Popular Culture References Research Articles

Teaching and Learning Guide for: ‘Have You Seen Any Good Films Lately?’ Geopolitics, International Relations and Film

Teaching and Learning Guide for: ‘Have You Seen Any Good Films Lately?’ Geopolitics, International Relations and Film

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

Abstract In this essay, I study MySpace and Facebook pages, as well as interviews with the university students who created them, in order to address how online literacy practices of contemporary convergence culture both use and are filtered through popular culture. Though their answers to questions of intent, audience, and rhetorical choices varied, students shared a common reliance on popular culture content and references appropriated from other sites to compose their identities and read the identities of others. They used popular culture icons, catch phrases, music, text, and film clips in postmodern, fragmented collages that seem simultaneously sentimental and ironic. The construction of these pages illustrates how popular culture practices that predate online technologies have been adopted and have flourished with new technologies that allow content to flow across media as well as increase the ease of audience participation. Online technological changes have changed what it means to be part of an “audience” by changing how individuals respond to and adapt popular culture texts to their own ends, such as the construction of identities on web pages. By creating potentially global audiences for any web page, these online technologies have changed the relationship of the popular culture audience members and their peers. The intertextual nature of popular culture texts creates opportunities for multiple readings of social networking web pages in ways that destabilize the identities students believe they have created.

Conservation and Globalization: A Study of National Parks and Indigenous Communities from East Africa to South Dakota

Conservation and Globalization: A Study of National Parks and Indigenous Communities from East Africa to South Dakota. JIM IGOE WADSWORTH/THOMSON LEARNING, BELMONT, CA, 2004. xii + 183 PP. $26.95 PAPERBACK REVIEWED BY JENNIFER COFFMAN The front cover of anthropologist Jim Igoe's book shows a jubilant and matronly woman, perhaps from South Dakota given the book title, with one hand clutching the hand of a warrior, and her other hand firmly wrapped around a beaded rungu, the quintessential symbol of manhood. The woman and warrior dance in front of other warriors, as well as other jubilant, matronly nonMaasai women. What's wrong with this picture? Everything and nothing. warriors don't hold hands with women, let alone older women. But the book cover clearly shows that they do. Women of any age do not carry rungus in Maasailand. Yet, the photo tells another story. The book's cover succinctly conveys the simultaneous normalcy and absurdity that is the intersection of and globalization. How do protected areas attract tourists and their dollars? How do locals make a living? Who gets to design and manage the multiple types of and ecotourism schemes? And most importantly, what has and hasn't worked, according to whose standards? These are the basic, complicated questions that enhance the author's research. He undertakes the challenge of responding to them in this chatty book directed to a young, American audience. With the use of analogies and popular culture references, the author attempts to make controversial issues surrounding accessible and interesting. Though a worthwhile read for practitioners and academics working in East Africa, this book is best suited for undergraduates or high school students, especially in courses dedicated to environmental studies, anthropology, sociology or cultural geography. Drawing mostly on ethnographic research beginning in 1992 in Tanzania, East Africa, the author launches the book with some basic explanations of and contexts for the terms conservation, globalization, ecotourism, and Maasai. This first chapter summarizes the author's experiences with how those four terms-and the ideas they represent-have become complexly intertwined in theTarangire National Park and Simanjiro District, Tanzania. Although some initial passages are inelegantly rendered, the author draws the readers into his narrative through personal anecdotes. Starting with his own trials as a budding cultural anthropologist and tracing the outline of his research over time, he demonstrates the challenges (e.g., gaining entry, accessing authoritative informants, negotiating hostilities among informants) and rewards (e.g., comparative studies based on multiple locales to help determine patterns, as well as aberrations) of multi-sited ethnographic research. Conservation and Globalization finds its stride in the author's passionate critiques of the rise and fall of non-governmental organizations, discussions of which also lead to examinations of the various ways in which conservation has been deployed. These are the threads that run throughout the book. Chapter 2 presents how Maasai resource management-open-access and multiple-use systems that flexibly exploit various ecological niches-clashes with the fixed locales and restricted access of national parks. The author notes that although both systems promote anthropogenic landscapes, the ways in which those landscapes are managed and who manages and benefits from them vary greatly. …

Working for Water's ‘AlienBusters’: Material and metaphoric campaigns against ‘alien invaders’

This article analyses aspects of the ‘AlienBusters’ campaign against ‘invasive aliens’, initiated in 2000 by Working for Water in an attempt to communicate to a broad South African public the urgent national responsibility for the control of invasive alien plants. The campaign was envisaged by the South African Department of Water Affairs and Forestry as a creative intervention in the government's management of environmental issues because it used strategies drawn from advertising and marketing in an attempt to persuade people to change attitudes and behaviours towards invasive alien plants. In addition, the campaign used fiction techniques and popular cultural references in order to attract its audience's attention. However, the discussion highlights tensions among the assumptions and methods that inform the campaign, situating design, image, narrative and characterisation in relation to volatile, often contradictory, forms of lived experience and symbolic meaning. Focusing on the key message platform of the campaign, the AlienBuster comic book, I argue that the campaign mistakenly emphasised metaphoric transcendence and formulaic narrative resolution over a recognition of material vicissitudes, and that this underplayed important aspects of Working for Water's existing social responsibility initiatives of Working for Water, rendering the campaign unable to accommodate the moral-experiential ambiguity associated with forms of environmental ‘alienation’ and ‘belonging’ in contemporary South Africa.

Visions of the maid: Joan of Arc in American film and culture

Representations of of Arc have been used in the United States for the past 200 years, appearing in advertizing, cartoons, popular song, art, criticism and propaganda. The presence of the 15th-century French heroine in the cinema is particularly intriguing in relation to the role of women during wartime. Robin Blaetz argues that a mythic of Arc was used during the First World War to cast a mediaeval glow over an unpopular war, but that she only appeared after the Second World War to encourage women to abandon their wartime jobs and return to the home. In Visions of the Maid, Blaetz examines three pivotal films - Cecil B. DeMille's 1916 the Woman, Victor Fleming's 1948 of Arc, and Otto Preminger's 1957 Saint Joan - along with every other film about the heroine made or distributed in the United States, as well as a broad array of popular culture references. Blaetz is particularly concerned with issues of gender and the ways in which of Arc's androgyny, virginity and sacrificial victimhood were evoked in relation to the evolving roles of women during war throughout the 20th century.