line with the unique features of a place like the Macao SAR, will be discussed in the course from a both Eastern and Western perspective.

Health is a crucial issue in global history. As nobody escapes disease and death, healing traditions have developed in all parts of the world. This course is a fascinating exercise in which we will explore, on the one hand, the development of medical thought, concepts and ideas as well as shifting patterns of medical practices and therapeutic treatments in world history. On the other hand, we will focus on the transmissions, interactions and exchanges of healing traditions, pharmacopeia and related religious worldviews, and this over a space stretching from Europe across Asia, from China and India to West Asia and the Americas. We will reflect on the close relationships between medical thought and the prevailing political, social, economic and cultural conditions that unavoidably shape man’s living conditions. Moreover, we will uncover that there are all-encompassing and cross-cultural parallelisms showing that civilizations and cultures are not discrete and unalterable units, but have been subjected time and again to external influences and impacts. With a true interdisciplinary and comparative approach and with due attention paid to primary sources this course aims at promoting an awareness of the historical forces that have moulded, and continue to shape, medicine in the world and that help us to reach a deeper understanding of what defines modernity. This general education course is conceived to be an interactive forum in which for some of the individual sessions a selected number of international Eastern and Western specialists in the history of medicine and medical humanities will present their innovative perspectives.

The course will focus on the challenging issue that our human being is facing – The Energy. The course will talk the importance of energy to our future society, energies in old forms (such as oil and coal) and their detrimental effects, and the solutions to the challenge in the future. The contents will cover all of the green energies, including solar energy, wind energy, hydrogen energy, tidal energy, hydroelectricity, Biomass, Geothermal Power, and others (such as ocean, and hot hydrogen fusion), and energy storage. In addition, topics on air pollution and global warming will be investigated.

This course aims to provide the understanding of how nutrition advances are made and a view of the relationship between diet, nutrition and disease in detail. It also introduces the role of nutrition in global health. There is now a large body of evidence demonstrating that the satisfaction of nutritional needs is mandatory to human life. This course includes the dietary causes of chronic diseases related to lifestyle, such as hypertension, coronary heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and cancer. The course covers the methodology used to determine dietary, nutritional and health status and how evidence is gathered to determine the links between diet, nutrition and health.

This course has been designed to promote and encourage the Portuguese-speaking countries’ (PSC’s) scientific study, adopting both perspectives: International Relations and Political Science. The PSC will be organized in three groups (Portuguese-speaking small developing island states, African Portuguese-speaking countries and Ibero-American Portuguese-speaking countries), taking into consideration their intrinsic characteristics and regional location. The study theoretical framework will be grounded in the post-colonial studies, regional development and globalization, and focus on the post-independence political, economic and social developments. Finally, this course also aims to encourage further post-graduate research on PSC in specific or thematic areas.

Greater China includes Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. This course introduces to students the background and features of each region within Greater China. It especially covers the social and economic changes of Mainland China in the pre- and post- reform periods, its economic structure, its 5-year plans, and their implications for Asia and the entire world. The reform & opening-up policy, foreign direct investment, and international trade have transformed Mainland China into a significant global trader. Its social and economic integration with Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan is being deepened through CEPA, ECFA, and other agreements. Renminbi as an emerging reserve currency, the One-Road-One-Belt strategy, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and the new four China Free Trade Zones are the latest events of development important for economies and society in the Asian and European continents. All these topics will be discussed in this course.

Globalization has become a centerpiece in our times when increasing economic, cultural, and educational interconnections propel nations and citizens to think globally and act locally. Drawing on international scholarship, this course aims to help students make sense of this multi-faceted phenomenon of globalization and examine key themes, issues, and trends that affect education around the world. A variety of topics will be discussed and students will be given opportunities to reflect and analyze their own educational system in relation to these themes and issues. No prior course work on related topics is required.

The course aims to provide students with a set of literacies specific to the cultural field of the global mass media. Most of the information and knowledge, and also the ideas, opinions and attitudes, which students have about the world are derived from (increasingly digitally linked) media outlets and sources. However, while students utilize the media intensively, they do so with a relatively undeveloped (often merely tacit) understanding of the field’s logics, values, discourses, genres and forms of address. Consequently students lack the ability to distinguish between different sources and levels of information, and have little idea how to critically evaluate the representations and presentations provided through the media. In this course students will learn about the mass media as a cultural field, and how to approach and utilize it as informed and literate users. This level of literacy will be demonstrated in a project that they will be required to complete at the end of the semester, and also in oral presentations that groups will give on selected case studies. The course will also have a strong visual literacy component, whereby students will learn how audio-visual texts utilize combinations of visual, spoken and written language and signs to produce meanings and narratives for, and to hold the attention and influence the ideas and practices of, media audiences. Part of the feedback from the oral presentations will be directed to the kinds of literacies and techniques that help produce effective audio-visual texts: in this way the course will help students to learn both analytical & practical oral, visual and written communication literacies.

This course provides an introduction to how people communicate across cultures. It will look at examples of, and the reasons for, successful and unsuccessful cases of intercultural communication. This course aims to provide students with the tools they need to become competent and confident communicators across a range of intercultural communication contexts. There will also be a focus on how communication and culture shape each other, and how various socio-cultural factors and issues affect and are affected by communication.

This course area is designed to provide a general understanding of some of the key problems facing the modern world. In an attempt to understand the rise of modern-day ‘superpowers’, this course will focus on the historic role of ‘Empires’ and ‘Overseas Expansion’ in affecting political, economic, social and cultural development throughout the world in the modern period. Through an exploration of this process we will explore how empires (European and Asian) did not simply carry or enable global processes but rather how they gave rise to new hybrid forms of economic activity, political practice and cultural expressions.

The contemporary issue that we will focus upon in this class is globalization. Globalization has long historical roots; some say reaching back 500 years and others even earlier, but no-one can deny that the current globalism is overwhelming in its impact upon the local. From the literature, we can see that globalization has numerous vectors, social, economic, environmental and political. Globalization also has its opponents as well. By taking a long duration approach – and with Macao as a ready example – this course seeks to reveal how many of the problems associated with globalization can only be understood with reference to the global past.

Migration is a fundamental feature of our lives. In Macao, our ancestors and family may have left home, settled and created a migrant society together with other groups. In the era of globalization, technological development facilitates further mobility, but new control mechanisms and borders also increasingly regulate and limit our mobility. This course offers a holistic view of the migration process from multiple perspectives. We will introduce macro factors structuring migration patterns and volume; how problems and crisis such as refugees and human trafficking affect the global politics and international relations. We will discuss migration policies of different countries and how they condition the migrants’ entry, exit, settlement and entitlement to citizenship, as well as societal views toward different migrant groups. Students will also learn to look at migrants’ identities and social networks through their own migration experiences or their family’s migration history.

Businesses, especially multinational corporations, play prominent role in the increasingly globalized world.

This course will therefore analyze how the contemporary global business environment and the free market economy has been evolving since the first publication of Adam Smith’s ‘The Wealth of Nations’ in 1776 and the world’s first stock exchange invented by the Dutch in 1602 (i.e., Amsterdam Stock Exchange). As the contemporary business environment is highly globalized, this course will also adopt a cultural perspective on how to deal with counterparts from different parts of the world. Specifically, how different nations’ cultures and the organizational cultures interact and affect the behaviors of employees will be discussed. The aim is to equip students a thorough understanding of how the contemporary business environment has been evolving and the skills to adapt to the latest development of globalization with cultural sensitivity. In addition to exposing to these historical, cultural and managerial dimensions of global business environment, students will also learn what modern business corporations need to adapt in the global business environment and develop individual sensitivity and competence in the global work context.

The field of world politics presents us with some of humanity’s most difficult problems. Why do wars happen? Why are some countries rich and others poor? Why is it so hard to get countries to cooperate? Is change possible in world politics or is humanity doomed to repeat the same political drama over and over again? This course introduces students to the fundamentals of international relations theory and how to employ theory to analyze important topics in world politics, such as the development of international institutions, the causes of war, transnational norms, and the role of non-state actors.

This course examines the political process of international economy, and the interaction between state and market, and between power and wealth in international relations. The course will present (1) the history of international political economy; (2) basic theories and different schools and approaches; (3) analysis of basic issues on trade, investment, development, globalization and regional integration; and (4) examination of the interactions between the rising China and the global economy.