1. Exercise sociological and cultural concepts and frameworks to make sense of human experience in ways that go beyond ‘common sense’ accounts of the world.
2. Recognise the role of symbolic creativity in everyday life and its connection to social relations and institutions.
3. Develop an ethnographic understanding of cultural practices, both familiar and distant, in order to make sense of their larger significance to social groups.
4. Research the dimensions of social inequality in Australia and globally
5. Identify both the ways social inequalities are marked in cultural terms, and the wider structures and institutions that serve to reproduce those inequalities.
6. Understand how globalisation and global inequalities shape everyday life in contemporary Australia. 

Module 1: Culture, Society and Everyday Life
Week 1: The Idea of Society
Week 2: Cultural Representation
Week 3: Cultural Practices of Everyday Life

Module 2: Practising Culture: Self, Community and Symbolic Creativity
Week 4: Presentation of Self - Getting Dressed
Week 5: Communal Rituals - Ethnographies of Gift Giving
Week 6: Food Consumption and Everyday Multiculturalism

Module 3: Economic Inequality, Boundary Marking and Social Distinction
Week 7: Dimensions of Inequality in Australia
Week 8: The Geographies of Inequality: Poverty and Prosperity in Sydney
Week 9: Parsing Poverty: From the Undeserving Poor to the Bogans

Module 4: The ‘Australian Way of Life’ and its Contradictions
Week 10: Divisions of Labour: Housework, Care Work, Gender and Race.
Week 11: The Backyard & the Bush: Culture & Nature in the Age of Climate Change
Week 12: Conclusion