Popular Culture Media Research Articles

Escaping from the City Means More than a Cheap House and a 10-Minute Commute

Escaping from the City Means More than a Cheap House and a 10-Minute Commute

The Femme Fatale inVogue: Femininity Ideologies in Fin-de-siècle America

This article explores how marketing influences ideologies of femininity. Tracing the evolution of femme fatale images in Vogue magazine in 1890s America, we develop a typology around four archetypal forms of the femme fatale that prevailed during this period. In doing so we respond to calls for more critical historical analyses on femininity. While studies on masculinity ideologies proliferate, there is a paucity of research on dissonant representations of femininity in popular culture media. The femme fatale, often a self-determined seductress who causes anguish to the men who become involved with her, is an intriguing and enduring challenge to traditional notions of femininity. Thus, in studying the femme fatale in her historical context and revealing the multiplicity of feminine ideologies contained within this trope, we contribute to a deeper understanding of marketing’s role in both reflecting and reinforcing societal assumptions, attitudes and problematics around gender norms.

Religion in the Mediatized Public Spaces in Scandinavian Countries: Between Secular Neutrality and Nationalism

The following article presents a systematic review of the studies of religion in the mediatized public sphere of Scandinavian countries. The mediatized public sphere is tackled as constituted by interrelated media spaces, those of mass media, the Internet, and religious media and media of popular culture which are specifically organized public spaces, each of which varies in their degree of openness to different publics. A review of the empirical research reveals the specificity of the public (re)presentations of religion in each media space. In the Scandinavian mass media, religious issues are covered within the political frame, and “banalized” (Hjavard, 2013), while religious organizations have few opportunities to influence the representation of religious content. Due to its’ non-strict “entrance fee” and the spread of horizontal links, religious issues are articulated by agents though different ideologies on the Internet. Religious media space is an environment where religious organizations seek to maintain an institutional version of the religious narrative. In the media of popular culture, religious themes as a part of popular culture are interpreted aesthetically, and thus, makes this space a repository of religious meanings and identities that can be used in the course of political and public discussions about religion. The variety of media spaces enables the public circulation of diverse representations of religion, and allows various groups to discuss their ideological articulations of religion. However, this results in the polarization of public debates about religion and the fragmentation of the audience. The proposed model of the media spheres’ division into political spaces can be used as a framework for the analysis of the (re)presentation of religion in the Russian media.

Populäre Medienkulturen. Programmatische Positionen : Popular media cultures. Programmatic positions

The article discusses the relationship between popular cultures, pop cultures and popular media cultures as transformative educational cultures. For this purpose, these three cultural formations are related to the themes of culture, everyday life, society, education, narration, experience and present. Apart from a few exceptions, such as in youth sociological works on cinema and education, in the context of media literacy discussions or in dealing with media education, educational dimensions of popular cultures and pop cultures have generally not been the focus of attention in media and cultural studies.

Populäre Medienkulturen. Programmatische Positionen : Popular media cultures. Programmatic positions

The article discusses the relationship between popular cultures, pop cultures and popular media cultures as transformative educational cultures. For this purpose, these three cultural formations are related to the themes of culture, everyday life, society, education, narration, experience and present. Apart from a few exceptions, such as in youth sociological works on cinema and education, in the context of media literacy discussions or in dealing with media education, educational dimensions of popular cultures and pop cultures have generally not been the focus of attention in media and cultural studies.

Urban visions: Back from the future

The persistent growth of the human civilization, fueled in large part by technological progress has brought upon us a series of very serious challenges. The quality of our overall environment, energy and food supply are subjected to increased pressure, while access to decent employment, housing and medical care remains broadly unequal. According to the current trends most of the world’s future population growth will occur in cities, therefore positioning the city as a key component to solving challenges associated with human development. Based on that assumption, it seems crucial to think about what the city of the future should be and look like. If we look for existing and graphically convincing representation of the city of the future, we are inevitably drawn to popular culture media such as movies and graphic novels. For almost a century, movies in particular have proposed realistic constructs of future urban settlements along with the life associated with them. Based on a number of ideas expressed in motion pictures over the years about urban life in the future, one can argue that both past and recent predictions tend to be technologically optimistic but socially and environmentally pessimistic. This paper proposes to identify and discuss a number of challenges as well as opportunities associated with urban development in the next 100 to 200 years and present a series of urban visions to illustrate both positive and negative trends.

‘It’s what Emmeline Pankhurst would have wanted’: Celebrity Big Brother: Year of the Woman (2018, UK) and negotiations of popular feminism(s)

ABSTRACTFeminist scholarship has invested attention in popular culture as a terrain upon which understandings of feminism are circulated, contested and explored. This is particularly so in the contemporary moment in which feminism appears to have achieved a new ascendency. But whilst popular culture and feminism are recognised as inextricably enmeshed, there remains the implicit or explicit assumption in feminist scholarship that popular media culture could do ‘better’, and that there is a more ‘authentic’ form of feminism waiting to find representation. In response to this context, this article undertakes an analysis of Twitter responses to Celebrity Big Brother: Year of the Woman (2018) in order to explore the ways in which a popular media text provides an arena for the negotiation of popular feminism. Rather than positioning reality TV and celebrity culture as a site of ‘ideological ruin’ for feminism, this article explores how CBB is discussed in relation to feminism as popular television, and the ways in which this may offer affordances and limitations. The article concludes that feminist media scholars need to give due attention to the complexities of popular feminism as articulated by popular media culture.

Self-perceived use of popular culture media franchises: Does gratification impact multiple exposures?

Self-perceived use of popular culture media franchises: Does gratification impact multiple exposures?

Preschool children’s play and alignments in a bracketed framing of a music-technological breakdown

Music technologies are becoming important in children's play in everyday life, but research on children's communication and interaction in such activities is still scarce. This study examines three children's social interaction in an 'experimental' activity in preschool, when the music technology breaks down. Detailed analysis is carried out by using a Goffmanian approach. The findings illustrate the children's interpretive framings of the adult's introduction and their orientation to the technological material in order to perform different alignments and how they change footings. The children's social interaction is organised according to the playful framing of the bracketed activity. This suggests the significance to pay attention to children's definitions of situations and to consider children's experiences of participation in popular media culture.

Zainteresowanie tekstami o tematyce dystopicznej i postapokaliptycznej wśród uczniów w wieku gimnazjalnym


 Cel badań Celem badania było rozpoznanie tych zainteresowań czytelniczych nastolatków, które odnoszą się do tekstów kultury o tematyce postapokaliptycznej i dystopicznej. Wychodząc od założeń dotyczących popularności tego typu fabuł (Czaja, Głażewski, Nijaszewski, Polak) poprzez odniesienia do zagadnień dotyczących kultury popularnej i kultury medialnej (Wałaszewski, Melosik, Krajewski) oraz kwestię funkcjonowania w społeczeństwie współczesnym (Giddens, Appadurai), Autorka relacjonuje i omawia uczniowskie wskazania i refleksje, zebrane podczas badania ankietowego. Poczynając od teoretycznego ujęcia fascynacji fabułami postapokaliptycznymi i dystopicznymi, teksty kultury omówione zostały pod kątem ich oddziaływania na uczniów nastoletnich, osadzenia współczesnego adolescenta w kulturze konwergencji oraz potencjału dydaktycznego zaproponowanych przez uczniów tytułów.
 Metoda
 Przedmiotem rozważań staną się w głównej mierze wyniki badania ankietowego, przeprowadzonego wśród 59 nastoletnich respondentów na początku roku 2017 podczas współorganizowanych przez Autorkę lekcji warsztatowych. Część pierwsza ankiety wymagała od uczniów podania tytułów znanych im utworów postapokaliptycznych i dystopicznych pochodzących kolejno z książek, filmów i gier komputerowych oraz wskazania tych cech fabularnych, które respondenci uznali za najbardziej interesujące. Część druga pozwoliła uczniom na zaprezentowanie swojego stanowiska w dwóch kwestiach: powodu, dla którego polecają rówieśnikom tego typu pozycje oraz powodu, dla którego, ich zdaniem, powinny one wybrzmieć jako kontekst podczas lekcji języka polskiego (Janus-Sitarz, Nowak).
 Wyniki
 Autorka, na podstawie uczniowskich odpowiedzi, uwypukla cechy odbioru tekstów kultury przez współczesnych nastolatków. Zwraca również uwagę na zagadnienia, które porusza literatura postapokaliptyczna i dystopiczna, a które stają się dla uczniów ważne i wymagające uwzględnienia również w dydaktyce przedmiotowej.
 Wnioski
 Obecne w tego typu literaturze połączenie uniwersalnych problemów jednostki z niebezpieczeństwem związanym z funkcjonowaniem we współczesnym świecie, pozwala na kontekstowe odniesienia, może stanowić przyczynek do dyskusji i debat w klasie, uruchamia również możliwość kształcenia u uczniów krytycznej interpretacji tekstu.

Introduction: ageing celebrities, ageing fans, and ageing narratives in popular media culture

In 2012, Celebrity Studies published a special issue entitled ‘Back in the Spotlight: Female Celebrity and Ageing’. In her introduction, special issue editor Deborah Jermyn asks when it is that a w...

Social media in education contexts: implicationsfor critical media literacy and ethical challenges for teachers and educational institutions in Namibia

The proliferation of social media and its use by students has raised a lot of research interest in attempts to seek ways of appropriating these new technologies for instructional and learning purposes. Critical media literacy deals with the critical analysis of various popular culture media in terms of their ideological and power implications, as well as the meaning of their messages. Although critical media literacy views new media as beneficial in their democratised nature, concerns remain about students’ ability to decipher and analyse the content that they both consume and create through social media. The two can be termed critical consumption and creation respectively. Similarly, social media poses potential ethical challenges for the teaching profession and for educational institutions. This is a qualitative research that employed the Phenomenography method where data was collected through focus group interviews. The paper sheds light on student teachers’ current social media practices. Analysing student teachers’ social media practices through the lens of critical media literacy, the paper highlights potential ethical challenges that are encountered while using social media in educational contexts. Recommendations include critical and ethically considerate approaches to using social media in educational contexts, as well as methods of incorporating the teaching critical media literacy skills in teacher education curricula.

Gendered ageing bodies in popular media culture

Grace and Frankie (2015 to present), the Netflix original about two 70-year-old women who become unlikely friends after their respective husbands confess they have been in love with each other for ...

The Fourth Reich: Ishmael's Reed's The Terrible Twos and the Triumph of Celebrity Culture

AbstractDonald Trump's rise to the U.S. presidency was foretold in many 20th century works of dystopian fiction as well as Western Marxist scholarship written during and after the Nazi era. The most prescient modern dystopian novel, Ishmael Reed's The Terrible Twos (1982), has much in common thematically with earlier American dystopian fiction while also sharing the bleak vision of U.S. mass (media) culture postulated by Frankfurt School theorists such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). But Reed's novel diverges dramatically from these earlier writings, whether fictive or scholarly, through its farcical and absurdist postmodernist depiction of a future neo‐fascist America in which popular (media) culture reigns triumphant even as spaces of resistance take shape amid the seemingly overdetermined ideological and cultural landscape.

Introduction: Scotch on the Box: Television Drama in Scotland, 1952–1990

Despite its position as possibly the most ubiquitous of all post-Second World War popular cultural media forms, and the wealth of existing scholarship on multiple aspects of British TV drama, telev...

대중문화매체에서 문화콘텐츠로서의 무속의 양상 연구 : 영화 ‘박수건달’을 중심으로

우리의 역사에서 무속은 우리 문화와 민중 신앙의 일부이지만 과거로부터 긍정적인 인식이 아니라 부정적인 인식을 가지고 있다. 일제 식민지 시대와 더불어 진행된 근대화 시대에 무속은 반 문명의 누명과 함께 한국 사회에서 외면 받는 미신으로 여겨졌다. 그러나 시대변화와 대중의 인식이 변화함에 따라 최근에는 무속과 무속인(무당)이 방송을 위한 중요한 소재가 되었다. 이 논문에서는 샤머니즘을 영화‘박수건달’의 문화 콘텐츠를 중심으로 살펴보았다. 본 연구에서는 이 영화에서 등장하는 무속적 요소들을 제의적 요소와 그 외 다른 요소들로 크게 분류하였다. 우선 제의적 요소에는‘내림 굿’과‘풍어제’그리고 그 외 요소들로,‘귀신보기’,‘영매능력’,‘점보기’로 나타난다. 이들 무속적 요소들은 인간성 회복의 매개체로 작용하여 광호가

The Sex that God Can’t See: Heteronormativity, Whiteness, and the Erasure of Queer Desire in Popular Media

Research Article| June 01 2017 The Sex that God Can’t See: Heteronormativity, Whiteness, and the Erasure of Queer Desire in Popular Media Elizabeth Whitney Elizabeth Whitney Elizabeth Whitney is an assistant professor in the Department of Speech, Communications, and Theatre Arts at the Borough of Manhattan Community College in the City University of New York. During the 2015–2016 academic year she was a Fulbright Scholar in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Turku, Finland, researching arts funding and freedom of expression in a Nordic context. Her research interests include performance, gender, and popular culture media. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking (2017) 4 (2): 143–149. https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.4.2.0143 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Elizabeth Whitney; The Sex that God Can’t See: Heteronormativity, Whiteness, and the Erasure of Queer Desire in Popular Media. QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 1 June 2017; 4 (2): 143–149. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.4.2.0143 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressQED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2017 Michigan State University2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Enter as an outsider: Teaching organizational humility.

The concept of cultural humility acknowledges the enormous task of becoming culturally competent by encouraging curiosity about the context within which others live. For physicians, this includes curiosity about the organizations in which they work as Outsiders in settings such as a new hospital or patients' homes. However, efforts to train healthcare professionals in cultural competence are often de-emphasized due to the pressure learners feel to acquire Medical Knowledge and clinical skills. Little time is devoted to address the significance of cultural humility for fully appreciating the experiences of others. Efforts to educate physicians-in-training about the cultural aspects of care require innovative approaches that help them recognize bias without provoking defensiveness. Enter as an Outsider is a highly focused activity which fosters a culturally humble approach to an often neglected problem, organizational bias. This article describes how cultural humility is explained to learners and small group activities are used to explore the thoughts and feelings of an organization's Insiders and Outsiders. This program relies on instructor self-disclosure to facilitate learning and on a video vignette from popular-culture media to illustrate being an Outsider in a healthcare setting. Participants in this training have improved their ability to recognize when they are Outsiders where they provide care. They have developed a better understanding that cultural humility in organizations is a gateway to providing quality care. They have begun the process of committing to respectfully learn from the organization's Insiders.

Bigger, Stronger, Faster, czyli amerykański sen nie jest dla każdego, a sport to jedno wielkie oszustwo

The author analyses the 2009 documentary film Bigger, Stronger, Faster, which investigates the nature of American pop culture and sports. Writing from the perspective of cultural anthropology and sociology, he considers how ideas about the body and physicality are programmed by popular media culture and famous sports figures and celebrities, who are treated as models of masculinity and mass media heroes. He also raises the issue of the influence of illegal pharmaceutical doping on contemporary American sports. All these subjects serve to describe the form and functioning of America’s contemporary collective identity and the connection between the authorities, television, sports entertainment, and politics. The United States described in the documentary is a real and existing utopia, which Americans and other people have dreamt and still dream about, and which everyone believes in—not only the recipients of popular media culture and sports entertainment.

‘. . . But Is It Literature?’

As a hybrid between ‘high’ literature and ‘trivial’ comics, graphic adaptations have been the subject of extensive debate in Germany. This article discusses the specific cultural conditions of graphic adaptation in Germany, which have been influenced by a process of emancipation from deeply rooted prejudice against comics as a medium of popular culture. To illustrate the changes brought about by the term ‘graphic novel’ around 2000, this article analyses two examples of a newer generation of graphic adaptation in detail. Flix’s Faust (2009–2010) and Drushba Pankow’s Das Fräulein von Scuderi [Mademoiselle de Scudery] (2011) represent a new self-confident approach to classic literature, but they also reflect on their own status as adaptations and thus contribute to ‘closing the gap’ between ‘high’ and popular culture.