The University of Melbourne is offering a degree course on the Eurovision Song Contest.
Despite being more than 8,000 miles away from Europe, Australia competed in the Eurovision Song Contest for the first time ever this year – and now, the University of Melbourne is offering a degree course based on the music contest.
Students can opt to study a faculty of arts programme on “Eurovisions”, which appears to be using the Eurovision Contest to look at European social issues in a broader sense. The course’s subject overview describes the contest as offering “a rich site for exploring many issues at the core of Europe today: the expansion of the European Union, the integration of Europe as well as the ‘nation branding’ of new participating states”.
“This subject introduces students to Europe through the prism of its biggest annual media extravaganza,” says the university’s handbook. The course will examine a range of dimensions of Europe, including language, culture, diversity, the national and the transnational, as well as issues of gender and sexuality.
Students must commit to two and a half contact hours with a tutor a week, a total of 170 hours, and must submit two research essays to complete the course, which runs for three months.