Kantegger

Re: Master of Cultural Studies

Dear Sir/Madam,   

Smurfs, TinTin and Spirou, my childhood idols were running in the streets of this Comic Kingdom. Chocolate, mussels and beer, these traditional treats spread to China and had won my heart. With countless museums, research institutes, and technology giant companies, as a country truly embrace and represent European art and science, Belgium is a great place for me to start a European journey. Unlike how Prof. Jan Baetens explained TinTin’s American trip in his paper that ‘leaving Belgium is almost an automatism’ as ‘small countries make great globetrotters’, I am looking forward to leaving a big country to acquire different perspectives and shake some old ones if needed. To study Master of Cultural Studies in Leuven, I see it as not only an amazing cultural exploration, but also a precious intellectual journey for my future academic aspirations.    

Despite being a student majoring in English, I am au fait with cultural studies. In addition to learning knowledge of English language in my undergraduate study, my Canadian teacher Lynden Carlson, who taught Western Civilization, enlightened me with the story of the pomp of the Roman empire on three continents and the illustrations of European church buildings, interior murals and sculptures. We discussed how two industrial revolutions had led to profound socioeconomic changes–all the advanced production techniques and production methods had hit the colonial old system and old ideas violently. My readings and thinking spread from the contents of Western Civilization to almost everywhere in western culture and philosophy, and they ultimately, and inevitably, return to the thinking on China and Chinese culture, which distinguish itself distinctively from any country in the world.

Since deregulation in national politics and culture policy, the beginning of Cultural Studies in the Chinese mainland appeared in the 1980s. Academics used cultural criticism of Frankfurt school to criticize the early mass culture. Later, Horkheimer and Adorno’s views were limited in explaining Chinese problems, and Birmingham School’ cultural studies was introduced to scholars to explore a new way to describe and explain Chinese local popular culture in the 1990s. As Raymond Williams said in Culture and Society, the history of the idea of culture is a record of our reactions, in thought and feeling, to the changed conditions of our common life. Owing to the development of education and the media, nowadays, the ideological functions become more and more powerful in ordinary people’s daily life in China, especially for those young people in big cities. Young people feel proud of and would like to contribute to the “China Speed” developments in all aspects–we protect and develop the fine cultural traditions of ethnic minorities; more and more women become independent materially and spiritually to say no to gender discrimination and hidden rules in workplace; the distribution of China’s education resources is unbalanced, yet many graduates of top universities choose to support education in remote areas. All these rapidly changing ideologies and huge developments leave a big room for scholars in Cultural Studies to explain and study to ensure the developments are sustainable. 

Master of Cultural Studies in Leuven integrates cultural theory with practice and pays attention to their translation into a diversity of media formats. It attracts me the most. It’s the era of We-Media. Everyone can post and circulate information online–me included. I wrote for the official WeChat platform of my university in 2014. I interviewed excellent students who performed well in academics or club activities, held celebrity lectures of famous scholars or directors, and shared weather forecast and travel guides before holidays. The followers of our platform increased more than ten thousand over a year, with page views ranking No.1 among the top universities in China. In the next 2 years, there has been a growing number of internet celebrities with millions upon millions of followers online. They share all kinds of things in the form of “quick popularization of Science”, including films and televisions, delicacies, and cosmetics. Big brands also utilize We-Media to interact with their customers–the Fan Economy of Apple is obviously a classic case. Although modern media bring great convenience to our life, they also have made some negative impacts from things like fake news and network violence. These deserve our careful research and continuous efforts to improve.                                                                      

Manuel Castells said in The Power of Identity，the rise of the network society and the growing power of identity are the intertwined social processes that jointly define globalization, geopolitics, and social transformation in the early twenty-first century. In this post-modern society, digital media have blurred the pre-existing borders among different nations, the culture feature of one nation seems fading: The young people’s life around the world is more and more similar– we listen to popular songs of Ed Sheeran or Taylor Swift, stay up late and chat with emoji. Facing it, an increasing emphasis on a sense of national identity is happening in every region in the world. New cultural boundaries are rebuilding. Inspired by this new trend, I hope to study further on how different countries will construct their own cultural identities and how people will re-identify with their own culture. Meantime, the replicability and simulation of digital images can generate an amazing power for the inheritance and development of cultural heritage. These studies will be my life-long career and personal pursue.

Leuven is an open and inclusive place to inspire the outstanding ones. I admire your good inheritance and interpretation of the European culture and your offering of practical courses for students’ future careers. The wealth of the mind is the only wealth, and I am eager to exchange my understandings on culture and ideas of China with my colleagues from many other countries. After graduation, I would like to dig deeper in this area by pursuing a PhD and becoming a writer who truly convey her voice to the world. It is my great happiness to help people understand and love this world where we are living together.

Yours faithfully,

PS: This is an original writing without GPT revision.