EURO10002: Eurovisions

A 10-minute class presentation (equal to 1000 words) during semester [25%]; 1 in-class test (equal to 1000 words), due in week 8 [25%]; 1 research essay (2000 words), due during the exam period [50%].

Hurdle requirement: Students must attend a minimum of 75% of tutorials in order to pass this subject. All pieces of written work must be submitted to pass this subject.

Note: Assessment submitted late without an approved extension will be penalised at 10% per working day. In-class tasks missed without approval will not be marked.

Boy oh boy, where do I begin. As a massive Eurovision fan, I am so happy I had the opportunity to take this subject, the first of only two universities so far to offer such a course. I had an amazing time - there was so much fun to be had and I made a number of new Eurovision friends. :3 I really wanted to just give this subject a 6/5 overall but there were a couple of problems I cannot reasonably ignore, hence the proper rating of 4/5. However, given it's only the second time the subject has run, I have a feeling it will improve even more next year.

As the name suggests, this subject is all about the Eurovision Song Contest. In particular, we did the following:

• Week 1: Introduction, general history and important rules
• Week 2: Role of politics
• Week 3: Role of language, with a focus on Sweden
• Week 4: Germany's participation in Eurovision as a mirror of Germany in Europe
• Week 5: Yugoslavia's participation in Eurovision as a mirror of Yugoslavia in Europe
• Week 6: Britain's declining interest in and Ireland's dependence on Eurovision and the European Union
• Week 7: Turkey's participation in Eurovision as a mirror of Turkey's contentious position in Europe
• Week 8: Mid-semester test
• Week 9: Gender and sexuality in Eurovision
• Week 10: The participation of Russia (and allies) in Eurovision as a mirror of their relationship with the EU and Europe
• Week 11: Spain's participation in Eurovision as a mirror of Spain in Europe
• Week 12: Fan culture (and a special guest appearance I am forbidden to talk about but will tickle the fancy of any Eurovision fan)

Evidently, there is a lot more than meets the eye in terms of what we explored in this subject. Some people may scoff at how EURO10002 can be a prerequisite for the European Studies major, but in hindsight it makes perfect sense. Eurovision really does encapsulate so many aspects of life in Europe - more than I initially appreciated. I thought that the subject would perhaps explore topics more related to the music and performance aspect of the contest, but really it's about examining how events in Eurovision reflect to a very high extent what is happening in Europe. With this said, this is not a subject to take if you have no idea about Eurovision at all - you need to have a basic idea of what it is (it is not necessary to be an obsessed fanatic like I am) and it's probably best to make sure you watch the most recent contest prior to the subject. We had a couple of people take the subject with no idea what it was all about and I don't think they did very well. Obviously you needn't be an expert - otherwise taking this subject would be pointless - but working knowledge of Eurovision, the European Union and Europe, and associated historical, political and linguistic issues, is recommended.

We had the lovely Forum Theatre in Arts West this year to have our lectures in. It was brilliant: it was round in shape, which was great for a smaller cohort (~80 people) such as ours because it facilitated group discussion. It was also designed with acoustics in mind so playback of footage was very high quality. I thought all of the lecturers did an amazing job at delivering the content this year. Perhaps one point of improvement would be to have a greater focus on the 2016 contest - it felt like 2015 was being discussed a lot more, suggesting the slides hadn't really been updated since last year. My major qualm is that lecture notes were only provided after the lecture. This was apparently done to encourage lecture attendance, but in all honesty I'm not sure if that really achieves anything. My preference is to have the lecture slides before me so that I can annotate them during the lecture.

The tutorials are primarily used for the delivery of the oral presentations. Each week from week 3 onwards (with the exception of the mid-semester test week), one or two students will deliver an oral presentation on a topic related to that week's lecture. These are supposed to go for ten minutes, but they always went over. I signed up for week 3 so that I could talk about Sweden, and despite having rehearsed my speech and it sitting on about 11 minutes, it went for about 45 minutes during class because the tutor and the classmates were so enthusiastic they kept asking me questions! This happened with most of the presentations so I don't think anyone was penalised for it. While a transcript of the speech was not required for submission, we did have to produce a double-sided handout page as supplementary notes for the class and tutor, and it was recommended we have visuals and a couple of clips from Eurovision performances to demonstrate our points (these are not factored into the largely irrelevant ten minute time limit lol). Printing out the lecture slides onto a double-sided page was considered satisfactory, and this was what I and most other students did. Importantly, the presentation must not simply be a summary of the lecture or readings - while you should integrate aspects and refer to covered content as necessary, it is also important you bring in new information to discuss. This might seem daunting, but there is actually a lot more literature related to Eurovision and Europe than you think. I have to say that I really enjoyed learning about what my peers were presenting. For example, we had a student on exchange from Germany who signed up for the oral presentation on Germany in week 4, and provided insights I don't think I ever would have seen had it not been for this subject. In many cases, people signed up to topics they were connected with, and it really came across in their speeches. Feel free to get creative - a couple of people, including myself, dressed up as a particular Eurovision figure. A criticism I have is that because the lecture slides were not provided prior to the lecture, students may have only had a day or two to fix up their oral presentation if it happens to co-incidentally align too closely with the lecture content. Ultimately I think having the lecture slides beforehand is the best solution; otherwise it may be necessary to introduce a week's delay with the tutorials so that this doesn't happen. I was literally editing my own oral presentation during the lecture. I think we were supposed to discuss readings in a round-table sort of fashion once the oral presentations were finished, but we never had time for this. In week 2 we mainly discussed the 2016 contest and also signed up for presentation topics. Again, we were lucky to have the beautiful tutorial rooms on level 1 of the Arts West building.

The other assessment during the semester was the mid-semester test. The consensus from last year was that while this was an Arts subject, we needed to treat this as if it were a Biomedicine mid-semester test. 😂 In the end they were right - you needed to know a lot of specific detail. Thankfully, there were only seven lectures examined on the mid-semester test, with plenty of time to work through each one. However, all the readings are also examinable, as are a set of facts and figures on each of the regularly competing Eurovision countries. These were provided in a sheet uploaded to the LMS in week 1, which contained the following sort of information:

• Whether the country was formerly part of a greater entity (e.g. USSR, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia)
• Capital city
• Population (to the nearest million)
• Main language(s)
• EU status, and joining date (year, if applicable)
• Most recent and first Eurovision performance (year)
• Number of Eurovision victories, and the year of the most recent victory (if applicable)

Evidently, this is a lot of information, and something you need to start working on from the very beginning of the semester. Some may feel this sort of information is irrelevant but it does help you start developing that working knowledge of Europe. Importantly it is not only necessary to learn the facts for each country put also in the perspective of the statistic: for example it would be perfectly reasonable to be asked how many countries have won Eurovision three times. All of this information is in addition to specific dates (generally years were sufficient) of specific historical events, and names and titles of specific performances covered (including songwriters/composers). This seems incredibly daunting but given this was made explicitly clear from week 1 we had plenty of time to get on top of this and most people did really well. Personally, I think I had fun working through all these details. Unfortunately, a handful of students did really poorly. Hence, while this subject is comparatively light compared to other subjects, it mustn't be taken as a joke. To support your learning, weekly practice quizzes were provided on the LMS of a very similar style and difficulty as those on the actual test. The test itself is allocated the whole 90 minutes of the lecture slot, but generally most people finished after about an hour. One quarter of the test is multiple choice, a quarter is true/false and a half is short answer. The short answer questions asked us to provide a certain amount of dot points providing evidence for a particular point of view on a given topic. Understanding the lectures and readings helps, but you can also have your own ideas and this section was marked really leniently (probably because people may not have done as well on the multiple choice or true/false if they couldn't remember a detail).

The great thing is that after the mid-semester test you needn't worry as much about the readings and lecture notes because that's the end of direct assessment. The week after the the mid-semester test the essay topics became available to work on. There were 11 topics to choose from, often in direct relation to a specific question but also a couple of interesting extra ones. You should definitely find a topic that you like and can essentially tailor your study in the final few weeks by only working through the relevant readings and lectures in preparation. The topic I chose allowed me to work on my essay immediately and I had done all my research, planning, and a final draft done by the end of September, despite the submission date not being until early November. This was my first subject with a final essay instead of an exam and I felt like I had no problems with it whatsoever. I guess it helped that I was really passionate about what I was writing, I had a lot of general knowledge but I also knew where I needed to look in terms of finding academic literature to reference. There is a guide outlining special formatting requirements and the marking rubric that students should follow. Despite being told on the sheet that we could use any referencing format we wanted, we were later told to use MLA or Chicago. I got so caught up writing my essay I am partly afraid that I went off-topic, so I hope that doesn't affect my grade. :x

If the lecture notes could be uploaded prior to the lectures, this subject would've been absolute perfection. Otherwise, this is a must-do subject for anyone with an interest in Eurovision. Nonetheless, be aware that this subject is not a bludge and working knowledge of Europe is absolutely essential. This was an amazing way to finish my degree, and given the number of third year Science students taking this subject I think a lot of people had a similar idea. Some of us were joking on the last class that we were so reluctant to leave we wouldn't submit our essays - that way we had the "burden" of having to take the subject again. I really hope a couple of ATARNotes users will take this subject in the coming years so that I can talk about it with them. Enjoy the experience, and good luck!
NB: Since this is a subject unlikely to be reviewed to a large extent, here is another review someone from 2015 wrote on their blog: https://antagonisticasian.wordpress.com/2015/12/28/unimelb-euro10002-eurovisions/. Sometimes it can help having another person's perspective.

Yes, with screen capture.

- Co-ordinators: Prof. John Hajek & Prof. Alison Lewis (John took the majority of the lectures and Alison took the majority of the tutorials).
- Other staff: Dr Heather Benbow (Turkey), Prof. Alfredo Martinez-Exposito (gender and sexuality, Spain), Meribah Rose, Liam Clark.

In a limited number of cases a substitute tutor was required to fill in for a staff member. When this happened they always did their best to find a person with some relation to the week's topic; for example, one class had one of the Russian language staff during the week on Russia.

Note: This subject falls under European Studies and is run by the Department of Languages and Linguistics. It must be taken in order to complete the European Studies major in Arts if a European language is not being studied.

N/A

- Subjectively: 6/5.
- Objectively: 4/5.

Weekly readings are uploaded to the LMS. You need to do these at least until the mid-semester test because their content is examinable. Additionally, you will most likely want them when it comes to the oral presentation and final essay.

- Contact hours: 30 hours - 1 x 1.5 hour lecture and 1 x 1 hour tutorial per week.
- Total time commitment: 170 hours.

Note: there is no tutorial in week 1 or the week of the mid-semester test.

Semester 2, 2016.

H1