WELCOME

Welcome to the University of Idaho’s Journal of Popular Culture, POP—an online, student-run arena for critical analysis and intellectual curiosity.  Here you’ll find essays on everything from Gramsci to Northern Exposure, the Sex Pistols to An Andy Williams Christmas.  You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll wonder who’s running this crazy world, anyway?

OUR MISSION (should you choose to accept it)

We are all living in the world of popular culture, a world of cultural texts and practices: the toys we buy, the styles we wear, the activities we engage in.  When we wake up to the sounds of our Hello Kitty™ alarm clocks, dress for school in “Image Is Nothing” t-shirts, sit down for lunch outside the campus booths hocking credit cards (and credit debt)—when we are conscious and alive in the world we can be conscious of and alive to popular culture.  Because we consume and participate in PC in our everyday lives (whether consciously or not), we are all in some sense well rehearsed in the roles of pop culture pundits, PC gurus, pop aficionados.  We all have something to contribute to its study.

With this journal, we hope to foster an atmosphere of critical inquiry into the field of cultural studies.  We hope to encourage and engender heightened media literacy, as well as heightened engagement with various levels of analysis, from personal response to theoretical research.  As an academic journal written and edited “by students for students,” we hope to represent a variety of perspectives, approaches, and ideas.

ORIGIN STORY

This project grew out of the interest generated by a course on Society and Popular Culture offered in the Spring of 2002 by professor John Mihelich.  In that course, we as students found ourselves engaged in developing a foundation in ever more informed and critical analysis of the significance of popular culture in all of our lives.

POP continues this pursuit, offering a forum for students to showcase their critical analyses of American society, to invite interest and examination—to see what happens when intellectual curiosity stops being polite, and starts getting real.  We hope the forum can serve as a resource for current and future students of popular culture, promoting media literacy and critical consumption.

Within the articles, essays, and editorials found in each issue, the reader will encounter discussions of popular texts (television, film, advertising), cultural practices (sports, youth culture, shopping), and theoretical approaches (feminisms, Marxisms, structuralisms).

Our inaugural issue of POP! includes...

Questioning the Status Quo in Popular Music: Tori Amos's Strange Little Girls as Feminist Revision
          Jessamyn Birrer/Schnackenberg.

Northern Exposure: A Site for Hegemonic Struggle?
          Jennifer Gatzke

Batman and Robin: "Crime Fighting Duo" or "Ambiguously Gay Duo?"
          Marti Jo Morris

Rewriting History: A Marxist Feminist Look at Disney's Ducks
          Alisha Schnieder

So, tear that stinking Sprite™ shirt off your back (they should be paying you for that billboard space!).  Set up your own booths around campus.  Slap that Hello Kitty™ alarm clock into next Tuesday and raise your own alarm.  The future of POP depends on you!

POP OBJECTIVES:

To Embody Accessibility.  Because we represent students at a variety of levels, we wanted to create a forum perhaps less intimidating than many academic journals out there.  Though some of the essays do incorporate critical research and analysis, many are critical, “entry-level” explorations of popular culture by students just being introduced to conscious roles as “critical consumers.”  Regardless of whether or not you’re studying popular culture in the academy, or even the University of Idaho, you should be able to find something that speaks to you.

To Engage Context.  Currently, all the work submitted to POP! is written and edited by students here at the University of Idaho.  As such it should not only represent a uniquely located conversation, but a diversity of perspectives and levels of study—from the general freshman population to the upper-division student of sociology, from the generally curious to the graduate researcher. As a resource for the associated course on popular culture, POP! encourages and publishes not only personal responses to popular culture but researched analysis as well, analysis which employs any number of critical approaches as detailed in the course.

To Strengthen Pedagogy.  A key goal for POP! is to engage students in the process of learning through discovery and teaching.  Language and writing are epistemological practices—practices that help us “come to know” a thing better.  We write to understand.  We speak to share, to communicate.  What better place to bring our discovery and writing out into the public conversation than an online journal?

To Stimulate.  Ultimately, we hope POP! encourages students to become ever more critical consumers of and participators in popular culture.  What can we learn from popular culture?  What might these texts and practices say about our society?  About us?  Whenever we ask these questions (or try to answer them), we actively engage the world that is every day telling us stories, offering us mirrors, and selling us to ourselves.

To Provide a Community Hub.  We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again.  This is your journal, your resource, your online playground.  We hope you turn to us not just for homework or out of boredom, but to raise your own voice in these pages.  Send us your writing.  Join an online discussion.  Help us make POP a journal for us all.

STUDENT EDITOR BIOS:

Jessamyn Birrer/Schnackenberg (pick-your-patriarchy) is currently completing her Master of Fine Arts in Poetry while teaching college writing and rhetoric here at the University of Idaho.  She is an avid follower of Xena: Warrior Princess and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and not only looks but runs, sounds, throws and screams like a girl.

Jennifer Gatzke is a Marine Biologist turned MA Anthropology Graduate Student with research interests in contemporary American culture……..and if there is any way that she can integrate her frighteningly proficient knowledge of Northern Exposure into everyday life she will. Her first winter snowed into the mountains of Idaho she had no job, no friends, no cable…..and 20 videotapes of “NX” reruns. It wasn’t her fault.

Graphics Design:

Will Wise