In the spring semester, I taught a new course I had proposed for the College of Arts and Sciences, entitled "Cultural Studies". I designed this new course, taught in Japanese but with a bilingual (English) component, to function as an introduction to the academic field of Cultural Studies, aimed to the second-year students of our College. As a faculty member of the "Culture" field in the new curriculum, I created this course to introduce our students to certain seminal issues in Cultural Studies, especially semiology/semiotics, Marxism, the relationships between power and society, and various ideas on "the other". I introduced some of the thinkers most often employed in Cultural Studies analyses, including Marx, Gramsci, Althusser, Baudrillard, Bourdieu, and Foucault.
