Popular Culture

LOST exemplifies a contemporary American prime-time series that exhibits both serial and episodic traits and, thanks to technological developments, has proliferated across many different platforms allowing for a deepening of its hyperdiegetic world. This paper will examine how Lost’s non-linear narrative structure, using flashbacks and flash forwards, serves to provide a linear development of story and character while also creating an implicit promise of narrative resolution and final closure. However, as I will argue using a close study of Lost’s fifth season finale, recent developments have extended and problematised the non-linear framework that has structured the show’s development from the beginning. Instead of the promise of a story that can, despite a complex non-linear narrative, be reconstituted in linear terms, the increasing complexity of Lost’s narrative has opened up the possibility of a radical act of de-narration that threatens to erase an entire five seasons’ worth of story.

Arts-based Education in Outdoor Learning is a compendium of artistic endeavour created for the purposes of learning. The contents stem mainly from teaching BA undergraduate Outdoor students at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, UK, showcased here to promote critical discussion on Outdoor issues and foster pedagogical progress wherever that may be found. This introduction outlines the structure of the book, which also illuminates the plan of teaching that has brought about such a vibrant collection of chapters. The ethos of my educational mission has been for students to become philosophical about things, ‘having ideas’ with a view to making a comment about some state of affairs in the Outdoors. With a nugget of an idea latched on to, fuelled with some passion, the next step was to transform that idea into some physical presence through an artistic medium; shape it. Thereafter, the academic task was to polish and present the artwork with a supporting chapter, in order to communicate their idea to the world; share it. The creation of art in this context was always a means to an educational end, the artworks being an impressive by-product from this experience – but now the artworks are leading the show, representing the style of education we enjoyed. It seems worth mentioning at the outset, that all the Outdoor students I have taught are not artists, they are climbers, canoeists and mountaineers. They never came to university to do or study art and nor did I teach them as such. If I have done anything, it was to free up the possibility of thinking slightly differently about topics they chose, and then equip them with some basic artistic tools to play with those ideas. As a result, I discovered a huge increase in student confidence and a palpable increase in enjoyment of learning, as much for me as their teacher as for them. In effect, what I did was invite into my classroom a raft of untapped talent in thinking and learning that suddenly had a place in their university degrees. Students were writing home asking parents to dig out their pencils and painting sets that they had at school, as there was now an urgent need to express an idea in a creative way. On this point, and towards a student-centred introduction to this book, I invite the reader to turn to the last chapter (chpt 40) Student Voices: living and learning through art and the outdoors which provides a sense of the endeavour, commitment and learning experiences from a selection of student authors in this volume.

This book argues that the mythic figure of the zombie, so prevalent and powerful in contemporary culture, provides the opportunity to explore certain social models - such as 'childhood' and 'school', 'class' and 'family' - that so deeply underpin educational policy and practice as to be rendered invisible. It brings together authors from a range of disciplines to use contemporary zombie typologies - slave, undead, contagion - to examine the responsiveness of everyday practices of schooling such as literacy, curriculum and pedagogy to the new contexts in which children and young people develop their identities, attitudes to learning, and engage with the many publics that make up their everyday worlds.

The role of food in literature, art and film has been receiving a lot of critical attention lately. Food is not just a matter for the sustenance of life and its cultural and sociological significance is often discussed. Recently numerous studies have scrutinized texts to read meaning into the instances of eating and drinking in art. In the creative circle, food is frequently laden with a symbolic role and has a rhetorical function to perform. So often has this been practiced that it has resulted in a film food genre. Chocolat directed by Lasse Hallstrom is a film belonging to this genre. Chocolate, here, is more than an item of food. It is the exotic 'other'. It is the consummation of sin. It mediates the struggle between conventions and forces of change. The richness of Vianne's chocolates lends the movie its sumptuous richness. This paper intends to examine how chocolate breaks down the Catholic fortress to bend to the winds of change.

An analysis of the debates around net neutrality in India in 2015, with the release of a consultation paper by TRAI, and the release of a viral video by AIB (All India Bakchod) and how behaviour on Twitter and YouTube contributed to the mobilization.

Many people are offended and upset when they first hear about the study of ‘invented religions’. This is generally caused by two things. First, because these people are often religious themselves or have a view of religion that is based on what religious people think is ‘true’ religion. This generally means that religions must be hundreds or thousands of years old, have scriptures that are ancient and that don’t change, and have large, impressive buildings like medieval Christian cathedrals or Buddhist temples, that are believed to be great works of art. This means ‘invented religions’ (which started appearing in the 1950s) are too new and are therefore not respectable.

The second reason why ‘invented religions’ cause offence is because they are usually based on fictions, which many people think are frivolous and less important than factual (historical, for example) texts. Jediism take inspiration from the Star Wars films of George Lucas, the Church of All Worlds was based on Robert A. Heinlein’s science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), Matrixism was based on the Wachowskis’ film trilogy which began with The Matrix (1999), and Tië eldaliéva, the Elven Spiritual Path, was based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. This generally means they are regarded as parody religions, or types of fandom, and therefore not worth studying.

This lecture marks ten years of studying ‘invented religions’ for me, and will cover different aspects of these religions (for example, those that align best with science, those that have become part of modern Paganism, those that have a close affinity with performance art), and will also cover the major ways these religions have been studied (narratological analysis of books, internet and new media studies, and as examples of human creativity, for example).

This paper analyzes the prehistory of the War on Terror to explore how the meanings counterterrorists attributed to “terrorism” in the 1990s. A Tom Clancy novel, Rainbow Six, read in the context American cultural shifts in the 1990s surrounding capitalism, technology, globalization, and gender, reveal a counterterrorist fantast of mirroring terrorist dissociation from state institutions to engage in extralegal practices. These tactics range from breaking international law to torture, anticipating the War on Terror. The paper concludes with a consideration of the possibility that 9/11 may have slipped into a pre-existing cultural narrative rather than starting a new one.

The article explores Tyrion Lannister's rule in King's Landing in the second volume of A Song of Ice and Fire books, A Clash of Kings. In the reception of ASOIAF and the TV show Game of Thrones, Tyrion was considered one of the best rulers, and the TV show ended by making him Hand to a king who delegated the greatest part of ruling to him. The analysis is based on Foucault's notion of monstrosity in power, which is characterized by a monstrous conduct and includes the excess and potential abuse of power. The article argues that monstrosity in his rule reveals deeper layers in Tyrion's personality, which is initially suggested to be defined by morality. The article also comes to the conclusion that his morality limits the scope of his monstrous methods, which eventually leads to his fall from power.

Die Auswirkungen struktureller Diskriminierung in Form von Audismus werden gegenwärtig gesellschaftlich und politisch unterschätzt. Privile-gien, die sich für Menschen durch die Fähigkeit, zu hören, ergeben, bleiben tauben Menschen verwehrt. Es wird deshalb in der vorliegenden Arbeit an-genommen, dass die Lebensrealität hörender Menschen zu Nachteilen für taube Menschen führt. Die Diskriminierungen, die taube Menschen tagtäg-lich in vielen wichtigen Lebensbereichen innerhalb der hörenden Gesell-schaft erfahren, bleiben jedoch im Diskurs unsichtbar (Tuccoli 2008, 23 f.). Beispielhaft für die daraus anzunehmenden Spannungen zwischen der tau-ben sprachlich-kulturellen Minderheit und der hörenden Mehrheit soll im Folgenden das Phänomen der "kulturellen Aneignung" von Gebärdenspra-che und der diesbezügliche Diskurs-ausgelöst durch den Eurovision Song-contest (ESC) 2017-stehen und untersucht werden. Ziel der Arbeit ist es, eine wissenschaftliche Grundlage anzubieten, um auf deren Basis den Diskurs über "kulturelle Aneignung", Audismus und hearing privileges breiter und fundierter führen zu können. Sie greift das im Postkolonialismus geprägte Konzept der "kulturellen Aneignung" auf und beleuchtet dabei mithilfe der Kritischen Diskursanalyse nach Jäger (2015) die Reproduktion struktureller Diskriminierung. Die Analyse des Diskur-ses wirft Schlaglichter auf seine Aspekte und Argumente und versucht, die-se zu entschlüsseln. Dabei werden verschiedene Subjektpositionen sowie Diskursverschränkungen,-brüche und-verschiebungen sichtbar gemacht.

In 2007, the Dera Sacha Sauda (DSS) guru Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh Insan wore an attire similar to calendar image of tenth Sikh guru, Guru Gobind Singh, and performed a ritual baptism, which became controversial. This article will show how this controversy opens up two significant issues: first, questioning the egalitarian ethos of caste equality upheld by the Sikh religion, and second, with regard to authenticity of religious practice – of what is deemed Sikh and non/un-Sikh practices. The controversy became the fulcrum for questions of visuality and material practices around imageries of Sikh gurus in the domain of popular religiosity and visual culture. This historically relates to the much-debated status of images around gurus in contemporary Punjab. The image and ritual become a crucial site of conflict with regard to questions of Sikh identity, religion and caste. Questions of iconoclasm, authenticity and representation have emerged around the images—largely audio-visual in nature--of the Sikh gurus. In this article I will analyse music video/s that engages with the genre of Sikhi (Sikh principles or faith) highlighting crisis in Sikh identity through lyrical and visual references, for instance to the institutions of popular religion, such as Deras. I then mainly argue that the DSS event cannot be grasped without understanding the modes of engagement and ritual practices around images of Sikh gurus. Such an analysis will not only underline contestations around the ‘vexed’ status of images comprising both Sikh and Dera gurus but will also critique the normative understanding of Sikh identity and religion.

Ishinomori Shōtarō (石ノ森 章太郎) provided the blueprint for the rewriting of history in Japanese graphic art.  In Japan the hyperbole of his name ‘forest of stone’ is also synonymous with a plethora of other superlatives.  Ishinomori not only wrote the prototype for the first gakushū (学習) manga on economics , defined a new graphic genre in the process and thus paved the way for ‘serious’ manga to enter the educational discourse in Japan, but also holds the Guinness Book World Record for the most pages drawn by a single artist; totaling more than 128,000 pages. As if this was not enough, Ishinomori raised the bar by almost single-handedly penning the first comprehensive history of the Japanese Archipelago in his magnum opus Manga Nihon no Rekishi (マンガ日本の歴史; Manga A History of Japan). This voluminous compendium marks an attempt at historiographical analysis of Japanese history from its ancient ancestral roots right up to the contemporary world.  Despite the transcultural renaissance of manga on a global scale the neglect of his work from the discourse of Japanese cultural representation is somewhat surprising. 

Whereas books on the likes of Tezuka Osamu and the lesser known but still influential Yoshihiro Tatsumi have been highly appraised recently,  Ishinomori,  - usually labelled as a science fiction manga artist - as one of the founding fathers of the modern manga media is hardly discussed in the Western press. With this contradiction in mind this paper will evaluate the position of Ishinomori’s graphic analects of Japan in comparison to several other archetypes of graphic histories such as Yokoyama Mitsuteru’s Sangokushi (Romance of the Three Kingdoms, 1971-1986), Tezuka Osamu’s Hi no tori (Phoenix, 1978-1995) and Mizuki Shigeru’s Comikku Showa-Shi (Hereafter: Comic History of Shōwa, 1988-1989). The paper will demonstrate how Ishinomori’s representation of Japanese history in manga constitutes a new form of literacy that enables the visualisation of historical artefacts in relation to contentious issues of Japanese identity and memory formation.

This essay analyzes the comic book superhero as a popular figure whose queer-ness follows as much from the logic of the comics medium and the aesthetic principles of the genre as it does from a dialectic tension between historically evolving heteronormative and queer readings. Focusing specifically on the superbody as an overdetermined site of gendered significances, the essay traces a shift from the ostensibly straight iterations in the early years of the genre to the more recent appearance of openly queer characters. It further suggests that the struggle over the superbody's sexual orientation and gender identity has been an essential force in the development of the genre from its inception until the present day.

Scopo dichiarato dell’ordine dei cavalieri di Santo Stefano, fondato nel 1561 da Cosimo I de’ Medici anche per motivi di legittimazione dinastica, fu la difesa della cristianità dalla minaccia ottomana. La politica aggressiva nei confronti dei Turchi, praticata attraverso la guerra di corsa e gli attacchi per mare alle piazzeforti ottomane in vari punti del Mediterraneo, praticata in modo ancora moderato da Cosimo e Francesco de’ Medici, venne ripresa con forza da Ferdinando I, che ne fece un fiore all’occhiello del Granducato nel confronto con le analoghe attività delle altre potenze europee, e poi soprattutto da suo figlio Cosimo II e suo nipote Ferdinando II. In coincidenza con i tre granduchi l’uso di strumenti di comunicazione e propaganda relativi alle imprese navali dei cavalieri, relativamente poco presente fino alla fine del Cinquecento, divenne un progetto sistematico che vide nella prima metà del Seicento la pubblicazione di numerose relazioni, la loro ristampa in altre città italiane, e la loro traduzione, ristampa, o ripresa anche in altre nazioni europee (soprattutto in Spagna), con il coinvolgimento nella veicolazione complessiva dei contenuti anche di intellettuali come il poeta Gabriello Chiabrera. Il saggio mette in rilievo il carattere sistematico della produzione di relazioni sulle imprese dei cavalieri di Santo Stefano contro i Turchi nel corso del Seicento, illuminandone gli aspetti produttivi e il successo editoriale, ed evidenziandone anche i rapporti con la produzione di tipo più letterario.

This book chapter, published as part of the edited volume "Empirical Comics Research (Routledge, 2018), puts forward a quantitative approach to the study of comics by introducing a stylistic analysis of a corpus of around 240 graphic novels, graphic memoirs and other non-fiction.

Die Videoplattform TikTok basiert zu einem großen Anteil von implizitem Wissen: Memes und Songschnipsel werden innerhalb weniger Stunden imitiert, variiert und ironisiert. Entwickelt sich diese Dynamik zwar bei allen sozialen Netzwerken, erreicht sie in den 15-sekündigen-TikTok-Videos eine extreme Geschwindigkeit.

Auch in ihrem Wachstum ist die chinesische App aller Konkurrenz voraus: Seit seinem Launch im Jahr 2017 wächst TikTok schneller als jedes andere Soziale Netzwerk der Welt. Und bereits heute ist der Einfluss auf die Musikindustrie hat, sichtbar: Nicht nur prägt TikTok die rezeptive und kreative musikalische Praxis zahlreicher Teens und Prä-Teens auf der ganzen Welt. Auch professionelle Musikproduzenten veröffentlichen immer kürzere Songs. Die durchschnittliche Länge eines Billboard-Top-100-Tracks sank in den letzten fünf Jahren, in letzter Zeit sicher auch wegen TikTok, um 20 Sekunden auf dreieinhalb Minuten.

This paper investigates the way in which the perception of fan behavior is directly correlated to the demographic of the fan. The purpose of this paper is to break down the two styles of fandom, curative and creative, and theorize on how and why these fandoms tend to be more male or female using gender and media theory.

Originally written in 2015 as a final cap stone project for Masters Degree in Media Studies for The New School for Public Engagement.

Przysługujący widmom wywrotowy, niemalże rewolucyjny potencjał został odsunięty oraz zagubiony poprzez pozbycie się tej kontrowersyjnej kategorii z terytorium metafizyki i zbyt pośpieszne odesłanie jej do przestrzeni badań nad literaturą, sprowadzając ją jedynie do roli użytecznego, bezpiecznego narzędzia interpretacji.

Książka Andrzeja Marca odzyskuje niepokojący charakter widmontologii i ponownie wprowadza widma do myśli metafizycznej. Czym nawiedzona i przeniknięta jest tradycyjna metafizyka, co właściwie ją dręczy, nie daje spokoju oraz nieustannie podmywa jej stabilność?

Kategoria widma Derridy posłużyła Marcowi przede wszystkim do rozważań nad charakterem współczesności i przeobrażeń, jakie dokonały się w obrębie myśli ponowoczesnej. Współczesna kultura, zdaniem Marca, stała się miejscem powstawania widm, nieustannie powracających z przeszłości. Uznając, że nie jesteśmy już w stanie tworzyć utopijnych wizji przyszłości, autor stara się zdać sprawę z widmowego charakteru współczesnej kultury, analizując m. in. strategie vintage, retro, nurt no future w kulturze lat 70. czy nurt fantastyki naukowej w literaturze.

This short essay explores the meaning of crossing borders in contemporary times. Borders are proliferating at a rapid rate, and paradoxically they are also being eroded at a rapid rate. This essay claims that this 'making and unmaking of borders' has a profound social impact, and is a central concern in our personal lives and in wider societal and political realms. The making and unmaking of borders produces fear, anxiety, security, liberation and emancipation depending on where you are in relation to the border. Dr Western explores borders utilising a psycho-social lens, revealing how we constantly have to cross and navigate borders, in the 'real world', digital and virtual world, and in our emotional worlds.

During the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, Kanye West famously interrupted Taylor Swift's acceptance speech for "Best Female Video." A year later both performers returned to the VMAs with songs that responded directly to the original incident. In the meantime, the U.S. media and record-buying public had come to interpret the original incident using the stock scripts and characters of what Linda Williams has called “U.S. racial melodrama,” the fact of which both performers seemed aware. In this way, the Swift-West “incident” had come to reflect and mimic larger racial tensions, especially between black men and white women, as they had specifically come to be understood and portrayed during the Obama presidency, which many commentators have hastily and incorrectly identified as a symptom of “post-racialism.” This essay discusses how Kanye West and Taylor Swift reflect on and revise the tropes of racial melodrama, in the latter case to reinforce what Charles Mills calls "the epistemology of ignorance" when it comes to racism in America, and in the former case to challenge it.

A vlog is a personal video diary in which the vlogger addresses an online audience. This master thesis deals with the vlogger’s discourse in order to understand what it means to express an embodied self in an online environment. It presents theoretical frameworks to analyze the act of vlogging and offers case studies to explore these practices.
The practice of vlogging transcends domains that we have traditionally learned to keep apart, such as private and public, real and fake, self and other, body and virtuality. This thesis argues that vlogging is a transboundary practice in which vloggers easily cross the rigid borders between domains that have traditionally been kept apart. It creates new relations between ourselves and the world around us, causing us to rethink our ideas about identity and ourselves. The vlogger’s discourse is a new domain in which hybrid bodies emerge that are able to find new unities within these transboundary practices.

With the culture and identity-related events in Europe such as the Charlie Hebdo case, the need to reconsider the situation of Turkish people in Europe and their Muslim identity has (re)emerged. As it has been long acknowledged, culture is a socially and historically constructed term, which has been shaped by a number of common components including a shared history, language, and religion. During the construction process of culture, certain factors play initial roles to construct and maintain a culture repertoire to be presented to the society. Itamar-Even Zohar terms this process of choosing what to be presented to the society as " making of a culture repertoire ". By referring to his theory, this paper aims to discuss the perception/identity of being Turkish in Europe as a part of the process of constructing a specific " culture repertoire ". Within this brief background, the movies directed by European directors such as Die Fremde by Feo Aladag and Takiye: Allah Yolunda by Ben Verbong; and the movies directed by Turkish directors, namely Kuma by Umut Dağ and Gegen die Wand by Fatih Akın dealing with Turkish migrants in Europe are interpreted. It is possible to argue that deliberate actions, choices, and bias play crucial roles in representing and narrating a specific culture to another cultural majority and shape the perception regarding the represented culture. Moreover, when the tragic events overlap with fiction, the " culture repertoire " presented to a target audience becomes reinforced through repeated narratives. Keywords Constructivism, Culture Repertoire, Turkish Migrants in Europe, Movies as Cultural goods and tools.

The World War II has divided Japanese history between what came before and what came behind. After been defeated in 1945, a new narrative of postwar Japan, separated for the militarized past one was constructed.
Manga, or Japanese comics, have traditionally been a significant part of Japanese popular culture. As a popular medium of social expression, manga added a visual form that helped disseminate the new narratives and perspectives to a mass audience. However, manga works are closely connected to Japanese history and culture. Then they reflect not only the reality of Japanese society but also their myths, beliefs and fantasies they have about themselves. The representation of the war in manga shows in a certain way how Japanese postwar society attempted to deal with the war and how Japan came to be what it is today.
My goal is to study how World War II was remembered and depicted in Japanese comic art during the postwar and to understand which narratives were accepted and which were rejected by the society in order to configure the idea of Japanese Nation; which narratives differs from the official discourse of the role of Japan in the War, and which ones
strengthens it.
The fixation of certain war representations and the expressions used to describe them implies that certain dominant interpretative codes were strengthened and privileged above others. The configuration of one hegemonic memory was necessary for the construction of a social imaginary as the notion of nation, but it led Japanese to think Japan within a victimhood paradigm for a long time.

The essay that launched Afrofuturism. Introductory essay, in which the term is coined and theorized in depth, followed by interviews exploring the idea with leading African-American cultural theorists. From the collection FLAME WARS, edited by Mark Dery, 01/1994; Duke University Press., ISBN: 0822315408.

In looking at these two tropes of horror we have exposed a few underlying tropes within the American psyche. It is clear that although American society has externally appeared to have moved away from the view that the white male is the ideal state that internally it has not. By looking at it’s art, and we may call horror film art within the understanding that art is an expression of the self, we find a very different sentiment.

This thesis contends that (and demonstrates how) Rick Riordan’s children’s novel The Lightning Thief (2005) provides an illustration of some of the characteristics of present-day American society and identity, aspects of which are so recent that they are yet to be widely portrayed in children’s literature. This thesis focuses on five such characteristics: the association of ancient Greek characters with American cultural icons; the juxtaposition of ancient Greek and contemporary American treatments of sex and alcohol, particularly in relation to children; the engagement with emerging social norms around father-less households, including a re-gendering of the evil stepparent stereotype; the use of female stereotypes to support the male hero; and, finally, a depiction of financial transactions that engage with wider economic values occurring in America at the time of writing. Ultimately, this examination of a recent example of American children’s literature provides an insight into the stories American society is telling its children about itself; stories that children will use to help navigate, interpret and define their world.

In the years after World War II, American Pentecostal discourse revolved around a separation narrative. The authors of the narrative asserted that Pentecostalism’s success depended on the ability of the movement to remain separate from American popular culture, which was overwhelmingly shaped by mass consumption and mass media. Promoters of the narrative believed that Pentecostals were becoming too assimilated into mainstream American life with the result being a loss of Pentecostal distinctiveness and desensitization to cultural immorality. This thesis will argue that the separation narrative functioned as an idealized version of Pentecostal history, a rationalization of economic changes affecting Pentecostals, and a critique of postwar popular culture.

This course explores how popular culture generates and articulates our understandings of gender and sexuality and their intersections with race and class. The weekly themes cohere around two correlated topics: 1. “Celebrity” and its imbrications with 2. “Media Scandals, Controversies and Contentious Debates.” This syllabus reflects the premise that popular culture is never simply entertainment or a diversion for audiences. Instead, “pop” culture provides us with stories, images and scripts through which we imagine and practice femininities, masculinities, and sexualities. Popular culture provides us with models of how to understand our own racial, gender and sexual identities. This course allows us to critically analyze images, practices, and narratives that perpetuate and/or disrupt these norms. By the end of the course, you should have the skills and tools to perform such analyses on your own.

"Guavas for Dummies, American Jíbaras, & Postnational Autonomy: When I Was Puerto Rican in the Hemispheric Turn" (2019) re-engages this text after I taught it in Puerto Rico four years. In this 2009 essay, Santiago’s memoir is said to bridge U.S. and Caribbean lit. WIWPR begins with a remembered Puerto Rico, and ends in the author’s adulthood in the USA. Studying Santiago’s text within a trajectory of immigrant narratives familiarizes the text to readers who are often processing their own entries into the US / its cultural orbit. This essay examines Santiago’s representation of jibaros, a subculture whose place in in Puerto Rico parallels the conflicted relationship many Jamaicans have with Rastafarians. Also, the theme of “Translating and Resisting Imperialism” is developed through a close reading of the chapter “The American Invasion of MacÚn.” Santiago’s treatment of gender roles in her family is also explored.