The purpose of this project is to develop computer-assisted language learning (CALL) lesson plans using the Internet and to offer an example for academic senior high school teachers in South Korea of exemplary treatment of cultural topics that promote critical thinking and incorporate crosscultural understanding based on cooperative learning.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Seoul from July 2012 until July 2013, this dissertation offers a novel perspective on human-animal interactions and public discourses regarding livestock versus pet moral boundaries in contemporary Korea. I aim to explore how Koreans struggle to make sense of the tension between the emergence of animal welfare and the perpetuation of traditional health behaviours that involve animal processing. The focus will be on why participants in my study, whether activists or not, defended both animal ethics and cat and dog meat consumption, while including Korean animals in fluid and instrumental conceptions of Koreanness. I have analysed a variety of discourses produced by both Korean and non-Korean, academic and non-academic stakeholders, in order to reveal the on-going tension between these powerful ubiquitous ideas and the lived experience of Koreans today. Moreover, I examine how the aesthetics of cruelty and empathy is employed in order to singularize livestock into companion animals thereby transgressing cultural taboos regarding Western ethics of species separation. I also demonstrate that converging and conflicting economic, political, social and cultural agendas are responsible for making Korea’s public discourses about animal welfare very unsettled. My research thus contributes to key anthropological debates about the cross-cultural circulation and cross-fertilisation of moral values that impact the ethics of post-industrial human-animal interactions; and about the influence of policy dialogue, at both national and international levels, on applied animal ethics, cultural stigmatization and the reinforcement of national sentiment.

The family has always been a central narrative theme in cinema. Korean cinema has been no exception, where the family has proved to be a popular subject since its earliest days. Yet Western scholarship on Korean cinema has given little attention to this dominant theme, preferring to concentrate on the film industry's recent revival and its blockbusters. Scholarship in Korea and in the Korean language, on the hand, has continuously discussed some of the major cinematic works on the family. However, such literature has tended to be in the form of articles discussing one or two particular works. A comprehensive study of the family in contemporary Korean cinema therefore remains absent both in Korean and in English. This thesis is an attempt to provide such a work, bringing together films on the family and writings on them in both Western and Korean scholarships, as well as filling the gaps where certain trends and patterns have gone undetected. How are the changes in the understanding of the family or in the roles of individual family members reworked, imagined, or desired in films? Taking this question as the starting point of the research, each chapter explores a separate theme: transformations in the structure of the family; faltering patriarchy and fatherhood; motherhood and the extremity of maternal love; and certain children's experiences of the family. The first chapter detects a general move away from the traditional patriarchal nuclear family and an interest in depicting alternative families, exploring shifting family forms in contemporary society and the public discourses surrounding them. The second chapter highlights the contradictory ways that the father has been illustrated in films during and after the IMF crisis. The third chapter explores a branch of recent thrillers that depicts mothers as dark and dangerous characters, offering an interesting cultural framing to the multiple perceptions of the mother figure in contemporary society. Finally, the last chapter aims to extend representations of the 'Korean family' to include films by/about those currently living outside of Korea, namely Korean emigrants and adoptees.