Overview of the Graduate School of Global Media, Komazawa University

The kind of global media education we are aiming to provide is for people who want to specialize in either social science or engineering disciplines. In line with the basic orientation of the Faculty which was founded in the hope of developing a broad understanding of the true nature of media and content through a multidisciplinary approach and a desire to make a contribution to global society, we wanted to go beyond the “interdisciplinary ability” which the undergraduate program on its own provides to add “specialist knowledge of a particular field within an interdisciplinary area” in the graduate program.

The need to develop specialist knowledge within an interdisciplinary area in a society experiencing technological innovations in state-of-the-art media and an ever more competitive global marketplace lies in its indispensability in making use of new concepts of media which involve combinations of cloud computing services, smart phones and the like and in providing new services. At the same time, if we fail to take sufficient account of its social and cultural impact, the use and application of new media brings with it risks and the potential for quite unexpected global-scale phenomena to emerge. To be able to predict such risks and to be able to take appropriate action should there be unpredictable consequences, flexibility is needed. In order to provide for this, when using and applying media, companies, central and local government and NPOs all need people with both a specific knowledge of media and an ability to approach problems in a general way from a specialist media standpoint. To meet these demands, the Graduate School of Global Media has developed a program with three specific interdisciplinary strands (1. the Industrial Theory of Media Strand with its main emphasis on the business environment; 2. the Cultural Theory of Media Strand with its main focus on social and cultural phenomena; and 3. the IT Theory of Media Strand with its focus on achieving standards in utilizing technology) to strengthen specialization and to deepen students’ ability to think in an interdisciplinary way to assimilate these three areas together.

We believe that through media research based on social science and engineering research, we can contribute to producing students with a global outlook who can operate in a wide range fields. Our aim is educate students who will become high-level specialist professionals who can deepen research into media using an interdisciplinary approach and who can contribute to social and economic globalization.