The lecture series Globalization and social justice addresses social issues and policy problems of contemporary societies in terms of sustainable development, livelihoods, social identities, and the living environments. The main aim of the course is to help the students achieve a comprehensive understanding of the complexity and social context of major current problems from the North-South perspective.

This course explores interpersonal communication phenomena in culturally diverse workplaces. These will be presented within the context of main research perspectives on cultural workplace diversity and recent empirical studies. We will look at such issues as workplace mistreatment, communication in a multilingual workplace, cultural identity construction, relational development or the creation of a shared working culture.

The focus of the course is on the activation and development of basic academic writing skills. Course content includes, e.g. the ways to improve your writing independently and the online tools available for this, the structure and types of paragraphs (argument, compare-contrast, cause-effect etc.) and academic texts, the features of academic language, the steps of the writing process, and how to cite sources.

The course starts with a historical overview of Finnish media and society (the rise of 19th century nationalism, the rise and decline of the political press system, the emerging and growing role of public service, and eventually also commercial broadcasting), and in the second lecture the focus is on the present turbulent situation both in Finland and internationally. After the lectures the participants are expected to write an essay on media development in their own country. More detailed instructions are given later.