This course aims at creatively exploring, researching, or intervening cultural industries, with special emphasis on rural cultural industries. The culture industry primarily referred to the industrialization and commodification of the process of symbolic production and circulation in toto. Against the backdrop of a flourishing cultural economy, this course is designed to understand culture industries, not just in terms of manipulation and domination through the industrialized commodity, but as far more complex fields in which a subtle configuration of communication, innovation, creativity, and restructured power relationships are emerging. This course traces the key theorisations of the culture industries and then introduces students to contemporary debates in major areas of rural cultural industries, including food, festivals and tourism. In this way, the course will map out the vital two-ways transitions between theory and practice and address the complex dialectic of the ‘culturalization’ of economy and the ‘economization’ of culture.