Greetings and Salutations
Welcome to the first post on Teaching Popular Culture, a blog for anyone interested in teaching and studying popular culture in the academic environment, no matter your discipline, degree status, or affiliation. We hope to include classroom activities, conference reports, mainstream and academic coverage of teaching and studying popular culture, and discussion and debates on major questions in the field. We will also host any calls for papers on aspects of popular culture that we see fit, and any resources we find or favor on academic popular culture work.Popular culture studies is almost thirty years old and includes scholars from disciplines such as communications, English, media and film studies, women's studies, ethnic studies, American studies and sociology. Ray Browne, interviewed here by Americana is generally considered a major figure in the history of popular culture studies and also the founder of the only graduate program in popular culture studies. While popular culture studies has permeated numerous fields in the humanities and social sciences, it's value and validity are still challenged by more traditional scholars. Therefore, we feel that popular culture scholars need a supportive environment in which to share their practices, ideas, and theories with each other in a free and open forum accessible by anyone.
Want to submit a post, call for papers, question for discussion or conference report? Let us know! We welcome input from anyone and everyone in the academic popular culture community. Email us at teachpopculture (at) gmail (dot) com with any and all suggestions.
posted by jackie @ 8:18 PM
4 Comments:
Congrats on your new blog. I don't teach popular culture, but I do have a question for those who do. I have family and friends in academia, and it seems like one of the side effects of studying a particular topic is that you can grow to hate it over the years. Is that the case with teaching pop culture? And if so, how do you get over it?
It has certainly cut down on my popular culture consumption, and made me much more selective, which I find is a benefit to me. Also, I do sometimes find myself wishing that I could immerse myself in something more *substantial* and less ephemeral, which I try to do on my own time. I also get disgusted more quickly with a great majority of popular culture, but try to use that in the classroom and challenge students to think about the culture they are consuming as well.
I'm looking forward to reading the blog further...
The reason why (well, one of the main reasons why) my dissertation remains unfinished is that my former diss chair was a professor in the Visual and Cultural Studies Department and my dissertation is (was) very much an interdisciplinary work rooted pretty firmly in popular culture and in the idea of literary texts as "products" of popular culture.
My chair (a well-know member of the Cultural Studies community) left to take a position in CA and I was left with a new committee who think little of cult. studies or interdisciplinary works/methods. So I think the debate between "high" lit and cult. studies is, alas, too alive and well.
Yes, it is indeed, which is still surprising to me. That's terrible luck about your dissertation, too
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