Callie Truong and Helena Lu

Greetings everyone and welcome to the 2020 Global East Asia China blog! Today marked the beginning of the first-ever GEA China online non-travel version. Although we could not meet in SOS 250 and travel together to China this summer, we are still excited to dive into our research projects and work with our classmates and Professor Sheehan.

Each day, the professor begins the class by playing a Chinese music video from YouTube. Today he played “漂向北方 Stranger in the North” by Namewee and Wang Leehom. Then he described how the class will run for the next two weeks. We will primarily focus on building our analytical toolkit, which we will utilize when researching Chinese global brands and their international marketing campaigns. We began constructing this toolkit with a class activity on analyzing images. Students volunteered and shared an advertising image that they analyzed. This was a fun and interesting part of the class because not only did we get to practice the tools, but we also got to learn a little about our classmates’ interests.

GEA China Students’ Selection of Advertisements for the Analyzing Images Activity

After the activity, Professor Sheehan gave us his “Quick and Dirty Guide to Globalization” and emphasized how globalization is multi-faceted and can be characterized in several different ways. We also will be using primary and secondary resources in our research, so the professor provided us with a worksheet on how to read secondary resources in a non-linear fashion because it will be easier to understand the content and save time. We divided into breakout rooms to apply the worksheet to our day one readings that focused on globalization key concepts and the idea of invented traditions. Overall, day one was full of great conversations and I am excited for the next few days as we begin to navigate our toolkits and potential research topics!