IB Geography • HL5.2
Changing Identities & Cultures
How global flows spread cultural traits, transform landscapes and create new, hybrid and contested identities.
The global diffusion of cultural traits and changing cultural identities
Diffusion, imperialism and hybridity
Culture moves through migration, trade, media, tourism and digital networks—but never enters an empty or powerless landscape.
Cultural diffusion describes the spread of ideas and practices. Cultural imperialism highlights unequal power in that process. Homogenisation suggests increasing similarity, while glocalisation and hybridity show global forms being reworked locally.
Adopt
A global product, language or practice is accepted with limited change.
Adapt
Local actors reinterpret it, producing a hybrid cultural form.
Resist
Communities or states defend language, identity, values or creative industries.
Enquiry 1 — Trace one cultural trait
Choose music, food, fashion, language or media. Map its origin, diffusion channels, gatekeepers and local adaptations. Decide whether its spread is best understood as exchange, imperialism, glocalisation—or a combination.
Global platforms, local cultures
Netflix, global food brands and social media widen cultural access while concentrating control over visibility, data and revenue.
Streaming and cultural reach
Compare the platform’s global distribution power with investment in local-language production. Who decides what travels?
Menus made local
India’s vegetarian and religiously adapted menus show that a global brand may standardise systems while adapting products.
Designed for transnational circulation
Korean music blends local industry strategy with global genres, platforms and fan networks, complicating a simple West-to-rest model.
Enquiry 2 — Platform power audit
For one example, identify creators, platform, audience, state and advertisers. Trace content, money and data, then judge whether the outcome increases diversity or concentrates cultural power.
Culture becomes visible in place
Architecture, retail, music, language, festivals and public space reveal who belongs, who holds power and how identity changes.
From the Bronx to local protest
Follow the diffusion of a musical form and compare how artists adapt language, politics and place—including Thailand’s Rap Against Dictatorship.
Homogenisation or layered identity?
Compare chain retail, rising land values and standardised design with locally rooted businesses and cultural markers in San Francisco or Bangkok’s Ari district.
Japanese cultural influence
Explore how a nationally rooted creative industry builds global networks while remaining adaptable to transnational audiences.
Fieldwork lens — Read a cultural landscape
Photograph or map a local street. Classify evidence as local, global or hybrid; record who produces and consumes each space; then explain whether change represents diversity, displacement or both.
Diaspora: belonging across borders
Diaspora communities maintain links with a shared place of origin while adapting to host societies and influencing both.
The Chinese diaspora offers a detailed case study of dispersed communities connected through family, commerce, language, media, festivals and remittances. Identity is neither simply preserved nor lost: it is negotiated across generations and places.
Enquiry 4 — Two-way influence
- Map the diaspora’s main origins, destinations and connecting flows.
- Identify mechanisms that preserve cultural traits across generations.
- Show how the host place changes diaspora identity—and how the diaspora changes the host place.
- Evaluate whether “hybrid identity” is a more useful concept than assimilation.
Culture is chosen—and governed
States and institutions promote some identities, regulate others and shape access to transnational cultural flows.
Film quotas and cultural policy
Screen quotas protect national production within a highly globalised cultural economy.
Digital borders
Global connectivity coexists with platform restrictions, surveillance and state direction of cultural exchange.
Māori language and identity
Revitalisation shows cultural survival as an active political and educational project, not a passive relic.
Paper 3 synthesis
“Globalisation produces cultural hybridity rather than cultural homogenisation.” Discuss using media, a cultural landscape and a diaspora example.