The ability to look critically at popular culture is an important resource for individuals and citizens in learning how to cope with the cultural environment, in empowering oneself in relation to dominant forms of media and culture, and in struggling for a better society and a better life (adapted from Douglas Kellner, http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/papers/SAGEcs.htm).

This interdisciplinary course serves as an introduction to the academic study and critical analysis of popular culture.  The course requires students to develop an informed critical analysis of popular culture and understanding of the significance of popular culture in society—how it shapes Cultural and implications for meanings, ideas, practices, ideologies, groups, politics, economy, family, gender, race, class, etc., and how it shapes students’ everyday lives.  As such, the course also requires students to seriously reflect on how they engage with popular culture and how it engages them.  Overall, the premise driving this course is that we can learn much about ourselves and our society through the sustained and critical study of popular culture.

Since we consume and participate in popular culture every day of our lives, we all have developed a particular level of competency in the realm of popular culture and have something to contribute to its study.  However, we can continually develop the foundation upon which we make responsible, reasonable, and sustained analysis and critique of cultural forms.  The analyses generated in this course are expected to be founded on a thorough engagement with established methodologies and theoretical approaches.  The course will integrate your prior and continued experience and interpretations of popular culture with these theoretical perspectives producing an expanded understanding of the role popular culture has played, does play, and could play in your society and in your biography.  Because it is impossible to survey the entire range of the academic study of popular culture or review the entire realm of popular culture itself in a course of this length, we will selectively survey the contemporary study of popular culture and its forms.  We will explore contemporary theoretical approaches to studying popular culture, focusing on exemplary studies, and then review limited representative examples of critical issues (e.g. race, class, gender) and various forms of popular culture including “texts” (T.V., film, news, advertising, magazines, etc.) and cultural practices (e.g. sport, holidays, youth culture, shopping, fashion, etc.) and material forms.  Students will demonstrate their understanding of issues and theoretical approaches to the study of popular culture and their ability to comprehend, evaluate, integrate and synthesize approaches from various disciplines into their own informed perspective and analysis.

With the theoretical and empirical background, students will explore and analyze an example of their choice from the realm of popular culture as one end product of this course.  In this project, students will demonstrate their understanding of issues and theoretical approaches to the study of popular culture and their ability to comprehend, evaluate, integrate and synthesize approaches from various disciplines into their own informed perspective and analysis.  Through this course, students will participate in the process of generating and disseminating new knowledge about something they actively consume.

While the course is an introduction to the study of popular culture, it is an upper-division course.  As such, it will be require rigorous engagement with theory, intensive reading, constructive participation and presentation, professionalism in conduct and study, self reflection, and the appropriate levels of writing competency.  Please seriously consider whether this meets your expectations for the course and whether you are willing to engage in this level of study of popular culture.  If not, please select a different course and open the opportunity for others to engage in the critical study of popular culture.

OBJECTIVES:

Develop the capacity and knowledge base to become critical consumers of popular culture including the media and popular cultural practices.

Develop an ability to analyze various forms of popular culture and their significance according to theoretical perspectives and concerning selected issues.

Develop knowledge about the field of popular culture studies and an ability to demonstrate that knowledge in written and oral presentational forms.

Understand the integration of many disciplines in the study of social phenomena.

Develop an enhanced understanding of students’ own consumption of popular culture toward the ends of entertainment, identity, and politics.

Generate an understanding of the impact of history and social structure/culture on individual lives/biographies.

Develop the capacity to create an academic critical analysis of a specific form of popular culture

            -Application of perspectives to real life

            -Learning as discovery and teaching