Popular Culture and Genetics:Genetics and Biotechnologies in the Movies

Florida Lawyers Bring Big Screen Drama to the Courtroom: How Popular Culture’s Influence on the Law has Created the Need for ‘Professional Witnesses’

Pornographic Pedagogies?: The Risks of Teaching ‘Dirrty’ Popular Cultures

Much of the fabric of the modern world is woven on the loom of popular culture. While scholars have defined pop culture differently, there is a general consensus as to its strong influence on modern society. As television has become our society's principal means of storytelling, its offerings concerning the world of lawyers have become a staple of the popular culture consumed by Americans. There is a feedback loop between law and popular culture which is self-perpetuating: popular culture influences the viewing public's perception of the law, which in turn affects the public's expectations, which are reinforced by the misconduct of actual members of the legal profession, which affects what the networks will portray as popular legal culture. This cause and effect scenario is the result of what might be referred to in dance parlance as the Legal Culture Two-Step.In light of the self-perpetuating nature of the Popular Legal Culture Two-Step, the burning inquiry must be whether there is any way to interrupt or ameliorate the ramifications of the relationship between law and televised legal popular culture in instances where what is broadcast defaces the law as an honorable profession. The urgency of addressing this query was highlighted with the airing of a new series during the fall of 2014, Bad Judge. Bad Judge serves as a prototype for the type of legal shows which television should not be broadcasting and is a perfect platform on which to illustrate the harm which may result from the effect. To delve a bit deeper into the underpinnings of the Popular Legal Culture Two-Step put forth in this piece, Part II of the article discusses the cultivation theory, heuristic processing, and the process known as resonance, the lynchpins for the premise that television viewing does affect the viewer's perception of reality. It also examines the influence of resonance in the context of both syndi-court shows and actual incidents of judicial misconduct. Part III critiques a number of episodes of Bad Judge and evaluates the actions and conduct of Judge Rebecca Wright in light California's Canons of Judicial Ethics. It also focuses upon a written entreaty to NBC made by the Miami-Dade chapter of the Florida Association for Women Lawyers requesting cancellation of the show. Finally, the article explores possible responses to the demeaning portrayal of the judicial system and female judges and attorneys conveyed in Bad Judge in order to ameliorate the influence of television's of viewer perceptions of the legal world and to prevent such perceptions from becoming viewer reality.

Reviewed by: Islamic Modernities In Southeast Asia: Exploring Indonesian Popular and Visual Culture by Leonie Schmidt Jennifer Goodlander ISLAMIC MODERNITIES IN SOUTHEAST ASIA: EXPLORING INDONESIAN POPULAR AND VISUAL CULTURE. By Leonie Schmidt. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. 218 pp. Hardcover, $131.00; Paperback, $41.95. "To be Muslim, is to be modern" is the constant refrain of Leonie Schmidt's wide-reaching work on Indonesia, Islam, and popular culture. Her book is one of several giving attention to Islam and culture in Indonesia. Despite being the world's most populous Muslim country Indonesia is often left out of studies on Islamic culture, which tend to focus on the Arab world. In contrast, Schmidt's field research was carried out in the city of Yogyakarta, a bustling university town that is also popular with tourists; in addition many of her case studies are national or international in scope. The book examines various kinds of media and spaces, including rock music, fashion blogs, self-help books, shopping malls, and art. Within these various foci, there emerges several cohesive arguments and Schmidt is adept at drawing useful comparisons among the chapters. The book is not specifically about performance or theatre—but offers numerous intersections with wider concerns of performance studies and the role of Islam in mediatized identities in Southeast Asia that complement the field of theatre. [End Page 531] The introduction offers a historical overview of how Islam functions in Indonesian society and the relationship of global Islam to modernity, and how after the New Order period (1966–1998) people actively sought means to express diverse identities after a period of tight censorship. Schmidt contends her research is especially important because contemporary Indonesia is "simultaneously modernizing and Islamizing" and "popular and visual culture present perfect tools to publically fantasize and experiment with Islamic modernities" (p. 3). Thus her focus is not singularly on the object of study, whether it be a shopping mall, fashion blog, or rock song, but also in how Indonesians are consuming and using visual and popular cultures to construct modern Muslim identities. She establishes that she does not consider all culture produced by Muslims in a Muslim culture to be "Islamic", rather only those that bernafaaskan Islam, or "breath Islam". Most of her case studies encompass a relationship to "Islamic Culture" in some way, even though not all are Islamic culture per say. In order to analyze popular culture and its role in society, Schmidt outlines specific overlapping cultural spheres for her work: (1) leisure sphere (shopping malls); (2) media sphere (music, books, film, social media); and (3) creative sphere (visual and performance art). This is an effective way of conceptualizing these cases because it offers opportunities for cross-chapter comparisons and development of themes that greatly enrich the book's overall argument. Chapter Two "Urban Islamic Spectacles: Transforming the Space of the Shopping Mall during Ramadan" introduces an important theme that carries through several chapters in the book—the relationships between consumerism and religious piety. This chapter focuses on shopping malls in order to analyze the relationship between time and space in constructing meaning through intentional displays of Islamic goods, references to religion in advertisement, and people's engagement of the malls during Ramadan. The analysis of how expressions of Ramadan have shifted from private practice to public spectacle aligns with a larger shift of religious expression in Indonesia, and Schmidt offers valuable insight in analyzing specific moments or interactions. The chapter attempts to consider three large luxury malls together with Mal Malioboro, which is essentially an indoor market primarily for visitors to the city, but this lack of specificity makes it difficult to understand the relationships she is trying to draw between her theoretical framework and her evidence. The sixth chapter on Islamic fashion blogs draws similar conclusions, but also suffers from a lack of clear focus on a manageable number of examples. The next three chapters deal with rock music, self-help books, and film respectively. In each Schmidt provides excellent general [End Page 532] cultural and historical background for understanding the genre and its relationship to Indonesian society before giving focused analysis on a limited number of case studies. These three chapters provide the most...

GHANA STUDIES / Volume 10 ISSN 1536-5514 / E-ISSN 2333-7168© 2007 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System 9 POPULAR PERFORMANCE AND CULTURE IN GHANA The Past 50 Years JOHN COLLINS Introduction This paper examines contemporary African culture from the mid-20th century through the lens of the popular arts. Although Ghana is the focus, first I look at some of the general features of what is a transcultural sub-Saharan phenomenon and take the story back to the late 19th century, when popular cultural forms began to be created by the newly emerging African urban masses, the maritime workers, and the cash-crop farmers, who blended or “syncretized” local forms with those of Europe and America (including its black diaspora), introduced through colonial soldiers, missionaries, and traders, as well as through then available forms of mass media. Despite their hybrid nature, these new cultural forms contained and still contain distinctive features that express the identities, symbols, and underlying value orientations of their African creators, practitioners, and audiences. The ability of these new art forms to reflect the moods and outlooks of Africans undergoing rapid sociocultural transformations is helped by their often ephemeral and transient nature, or what Karin Barber (1987, p. 12) calls their “aesthetic of change.” These new African art forms go far beyond what in the West is normally called “art,” for they embrace coffin designs (Burns, 1974; Secretan, 1994); house and barroom murals (Beinart, 1968; Szombati-Fabian & Fabian, 1976); local portrait photography (Amicchia, 1999; Hales, 1998; Sprague, 1978); sign-writing; advertisements (from barbering to bread labels 10 Ghana Studies • volume 10 • 2007 [Middleton, 1974]); wire bicycles (Jackson, 1978); lorry slogans (Kyei & Schreckenbach, 1975); comic literature;1 and local cloth designs.2 Popular performance lyrics and text also generate catch-names and idiomatic expressions , which I discuss later. Most Africanist writers on popular culture generally agree that the practitioners of popular performance and popular art are drawn largely from the “intermediate” groups in African society. These groups (consisting of urban or urbanizing Africans, skilled and semiskilled artisans, transport workers, seamen, traders, minor civil servants, cash-crop farmers, and so on3 ) have 1. Barber (1987, pp. 29, 40) provides the example of the “Onitsha market literature” of eastern Nigeria during the 1950s and 1960s, and the Kumasi-made Twi-English “Spider Man” comics of the mid-1970s (collected by Tom McCaskie), whose central character is a combination of the American Marvel Comics “Spider-Man” and the Akan Ananse-the-Spider, who from his jungle hideout assists the masses under Acheampong ’s military regime. 2. Ghanaian and Nigerian 1960s highlife songs that provided cloth names include “Yaw Berku” (a man’s name); “Aku Sika” (A golden lady called Aku); “Aban Nkaba” (Handcuffs ); “Afie Be Ye Asan” (Troublesome years); and “Joromi” (a mythical wrestler). 3. Ware (1978, p. 363) states that most of Sierra Leone’s popular musicians come from the lower/middle classes, while Alaja-Brown (1987) notes that Nigerian juju music originated with the “rascals” and “area boys” of the old Saro (Sierra Leone) Olowogbowo Collins • Popular Performance and Culture in Ghana 11 developed since the 19th century between the national elites and the vast class of subsistence peasant farmers. The intermediate status of some of Ghana’s pioneering popular performers is exemplified by the highlife guitarists Kwame Asare (Jacob Sam) and his nephew Kwaa Mensah, who also held down jobs as a carpenter, a mining surveyor’s assistant, a watch repairer , and a cocoa broker. Sutherland (1970, pp. 5, 18) also mentions that Bob Ansah and C. B. Hutton, of the 1930s Two Bobs concert party group, had been a small storekeeper and a tribunal clerk, respectively. To jump forward several decades, if indeed emergent African popular arts and culture involved the crossing and blurring of cultural boundaries (transculturation), the “aesthetic of change,” the “intermediate” layers of society, and urbanization, then one can see contemporary emergent separatist churches (spiritual, aladura, apostolic, and Pentecostal) also as manifestations of popular culture. They are transcultural or syncretic in that they incorporate African features like dancing, possession, spiritual healing, exorcism, and divination. The local church congregations are drawn from the very same “intermediate” masses as are...

“Boulevard of Broken Songs”

This article is an attempt to examine the differences between mass and popular culture in the historical and sociocultural dimensions. The author traces the relations of these two phenomena to the general sphere of culture and its main principles. The key point of the article is that culture is a kind of arrangement, cultivation, education, and perfection. On the other hand, manifestations of mass culture are associated with the decline of its sublime foundations. Therefore, there is a necessity to compare the ‘high’ and ‘low’ levels of culture. The rise of commercial activity and the common consumption became the turn point of the emergence of a non-elite level of culture. Industrialization and urbanization accelerated the development of mass media, which helped bring the goods of civilization to the majority of people. Due to market mechanisms, the spread of wealth took place under the dictates of commercial success. Artistic and aesthetic parameters of culture did not fit into the pragmatic requirements, and marketing programs of mass production weakened those parameters. Wide-ranging conformism, infantilism, and consumerism were increasing. These trends are well known as mass culture. The indicator of this condition of culture is simplification of tastes. At the same time, there was a popular traditional lower culture, the main features of which were accessibility and commonness, and it had an unofficial and peripheral status. However, these two formations (elite and popular culture) did not enter into rigid antagonism. The author is analyzing the development of a popular culture from the ancient to the modern times. It is concluded that culture not only creates high ideals but also may be limited to simpler meanings. The author shows that the popular culture also opposes mass culture due to creation of alternative forms of resistance. It means that popular culture has not completely collapsed into conformism but kept the protest intention. Thanks to this alternative particularity, pop-culture has gradually become significantly different from masscult. It allows for grasping distinctions between these two kinds of culture. Finally, popular culture remains the domain of the formation of ideas in which social players express the values of their everyday life. Article received 14.02.2019

Stories about law and lawyers are ubiquitous within Western popular culture. These stories have an influence on popular legal culture: the beliefs and values which ordinary people hold about the law. The dominance of popular cultural stories based within an Anglo-American legal context is thus significant, in particular in the forming of a perception within popular legal culture that legal systems are homogenous. An understanding of legal diversity: that is, of law as contingent on cultural, social and political conditions adds a valuable dimension to legal education, both from a vocational perspective and in terms of the academic value of the discipline. This paper addresses the relevance to legal education of cultural approaches to law, and argues that stories from popular culture can be effective ways of introducing students to legal diversity. The example of the French show Engrenages, shown in the UK as Spiral, is used, as it deliberately situates itself within French legal culture and engages with debates that are specific to that culture. Reflection on the supposedly “universal” themes within global popular culture and the underlying specificities of the storylines in Spiral can help students perceive systemic and cultural difference at a deep level.

Globalized Muslim Youth in the Asia Pacific: Popular Culture in Singapore and Sydney

Employing the concept of a rhetoric of emotions, European Premodern fine art is revisioned as popular culture. From ancient times, the rhetoric of emotion was one of the principle concepts informing the theory and practice of all forms of European cultural production, including the visual arts, until it was gradually displaced during the 1700s and 1800s by an aesthetic of emotion. Under Modernism, a rhetoric of emotion was repressed when addressing fine art, but it was used to denigrate emotional appeals in popular culture. Where Western fine art was understood to express the uniquely felt emotional reactions of individual artists, popular mass culture was condemned as merely exhibiting emotional symptoms and deliberately arousing viewers’ emotions for base purposes. However, with regard to emotional appeals, many connections exist between Premodern fine art and today’s popular mass culture. Examples include images of emotionalism, sentimentality, horror, violence, exoticism, and eroticism; these appeals are enabled by a similar use of realistic styles, narratives, and formulas.

The public image of scientists, researchers and physicians and their work is not only influenced by what people learn in school or hear in the news. How medicine, science and research are represented in popular and entertainment culture also has an influence on how many people perceive them and what they think about it. In this chapter we will explore various interactions between science, medicine and popular and entertainment culture. For instance, physicians and scientists are also citizens that consume products of popular and entertainment culture. Fictional depictions of science and medicine can sometimes inspire people working in these fields and give them bright ideas. However, representations of science, research and medicine in popular culture can also be heavily biased and wrong. Fictional representations of scientists, researchers, physicians and psychiatrists are also important for the public perception of these fields and keep changing over time. We will explore how the public legitimacy of science and medicine is also connected to depictions of scientists and physicians in entertainment culture. Various scientific institutions have created programmes that ensure that the representations of science and physicians are positive and that the storylines in entertainment programmes are scientifically accurate. Another important aspect in the various relationships between science, medicine and popular culture is the recruitment of young people for biomedical and scientific careers. Here it does help if scientifically literate and tech-savvy people in the entertainment culture of today can be depicted as being “cool”, quite in contrast to depictions of former decades.

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.

First- and second-generation youth of color are vulnerable to racialized images of gender and sexuality as reflected in and perpetuated by dominant forms of popular and consumer cultures. These popular images inform the process of Americanization, including racialized sexualization, for first- and second-generation Americans. This paper examines the way first- and second-generation Asian girls and young women interpret and reinterpret popular representations of their positions in the United States. Data from two qualitative studies on Asian young women will be presented. Scholars from various fields have written about the powerful impact of popular and consumer cultures on youth identities and cultures (Appadurai, 1990; Giroux, 1992, 1994; Pyke, 2000; Silverstone, 1994). For youth from immigrant families, popular and consumer cultures are significant sources of information about America and being American (Olsen, 1997; Pyke, 2000). First- and second-generation youth of color, in general, are affected by the dominant messages of Whiteness, which pervade popular and consumer culture (Olsen, 1997; Pyke, 2000). Young women, in particular, are vulnerable to racialized images of gender and sexuality as reflected in and promoted by dominant forms of popular and consumer cultures. Gender, race, and class inform the process of Americanization, including racialized sexualization, for first- and second-generation Asian young women. This paper examines the way first- and second-generation Asian women interpret and reinterpret popular representations of their positions in the United States. includes a review of the literature, a brief description of two qualitative studies, data from a sample of Asian high school girls and a sample of college students, and discussion of the implications of the findings. POPULAR AND CONSUMER CULTURE AND THE GENDERED RACIALIZATION OF ASIAN AMERICANS Research on immigrant students of color (Lee, 2001b; Lei, 2001; Olsen, 1997) reveals that students undergo a process of racialization as they are incorporated into the existing racial hierarchy of the United States-one that places White people at the top and defines them as the only true Americans. While the formal curriculum and organization of schooling are implicated in this process, popular and consumer cultures, operating both within and outside of schools, leverage considerable power in the creation and re-creation of this racialized notion of identity (Hall, 1995). As cultural studies theorists like Thomas Nakayama (1994) have observed, It is as if there is a natural-as opposed to cultural, social, historical-relation between whiteness and (pp. 168-69). Whiteness, in consumer culture, is both pervasive and invisible as the unmarked norm. Significantly, unmarked Whiteness is a classed racial category, determined by an equally unmarked middle class status, such that the norm for Americanness is both middle class and White (Kenny, 2000; Ong, 2000). Of equal significance is the multiple ways in which Blackness is constructed in popular cultures and by students as the readers or consumers of those cultures. While Whiteness is constructed in dominant popular culture as all that is quintessentially good and right with Americanness, Blackness is constructed as the Other which defines that goodness-it functions to maintain the dichotomy of good and bad in culture and society (hooks, 1989, 1992). As julia Koza (1994) points out, Black rap music is discursively characterized in mainstream media as rejecting what is right and legitimate about dominant (read: White) values. is portrayed as violent, resistant, sexist, and dangerous. Simultaneously, White families are portrayed as the normal family; while Black families, with few notable exceptions, are portrayed as either absent or dysfunctional and deficient. This elaborates Nakayama's point that the collapsing of Whiteness and Americanness is achieved through the construction of a Black-White binary. …

During the second half of the 20th century, the Caribbean island of Barbados emerged as a key player in the creation and nurturing of Caribbean popular music. And, yet, despite its vital role in the popularization of tuk music, the rise of spouge, and the Barbadian contribution to and transformation of other Carribean music traditions, there is still relatively little sustained critical literature that discusses the various strands of the island’s music culture. Curwen Best’s The Popular Music and Entertainment Culture of Barbados provides this long overdue survey of the development of Barbadian popular music and entertainment culture by focusing on pivotal phenomena, artists and movements in the evolution of Barbadian popular music and culture. Best concentrates, in particular, on transformations since 1980 and 2000 respectively, each of which marked the ushering in of new opportunities and challenges to the creation and dissemination of Barbadian popular music. His study considers the telling roles played by the expanding influence of western popular culture, the Internet, post-dancehall and post-soca aesthetics, cyberculture, digital culture, and the subterranean lure of traditional culture. Readers will find especially compelling Best’s analyses of selected artists, musical genres, and phenomena, such as Gabby, Rihanna, Jackie Opel, Alison Hinds, Rupee, Red Plastic Bag, Lil’ Rick, spouge, tuk, ringbang, gospel, dub/dancehall, calypso, soca, folk, alternative, hip hop, Crop Over, Jazz Festival, National Independence Festival of Creative Arts, BajanTube, party politics and entertainment, popular bands, music technology, the Internet and new frontiers of cultural expression. This book will be of significant interest to scholars, students and all those curious about Caribbean popular culture, the popular music of Barbados, and the impact of emerging technologies on cultural development in a small island state.

The application of human rights to mass communication television pro gramming gives rise to a search for entertainment that is empowering. One genre that has managed to es cape the restrictions of commercial Ism and resulted in a genuine form of popular culture is the Brazilian telenovela. Any attempt to relate human rights In communication to popular televi sion culture might seem to be a fu tlle endeavour. Such an attempt ap pears to involve two incompatible Ideas: highmindedness and Ideallsm on the one hand, and free choice and commerciallam on the other. However, there could be a way out. Somewhere there might be a way that popular culture as expressed through television might also be em powering, instead of mainly com mercially exploitative and cynically manipulative. The one example that springs to mind is the telenovela of Brazil. This paper proposes to deal with the concept of human rights and broadcasting, especially as it affects the present SABC, then to look briefly at some concepts of popular culture and then to end off by discussing the Brazilian tele novella as a possible reconciliation of the two opposing Ideas, of human rights and entertainment. This article is based on a paper that was read at a RAU Seminar "Com munication Interactions in popular culture", that was held in Johannes burg on October 22, 1993,