Historically, American political science has rarely engaged popular culture as a central topic of study, despite the domain’s outsized influence in American community life. This article argues that this marginalization is, in part, the by-product of long-standing disciplinary debates over the inadequate political development of the American public. To develop this argument, the article first surveys the work of early political scientists, such as John Burgess and Woodrow Wilson, to show that their reformist ambitions largely precluded discussion of (...) mundane activities of social life such as popular culture. It then turns to Harold Lasswell, who produced some of the first investigations of popular culture in American political science. Ironically, however, his work – and the work of those who adapted similar ways of speaking about popular culture after him – only reinforced skepticisms concerning the American public. It has thus helped keep the topic on the margins of disciplinary discourse. (shrink)

J. Gingell, E. P. Brandon; Popular Culture, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 34, Issue 3, 7 March 2003, Pages 461–485, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-97.

This paper questions the meaning of popular culture under the auspices of modernity. The late transition and extension of modernity is technology. This eventual process is characterized by material culture. However, it is difficult to ignore the moment of postmodernity when the effects of the transition and the products themselves have given impetus to new constellations of discursive formation. The visual culture tends to dominate the scheme of things in popular culture. It is argued (...) in this paper that popular culture operates through four rationalities; namely, dispersion, segmentation, integration, and extension. The first three are called the intention/logic of mass culture. The last element, however, speaks of the transition from modern to postmodern. From location to bilocation and virtual location—the entire route of cultural turns has made the possibility of postmodern regimented bodies through the television. (shrink)

Digital data inundation has far-reaching implications for: disciplinary jurisdiction; the relationship between the academy, commerce and the state; and the very nature of the sociological imagination. Hitherto much of the discussion about these matters has tended to focus on ‘transactional’ data held within large and complex commercial and government databases. This emphasis has been quite understandable – such transactional data does indeed form a crucial part of the informational infrastructures that are now emerging. However, in recent years new sources of (...) data have become available that possess a rather different character. This is data generated in the cultural sphere, not only as a result of routine transactions with various digital media but also as a result of what some would want to view as a shift towards popular cultural forms dominated by processes of what has been termed prosumption. Our analytic focus here is on contemporary prosumption practices, digital technologies, the public life of data and the playful vitality of many of the ‘glossy topics’ that constitute contemporary popular culture. (shrink)

The popular culture and philosophy (PCP) book publishing movement has always been about serving the public. The idea for Seinfeld and Philosophy was to explain a broad range of philosophy and philosophers in a way that anyone could understand because the examples came from a popular television show. Plenty of professors were referencing Seinfeld in the classroom to help students connect with big ideas. Seinfeld and Philosophy would spur some readers to pick up Plato or enroll in (...) a philosophy course. By applying philosophy to pop culture, authors deliver a truly novel philosophical insight into the artwork. There has never been complete uniformity in the genre of PCP, but for the most part motivations have been pedagogical. The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series have a website with a blog that is open to submissions. The value of public philosophy in general, and PCP in particular, remains an open question at many institutions. (shrink)

Media in Question sets the agenda for a revitalized debate on the hybrid communicative practices that constitute the postmodern media landscape: practices that cross the boundaries between fact and fiction, information and entertainment, public knowledge, and popular culture. In this challenging and provocative collection, the individual contributors rethink key issuesùthe meaning of the public interest, the quality of media performance, and deregulation. In the process they raise questions rarely addressed in normative media theories, for example, the ethics of (...) sports reporting, the moral reasoning in popular culture, and the required professional standards for infotainment genres such as reality television and gossip journalism. Accessible and wide-ranging, The Media in Question will be essential reading for students in mass communication and political communication studies. (shrink)

This paper examines the nexus between popular culture and the problem of corruption in Nigeria within the theoretical framework of the Socratic dictum that “the unexamined life is not worth living”. The paper argues that corruption is a social behavior that is propelled by popular culture and sustained by skewed application of logical thinking in critical decision making. Hence, the paper posits that formal education remains the bedrock upon which corruption can be curtailed and also equips (...) people with logical tools to examine their actions as individuals and its consequences on the larger society. (shrink)

Utilizing an evolutionary perspective has proven fruitful in a number of areas of interest outside of the standard psychological or anthropological topics. This includes a wide range of fields from applied disciplines such as law, criminology, medicine, and marketing, to the study of the imagined worlds found in art and literature, the domains of the humanities. A number of excellent books, as well as numerous articles, detail the impressive work done in applying evolutionary insights to the study of art and (...) literature. This article focuses on evolutionarily informed explorations of popular culture, an area that, only relatively recently, has benefited from research taking this approach. The existing scholarship in this area will be reviewed, and future directions and challenges highlighted. (shrink)

This paper gives an overview of the placebo effect in popular culture, especially as it pertains to the work of authors Patrick O’Brian and Sinclair Lewis. The beloved physician as placebo, and the clinician scientist as villain are themes that respectively inform the novels, The Hundred Days and Arrowsmith. Excerpts from the novels, and from film show how the placebo effect, and the randomized clinical trial, have emerged into popular culture, and evolved over time.

This article takes the recent rash of unwanted pregnancy films, such as 2007's Juno and Knocked Up, as an opportunity to revisit Margaret Atwood's influential 1985 novel, The Handmaid's Tale. It argues that the novel deals with the same themes the films evoke during a pivotal time for reproductive politics, generally, and abortion politics, specifically. It argues that the novel offers several lessons and warnings on the nature of reproductive politics that are still relevant today. These lessons are connected to (...) how and why these films are able to `make sense' in naturalizing their heroines' choice to keep an unwanted pregnancy. (shrink)

When the term “postfeminism” entered the media lexicon in the 1990s, it was often accompanied by breathless headlines about the “death of feminism.” Those reports of feminism’s death may have been greatly exaggerated, and yet contemporary popular culture often conjures up a world in which feminism had never even been born, a fictional universe filled with suburban Stepford wives, maniacal career women, alluring amnesiacs, and other specimens of retro femininity. In _Feminism and Popular Culture_, Rebecca Munford and (...) Melanie Waters consider why the twenty-first century media landscape is so haunted by the ghosts of these traditional figures that feminism otherwise laid to rest. Why, over fifty years since Betty Friedan’s critique, does the feminine mystique exert such a strong spectral presence, and how has it been reimagined to speak to the concerns of a postfeminist audience? To answer these questions, Munford and Waters draw from a rich array of examples from contemporary film, fiction, music, and television, from the shadowy cityscapes of _Homeland _to the haunted houses of _American Horror Story_. Alongside this comprehensive analysis of today’s popular culture, they offer a vivid portrait of feminism’s social and intellectual history, as well as an innovative application of Jacques Derrida’s theories of “hauntology.” _Feminism and Popular Culture_ thus not only considers how contemporary media is being visited by the ghosts of feminism’s past, it raises vital questions about what this means for feminism’s future. (shrink)

These four volumes are part of the forty-one volume set _New Accents_. First launched in 1977, the New Accents series rapidly changed the face of literary studies. Its clear and concise volumes brought the latest in literary theory to students and academics and paved the way for undergraduate teaching on essential new topics and approaches.

In the decades since his death, Adorno's thinking has lost none of its capacity to unsettle the settled, and has proved hugely influential in social and cultural thought. To most people, the entertainment provided by television, radio, film, newspapers, astrology charts and CD players seem harmless enough. For Adorno, however, the culture industry that produces them is ultimately toxic in its effect on the social process. Here, Robert Witkin unpacks Adorno's notoriously difficult critique of popular culture in (...) an engaging and accessible style, looking first at the development of the overarching theories of authority, commodification and negative dialectics within which Adorno's work needs to be seen. This book is an essential guide for understanding one of the key thinkers of our time. (shrink)

In this 4th edition of his successful Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction, John Storey has extensively revised the text throughout.

‘Popular culture’ has two Japanese translations: taishu bunka and minshu bunka. Bunka embraces the entire concept of ‘culture,’ but ‘popular’ isn't so easily translated. Taishu means a large number (tai) of population or groups (shu), while minshu means groups (shu) of ordinary people (min). Thus, minshu bunka is a more faithful translation of 'popular culture’ than taishu bunka. Yet, the expression minshu bunka does not occur as frequently as taishu bunka. This means that, in (...) thejapanese context, ‘popular culture’ is generally regarded as ‘mass culture.’ Only when the difference is intentionally stressed does the term of minshu bunka reappear. This is not a mere language problem but derives from the very process by which minshu bunka becomes taishu bunka. (shrink)

The exploration of popular culture topics by academic philosophers for non-academic audiences has given rise to a distinctive genre of philosophical writing. Edited volumes with titles such as Black Sabbath and Philosophy or Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy contain chapters by multiple philosophical authors that attempt to bring philosophy to popular audiences. Two dominant models have emerged in the genre. On the pedagogical model, authors use popular culture examples to teach the reader philosophy. The (...) end is to promote philosophical literacy, defined as acquaintance with the key problems, ideas, and figures in the history of philosophy. In contrast, on the applied philosophy model, authors use philosophy to open up new dimensions of the popular culture topic for fans. The end is to illustrate the value of philosophy in understanding the popular culture topic, and ultimately, to demonstrate the value of philosophy in general. Taking stock of the relative strengths and weaknesses of these two models provides an opportunity to reflect more broadly on whether, why, and how philosophers should engage the public. (shrink)

The article is a response to criticism of my two recent articles on Richard Shusterman’s view of popular culture by Shusterman and Małecki. The former maintains that I have misrepresented his view on Europe, the USA and popular culture. But I point out that he talks as if there is no popular culture in Europe due to Europe’s aristocratic traditions, and that the USA is a hotbed of popular culture thanks to its (...) egalitarian traditions, and that Europe can be treated as a country comparable to the USA. He also says that I falsely think he is talking about popular culture while he is really talking about popular art. But I show that it is meaningless to talk about popular art without talking about popular culture and that as a pragmatist Shusterman should have understood that. I show that Małecki grossly misrepresents my article, maintaining that I am against all forms of popular art and against everything Shusterman says about popular art. I show that this is blatantly wrong. (shrink)

This paper contributes to the Business Ethics literature by unpacking the multimodal construction of moral narratives in popular culture and its portrayals of organizations and organizational roles. Understanding such portrayals and their construction is crucial to Business Ethics scholarship because they shape organizational imaginaries, influencing understandings and expectations of the ethical/moral responsibilities of organizations and the actors within them. In particular, we study the construction of moral narratives within a reality TV show that focuses on immigration and border (...) control at an airport. We find that the immigration officers are depicted as rational and heroic figures whilst the travellers are presented as emotional and potentially dangerous characters. Our analysis highlights how this is achieved via five multimodal editing dimensions—the structure of interactional scenes, the ability to address the camera, the narrator’s comments, the visual and music effects—that are key in constructing clearly defined personae. We show how, through the intersubjective construction of clear-cut characters, the show downplays the moral complexity of its content. Portraying immigration officers as heroic, while presenting travellers as potentially dangerous, allows for a silencing of any ethical questioning of immigration officers’ organizational practices. (shrink)

The studies of urban popular culture in modern China in recent years have attracted wide attention from scholars in China and abroad. The symposium, which is composed by Ma Min’s “Injecting vitality into the studies of urban cultural history,” Jiang Jin’s “Issues in the studies of urban popular culture in modern China,” Wang Di’s “The microcosm of Chinese cities: The perspective and methodology of studying urban popular culture from the case of teahouses in Chengdu,” (...) Joseph W. Esherick’s “Remaking the Chinese city: Urban space and urban culture” and Lu Hanchao’s “From elites to common people: The downward trend in the studies of Chinese urban history in the United States,” provide valuable insights on the perspective, trend, and methodology of the studies. (shrink)

In all societies that have arrived at a certain degree of social differentiation, there are two types of culture that may be qualified respectively as “popular” and “lettered”. Popular culture is that of the people as opposed to the dominant political and intellectual classes. The latter two may be distinct (but allied), as in ancient India with the pair Brahman-kshatriva. or mixed as in Confucian China with the bureaucracy of scholars-civil servants. The duality between the two (...) kinds of culture may become less distinct with the democratization of power and education as well as with the omnipresent symbolic universe of the media. None the less, it survives, as has been proven by all sociological research on the nature of leisure time as employed by classes in industrial societies, in the “West” and in the “East”. (shrink)

Almost wherever we look, depictions of sexuality, both subtle and not-so-subtle, are omnipresent. Whatever the medium, popular culture representations tell us something about ourselves and about the ideologies of which they are symptomatic. These essays examine the strategies of power implicit in popular representations of sexuality. The authors—scholars in fields such as sociology, philosophy, biology, political science, history, and English literature— eschew rigid disciplinary boundaries.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Popular Culture in the Houses of Poe and CortázarDaniel Bautista (bio)"[…]at the age of nine I read Edgar Allan Poe for the first time. That book I stole to read because my mother didn't want me to read it, she thought I was too young and she was right. The book scared me and I was ill for three months, because I believed in it."…—Julio Cortázar1In interviews (...) and essays, Julio Cortázar, the famous Argentine author, often expressed a lifelong fascination with Edgar Allan Poe (Berg 227–32). Moreover, as a young man Cortázar spent two years translating the American author's prose into Spanish, making irresistible the search for traces of Poe in his own work. His description of Poe as a youthful and guilty pleasure reflects a common reaction to the American author that has led some critics to rue Poe's influence. Jonathan Elmer points out that "Poe's connection with juvenile tastes, and hence with a time when reading and acquiring 'culture' were actually enjoyable […] has been insistently and disapprovingly stressed by the Anglo-American literary-historical tradition" (3). Although Poe himself often liked to "advertise [his work] as ethereal and otherworldly, or avowedly timeless," critics who found elements of the vulgarly popular in his writing regarded the author as a true "stumbling block" in the American literary landscape (Rosenheim and Rachman xii; Eliot 205). In a similar vein, Elmer observes,It has puzzled many critics, sometimes to the point of vituperation, that Poe stands simultaneously as the germinal figure of a central modernist trajectory (leading via Baudelaire to French Symbolism and thence to the high modernism of Eliot and others) and as the much-acknowledged pioneer of several durable mass-cultural genres: detective fiction and science fiction, as well as certain modes of sensational or gothic horror, which are today, to use one of Poe's coinages, "omniprevalent."(2)In the past, such critics tended to dismiss Poe to the fringes of the American canon for what they saw as his highbrow pretensions and lowbrow taste. More recently, critics like Elmer and others have argued that Poe's ability to straddle the high/low cultural divide is precisely what makes him such a perennially fascinating writer and one of the most revealing about American culture in general.Considering Poe's high standing in Latin America, one might assume that the question of his low or popular status was not as much of a stumbling block there.2 Cortázar himself blamed American discomfort with Poe on his use of "baroque" language, an issue that Cortázar's own background as a native Spanish speaker allowed him to ignore: [End Page 1] "since I'm neither English nor American, I see it with another perspective. I know there are aspects which have aged a lot, that are exaggerated, but that hasn't the slightest importance next to his genius" (Weiss 73). The idea that an author's "genius" could rise above the demands of his countrymen was important to Cortázar. Questions about his own cultural status also significantly affected the reception of Cortázar's work, though in many ways he suffered from just the opposite charges made against Poe. The style and themes of his work, and the political context in Argentina during the early part of his career (characterized most conspicuously by the rise of Perónism), led some in the literary establishment of his own country to accuse Cortázar of being too European or elitist.3 Looking at Poe and Cortázar together, this essay compares how both authors negotiated such cultural issues in their writing and the way that Cortázar reworks some of Poe's particular strategies in a modern Argentine setting. Focusing on two of these authors' most well-known stories, "The Fall of the House of Usher" (published in 1839) and "Casa tomada" ("House Taken Over") (published in 1946), I argue that they both reflect some of the ways that Poe and Cortázar grappled with the rise and attraction of a popular culture that threatened to reconfigure their particular literary landscapes.In Keywords, Raymond Williams traces the... (shrink)

The eight essays contained in Philosophical Feminism and Popular Culture explore the portrayal of women and various philosophical responses to that portrayal in contemporary post-civil rights society. The essays examine visual, print, and performance media — stand-up comedy, movies, television, and a blockbuster trilogy of novel. These philosophical feminist analyses of popular culture consider the possibilities, both positive and negative, that popular culture presents for articulating the structure of the social and cultural practices in (...) which gender matters, and for changing these practices if and when they follow from, lead to, or perpetuate discrimination on the basis of gender. The essays bring feminist voices to the conversation about gender where is it taking place and attest to the importance of feminist critique in what is sometimes claimed to be a post-feminist era. (shrink)

The eight essays contained in this book explore the portrayal of women, and various philosophical responses to that portrayal in contemporary post-civil rights society. They bring feminist voices to the conversation about gender and attests to the importance of feminist critique in what is sometimes claimed to be a post-feminist era.

The most common definitions of popular culture suffer from a presentist bias and cannot be applied to pre-industrial and pre-capitalist societies. A survey reveals serious conceptual difficulties as well. We may, however, gain insight in two ways. 1) By moving from a Marxist model to a more Weberian approach . 2) By looking to Bourdieu’s “cultural capital” and Danto’s and Dickie’s “Institutional Theory of Art,” and defining popular culture as “unauthorized culture.”.

The boundary between 'high' culture and 'popular' culture is neither hermetic nor stable. A wide-spread mechanism of a reception strongly influenced by structuralism and post-modernism has led to the amplification and acceleration of cultural production between these two poles. Relying on a decidedly theoretical approach, this volume offers a broad perspective transgressing linguistic, cultural, temporal, and media borders. Reflections and perspectives on the relationship between 'high' and 'popular' culture are the subject of the thirteen articles (...) collected here. Side by side with theoretical approaches, case studies covering classical and Heavy Metal music, TV series and pornographic films, zombies and 'Creature Features', philosophically infused comics and popular lexicography, professional wrestling and hypertext literature pave the way to a contemporary aesthetics. (shrink)

Social theory can sometimes seem as though it's speaking of a world that existed long ago, so why should we continue to study and discuss the theories of these dead white men? Can their work still inform us about the way we live today? Are they still relevant to our consumer-focused, celebrity-crazy, tattoo-friendly world? This book explains how the ideas of classical sociological theory can be understood, and applied to, everyday activities like listening to hip-hop, reading fashion magazines or watching (...) reality TV. Taking the reader through central sociological texts, Social Theory In Popular Culture explains why key theorists – from Marx to Saussure – are still considered to be the bedrock of sociology and sociological enquiry. Each chapter examines a different key thinker and applies their work to a recognisable aspect of popular cultural, showing how the central issues underpinning classic social thought - class, conflict, gender, power, ethnicity, and social status - can still be readily observed within the modern global world. Encouraging the reader to critique and reflect upon the ways in which classic social theory applies to their own worlds, this is the perfect antidote to dry social theory explanations. It is an eye-opening read for all students and scholars across the social sciences. (shrink)

Over the past two decades, stories of world-ending catastrophe have featured prominently in film and television. Zombie apocalypses, climate disasters, alien invasions, global pandemics and dystopian world orders fill our screens-typically with a singular figure or tenacious group tasked with saving or salvaging the world. Why are stories of End Times crisis so popular with audiences? And why is the hero so often a white man who overcomes personal struggles and incredible obstacles to lead humanity toward a restored future? (...) This book examines the familiar trope of the hero and the recasting of contemporary anxieties in narratives like The Walking Dead, Snowpiercer and Mad Max: Fury Road. Some have familiar roots in Western cultural traditions yet many question popular assumptions about heroes and heroism to tell new and fascinating stories about race, gender and society and the power of individuals to change the world. (shrink)

Central to politicized academic projects such as cultural studies and politicized work in cultural theory and philosophy is a critique of the cultural power of institutions—pedagogical institutions...

Addressing the contradictions surrounding modern-day femininity and its complicated relationship with feminism and postfeminism, this book examines a range of popular female/feminist icons and paradigms. It offers an innovative and forward-looking perspective on femininity and the modern female self.

This volume addresses the relationship between irony and popular culture and the role of the consumer in determining and disseminating meaning. Arguing that in a cultural climate largely characterised by fractious communications and perilous linguistic exchanges, the very role of irony in popular culture needs to come under greater scrutiny, it focuses on the many uses, abuses, and misunderstandings of irony in contemporary popular culture, and explores the troubling political populism at the heart of (...) many supposedly satirical and (apparently) non-satirical texts. In an environment in which irony is frequently claimed as a defence for material and behaviour judged controversial, how do we, as a society entrenched in forms of popular culture and media, interpret work that is intended as satire but which reads as unironic? How do we accurately decode works of popular film, literature, television, music, and other cultural forms which sell themselves as bitingly ironic commentaries on current society, but which are also problematic celebrations of the very issues they purport to critique? And what happens when texts intended and received in one manner are themselves ironically recontextualised in another? Bringing together studies across a range of cultural texts including popular music, film and television, Isn't it Ironic? will appeal to scholars of the social sciences and humanities with interests in cultural studies, media studies, popular culture, literary studies and sociology. (shrink)

New to this edition: 4 new readings Stuart Hall The rediscovery of 'ideology': return of the repressed in media studies Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe Post ...