Be Like Bill: An Anatomy of an Internet Meme

“What South Park Character Are You?”: Popular Culture, Literacy, and Online Performances of Identity

Objective: This study is to investigate the ways in which popular culture texts (film, television shows) shape language learners’ identities and attitudes towards the target language culture. The study aims to explore how movies and television shows influence and shape language learners' identities and attitudes toward the target culture. Theoretical Framework: The main concepts and theories are based on Geert Hofstede’s Onion Culture Model. This model provides a solid basis for understanding the context of the investigation. Methods: This study uses a qualitative research approach, using secondary content analysis to build a model of learners’ attitudes and identities, and then presents the results obtained from the analysis of this model. Results and Discussion: The findings indicate that target cultural values have a significant impact on learners’ attitudes, resulting in both favorable and unfavorable impacts on cultural immersion. These findings highlight the important role of popular culture texts in motivating language learners and shaping their attitudes and identities. Research implications: This study investigates the influence of films as well as television shows on culturally relevant foreign language teaching and learning activities. Popular culture texts play a crucial role in promoting cultural awareness and molding the attitudes and identities of learners. It contributes to revealing an approach to advancing SDG 4—Quality Education. Originality/Value: The study confirms that popular culture materials in language instruction can enhance learners’ cultural awareness and the overall language acquisition process. This study also demonstrates the use of popular culture texts in shaping language learners’ cultural and identity.

Using Digital Media to Promote Kidney Disease Education

The aim of this study was to associate popular culture texts with Turkish language lessons of middle school students. For this purpose, a model was proposed and a suitable curriculum was prepared for this model. It was aimed to determine how this program, which was the result of associating popular culture texts with Turkish language lesson outcomes, operated during classroom practices. The study was designed based on action research principles. The participants of the research were 19 (12 males and 7 females) seventh grade students. These pariticipants were selected according to the criterion sampling technique. Audio and video recording, questionnaire form, student and research diary, observation form, student activity files were used as data collection tools. Descriptive analysis technique was used in the analysis of these data. According to research data, it was seen that the Turkish language lessons associated with popular culture texts contributed to the development of basic language skills and developed a critical perspective on popular culture texts. However, for the action research process, students expressed their opinion that the lessons were fun and related to out of school life.

The growth of digital culture has opened up new spaces of engagement where interactive users discuss social issues, including crime. Given crime’s ubiquity in popular culture, cultural criminologists argue that diverse emotional involvement with crime in popular cultural texts, such as social media, provides important insights into how citizens comprehend issues related to crime. Here, an analysis of emotion should be placed into the foreground (Hayward, K., and J. Young. 2004. “Cultural Criminology: Some Notes on the Script.” Theoretical Criminology 8 (3): 259–273). Taking this as a cue to explore these often neglected popular moral and emotional aspects of crime, this article focuses on constructions of popular crime discourses, using citizens’ responses to the Mo Robinson people smuggling case on Facebook as a case study. Applying multimodal critical discourse analysis and a framework for analysing evaluation, we reveal ideological themes through which participants judge crime, perpetrator and victims. Our analysis of the Free Mo Robinson Facebook page demonstrates that although social media has the potential to challenge and shift traditional narratives about crime, it can also perpetuate and amplify ideological narratives of crime control that fail to address the wider socio-political and structural contexts in which crime occurs.

Stem cell science should be tweeted.

Facebook, the most widely used application of online social media, reached its 10-year anniversary with over a billion current users.1 This astronomical number of users reflects the widespread appeal of digitally sharing our personal lives, and prospective employers and admissions officers are now capitalizing on the popularity of social media. Profiles on social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook, where users share thoughts and experiences, photos, videos, and other media, and endorse other users' content, are visible to the public in varying degrees and can therefore offer searchers a glimpse of applicants' online behavior. It is estimated that 19% to 31% of collegiate admissions officers currently vet applicants through online searches,2,3 while nearly half of employers may do so.4 Data are more sparse regarding medical schools and residency programs but suggest that searches with SNS are already a considerable tool for evaluating candidates. A survey of program directors in surgical specialties found that 17% screened applicants by using SNS, and 33% of this group gave lower rankings to applicants based on SNS content.5 In contrast, a study of more general Google searches with program directors in emergency medicine demonstrated little consequence to applicants' standings.6

#FreeBritney and the Pleasures of Conspiracy

From the drooling Mrs Green in the children’s picture book, The Teacher from the Black Lagoon to the best scarer of all time, Dean Hardscrabble from Monsters University, monstrous female teachers leap out from around the corners and under the desks of popular imaginings of school. In this paper, I focus on the figure of the female monster teacher in popular cultural texts and media produced for and/or consumed by North American youth, including picture books, television, film, and other cultural texts. Although these monster teacher narratives are produced for children and youth, they also work as a form of popular pedagogy for adults. The stakes of these representations are many, including the misogynistic representation of women in power as monstrous, the devaluing of teaching as “women’s work” or “child care,” and, the figuring of boys as “in crisis” in relationship to a predominately female workforce. I argue that, the female monster educator in popular cultural texts offers a corporeal curriculum that seeks to discipline the body of the teacher and to obfuscate the radical potential of teachers as professional women.

English teaching and learning has taken an interesting shift in Hong Kong schools with the implementation of the New Senior Secondary (NSS) curriculum under the ‘334’ education reform. Situating the paper within the broader considerations of the intersection of Cultural Studies and English teaching, this paper examines the challenges and prospects of teaching the new Language Arts elective called Learning English through Popular Culture module. It is argued that while the module endeavours to connect and motivate Hong Kong students to learn English through popular culture materials, the official curriculum and schemes of work, however, narrowly articulate the teaching of popular culture texts conceived as ‘text-types’. Such a formulaic approach to using popular culture in the classroom is limiting and locks students into a procedural way of ‘thinking’ and ‘doing’ popular cultural texts. The paper concludes by offering some ways forward that might deliver what is otherwise a revolutionary and innovative curriculum. Beyond the specific case of Hong Kong, the curriculum challenge discussed is instructive for other education systems and curriculum scholars looking to develop new pedagogies from the intersecting disciplines of Cultural Studies and English teaching.

Popular culture and the media play an integral role in shaping public perceptions concerning the geographies of military activities and power. Critical approaches in studying military geography have started to pay closer attention to cultural representations of the military and their constitutive role in legitimizing and justifying military presence and practices within varying geographical contexts. It is important to note that there is no definitive or coherent scholarship on the topic of military geographies of popular culture. Therefore, this review does not chart a single cohesive body of scholarship. Instead, it offers an illustrative account of the interdisciplinary nature of studying the popular cultural geographies of militarism and militarization. There are several ways in which geographical scholarship, especially in the field of popular geopolitics, has contributed to understanding the relationship between the military and popular culture. First, geographical work has offered critical insights into the political-economic structures of what has been termed the “military-entertainment complex,” revealing the intimate symbiotic relationship between military institutes and the entertainment industries. Second, and where the predominant focus lies, geography has brought critical attention to the cultural politics of popular military representation. This has involved a detailed critical analysis of various popular cultural forms, texts, and visual media, exposing the geopolitical imaginaries that are both reflective and constitutive of the militarized violence they depict. More recently, such work has been advanced through an interest in material cultures and “more-than-representational” accounts to consider how cultures of militarism become embedded within the context of everyday geographies. Finally, geographers have reflected on the significance of place and the everyday situated contexts in which popular militarized cultures are embedded, experienced, and negotiated. Such work has considered the role of scale, highlighting how cultures of militarism are performed and internalized, especially within the domestic setting. Such work has adopted in-depth qualitative methodological approaches to recognize how popular forms of militarism are experienced in everyday life. The review article begins with an overview of the interdisciplinary work that seeks to expose and explore the military-entertainment complex. It then proceeds with thematic sections drawing attention to how scholars, within and beyond the discipline of human geography, have critically analyzed an array of diverse popular cultural militarized texts, representations, and material objects. It ends by drawing attention to the emergent methodological approaches and techniques to studying popular military geographies.

Social networking is popular online activity; however, like many activities on the internet, there are some privacy risks and concerns associated with its use. Recently, an increasing number of nurses have been censured or asked to appear before regulatory or registering authorities for unprofessional behaviour on social media sites. Problem behaviours identified include: inappropriate content and postings, crossing professional boundaries and breaching patient privacy and confidentiality. This discussion paper aims to give the nursing profession an understanding of how their online behaviour can impact on their professionalism, and how they can avoid problematic situations when using social media (Facebook). This exploratory discussion paper will inform a study researching nurses’ online behaviour. Social media is here to stay and nurses need to navigate the complexities of the boundaries between the personal and the professional. Nurses need to learn to balance the growing usefulness of social media, with the legalities and etiquette of the online environment.

The Russian hip hop artist Smoki Mo has frequently referenced religious and spiritual topics in his lyrics. The composition “Who is the creator” discusses the positive and negative replies to this question. The lyrics are interpreted as a popular culture text with the aim to discover how popular culture texts can function as religious ones and how popular culture can function as religion. The article employs a functional definition of religion to explore how the studied text discusses existential questions and struggle with identity that religion also is concerned with. The popular culture itself is understood in the article as the meaning and value that people ascribe to mass culture products, such as popular music, in their everyday lives. The article also summarizes the possible issues with reading popular culture texts as religious ones to avoid misinterpretation due to researcher’s indebtedness to traditional religious definitions or to scholarly traditions of interpretation. The article also employs the notion of spirituality to connect the ideas expressed in Smoki Mo’s lyrics to a relevant ideological framework. The understanding of the “creator”, “God” and other theological notions in the lyrics is closely related to the broad features of modern spirituality that include the focus on the individual self and universal statements rather than particular religious traditions. In this way, the studied composition in itself is an expression of modern spirituality dealing with existential questions.

Objectives The purpose of this study is to utilize K-pop music videos as educational materials for Korean culture education for foreigners. In particular, K-pop music videos can be effective materials for Korean social culture education. Methods This study aimed to identify the genre characteristics of music videos and to reflect the characteristics of popular culture in order to organize the course curriculum based on the principle of ‘student participation-type classes.’ The music video education plan was specified according to the class progress order of ‘selecting a popular culture text, finding cultural codes, analyzing the cultural context, and producing new contents.’ Through this, it was expected that learners would be able to actively understand popular culture and grow into ‘participatory recipients’ of popular culture. Results The class stages were specified in accordance with the genre characteristics of the music video and the content characteristics of the text selected in class. Above all, in the post-viewing activity, it was suggested that the learners produce secondary content on their own based on the popular culture texts learned in class and the content they researched. Conclusions Through this study, it was found that popular culture classes should be designed according to the genre and content characteristics of a popular culture text, and that learners can improve their critical understanding of popular culture and digital literacy skills through analysis of popular culture texts. In addition, it was expected that learners would be able to participate, communicate, and share in class as ‘participation consumer’ of popular culture, and ultimately improve their intercultural capability.

Many education researchers espouse the use of different media and popular culture texts to enhance student engagement, but educators also need to see that such texts can be used in academic manners. This interview study draws research material from 12 participants in the US but focuses on one representational example to demonstrate the array of meaning making activities that are bound in reading popular culture texts, in this case, comic books. Roger, the participant, described his reading practices having critical, moral, literary and dialogic dimensions. This array of meaningful practices provides evidence of potential for using popular culture texts in substantive literacy activities.