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The history of Spanish departments in Australian universities can be traced back to the 1960s, when a number of British hispanistas relocated to Australia and created a small number of successful teaching programs that reproduced the British model. A second generation of Spanish scholars arrived in the 1980s and 1990s, mainly from Latin American countries, in a migration wave that is still current. The transition from a British understanding of the Spanish discipline, with a strong focus on (canonical) literary studies, to current curricula that emphasise communicative skills and a loose notion of cultural studies, is symptomatic of deeper changes in the way the discipline has sought to reposition itself in the context of the Modern Languages debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter looks at three areas of work in popular culture in 2012, all of which examine the interaction between popular cultural texts and the societies in which they are produced and consumed. The chapter is divided into three sections: 1. Television: Legitimation and the Classics; 2. Television: Legitimation and Subversion; 3. Film: History and Heritage. The first section follows up a long-standing debate about the cultural status of TV programmes, discussing work on ‘classic’ TV texts and the legitimizing frameworks that allow viewers and critics to make judgements about programme quality. The second section examines satire in popular culture, and discusses texts which self-reflexively satirize news and current affairs programmes and popular TV genres. The third section looks at the intersection between popular film and history, looking at social histories of film as well as films that use historical narratives and subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Lingüística y Literatura is the property of Universidad de Antioquia, Facultad de Comunicaciones and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Borrowing concepts from cultural studies, legal pluralism, interpretative policy analysis, and other areas, the author argues for an expanded media policy analysis that also considers unofficial, bottom-up, and 'vernacular' media policy: the kinds of media policies that are formulated and enforced in a range of settings and by differently empowered policymakers, from parents restricting the media consumption of children to Internet pranksters regulating behavior online. Although this essay remains an initial conceptual statement, with research on particular case studies yet to be done, I argue that a better appreciation of the diverse sites and modes of media policymaking and their relationship to the official policy sphere will deepen our understanding of media policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Editorial opens the special issue of the International Journal of Iberian Studies titled 'Reading Madrid: Perspectives from Urban Cultural Studies' by suggesting mobility as a trope that is just as relevant to close textual readings and to a wider understanding of Madrid's cultural production as it is to questions of disciplinary and interdisciplinary research, more broadly considered. Appropriately, given the objective at hand, the impetus for this move is sparked by a textual analysis - of Madrid's presentation throughout the opening sequence from director Pedro Lazaga's 1965 film La ciudad no es para mí. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the various complex meanings of King Joram's magic belt in Wirnt von Grafenberg's ›Wigalois‹. The approach used in order to analyse these meanings follows recent tendencies in the field of cultural studies by assuming that (narrated) objects (›Dinge‹) are endowed with a certain individuality and independence. It appears that the object ›belt‹ serves on the one hand as marker when central changes occur within the narrative structure of the text; on the other hand, as a central ›Ding-Symbol‹ in a major part of the text, it is polyvalent. The analysis reveals that narrated objects are not only attributed with an individual meaning which is independent of their function concerning the action, but that they have a certain life of their own. In order to grasp this independent existence it is necessary to look at the action from a perspective that focuses on the objects and not vice versa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper puts the most fundamental philological operation into the center of the theory of culture: the seemingly trivial act of recognizing the shape of a letter in the 'ornamental' abundance of the material text. Culture is described as a comprehensive term for all mechanisms, which interrelate social events with their 'scripts,' that is to say, with their proto-textual foundations. Culture continuously, but variably, determines what is actually significant in the potential ornaments of 'social text.' The common quest of philology and cultural studies is to re-evaluate this text's seemingly ornamental details and to uncover their significance. In order to reunite these only seemingly oppositional approaches, literary scholarship must put genuinely philological operations in the center of its methodological repertoire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are significant connections between Bakhtin's theories and the contextual, psychological, and stylistic dimensions of Norman Mailer's fiction. Bakhtin clarifies many of the particular aspects of Mailer's fiction: his narrative experiments, his use of complex turns of plot, his careful attention to creating sometimes grotesque and often psychologically damaged characters. Mailer's rhetorical experiments with voice in novels such as The Armies of the Night provide clear connections to the play of voices prominent in the novel tradition. Often the defining factor in a Mailer novel is the particular perspective he takes on connections between text and context. The Naked and the Dead, arguably his most traditionally narrated novel, defines the reader's perspective through multiple points of view synthesized within a traditional third person narration. These multiple points of view become the reader's way of seeing the military culture contrasted with the perspectives of individual soldiers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Ecos de la Comunicación is the property of Pontificia Universidad Catolica Argentina and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Pre-service teachers from various disciplines undertook a writing assignment in response to an initial prompt related to movie reviews. The movie review genre allowed the student teachers to demonstrate their artistic talents as communicators and writers and enhanced engagement as they applied the activity to planning lessons for their future teaching assignments. This article describes the steps used in the movie review strategy alongside an example lesson plan that illustrates how one pre-service teacher applied the strategy for teaching social studies. Instructors at all levels can use movie reviews to connect academic literacy practices to popular culture in an authentic way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the aspect of banality and fatality and its meaning in Kenneth Goldsmith's "The Weather." It says that Goldsmith's phenomenology of banality finds itself in honing a person's ability to respond to practices as practices. Meanwhile, it contends that the essay "Banality in Cultural Studies" by Meaghan Morris is not a denunciation of the banality/ fatality dialectic in popular culture as it is an exploration of how cultural studies extends the cultural logic.

A reprint of the University of Birmingham, England's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies' third report titled "Part II: Definitions: The Centre: Some Basic Definitions," originally published in December 1965, is presented. It addresses the Centre's focus on areas of study including the historical and philosophical background of cultural studies, the sociology of literature, and evaluative studies of contemporary culture.

The transdisciplinary coherence of area studies can be enhanced through a cross-fertilisation of historical and social sciences with concepts derived from philology and cultural studies. The five Scandinavian power investigations (Norway 1972-1982, Sweden 1985-1990, Denmark 1997-2003, Norway 1997-2003, and Finland 2007-2010) are here recognised as a unique body of work. Blending politically guided perspectives with collaborative scholarly analysis, these investigations represent events rather than texts. For this reason the concept of genre does not sufficiently capture their essence. Instead, power investigations are seen as comprehensive politico-cultural practices identified by 14 characteristics imported from the humanities. The utility of these investigations in suggesting transparency and self-reflection enhances the legitimacy of Scandinavian government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, I respond to composition scholar Linda Adler-Kassner's (2012) "no vampires" dictum: her stand against content (other than writing studies) in first-year composition courses. I argue that in "challenging times," when students are pressured to take a pragmatic, career-oriented approach to college, it is important for them to choose content, especially in a required course. It may be one of the few times in the course of a goal-focused, pre-professional college career when students can explore topics that interest them, while still learning writing skills. Further, I draw from Harris (2004) and Moskovitz and Petit (2007) to argue that first-year writing programs are more vital when they can bring together instructors from various disciplinary backgrounds for the common goal of teaching first-year writing. Finally, I contend that in "challenging times," we are in special need of vampires or other subject matter that enables students to engage in intellectual play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

These reflections on critical communication and cultural studies of race draw on Bruno Latour's idea of ‘matters of concern’ to propose that scholars expand the focus of inquiry from empirical questions of veracity and accuracy in representations of race to concerns with how (and where) media gather and mobilize sentiments and affective investments that increasingly underwrite quotidian practices of racial inequality and racism in the post racial period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To assess future priorities for cultural studies, this essay returns to the later writings of Raymond Williams, in particular his concerns about “new conformism.” It is argued that today we face comparable analytical challenges in which the pressures of institutionalization, and a strain of ahistoricism, have produced a “weak materialism” in contemporary cultural critique. The essay recommends a flexible and context-driven navigation of the current dominant tendencies toward micro-recuperative and macro-epistemological analysis, and proposes that this flexibility is the preferred mode of assuring that the dynamism of culture is captured by our critical methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

These words critique the ongoing tendency to create false dichotomies between different approaches in media studies. Delivered as part of a panel on the future of media studies at the 2013 Society for Cinema and Media Studies, I offer a definition of critique that all critical media scholars should share. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses the (in)famousKony 2012(Kony) viral video, which had a record-100 million views in six days. It discusses its unique status as a viraladvocacyvideo by NGO Invisible Children (IC) to make Joseph Kony “famous.” TheorizingKony'seventfulness entails insights for twenty-first-century communication and critical cultural studies, which note the obsolescence of past critical trends in CCCS: especially regarding virality, imitation, attention, affect, citizenship, subjectivity, power, control, participation, and protest. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author reflects on efforts to preserve of the House of Popular Culture, a building in Bowling Green, Ohio associated with Bowling Green State University's (BGSU's) Popular Culture Department. Details on the role of material culture in the field of Popular Culture studies are presented. The house's design as a Montgomery Ward kit home modeled after a Sears kit home pattern is also discussed.

In Brick Lane, Monica Ali problematizes the practice of hijab both implicitly and explicitly. To this end, the British Bangladeshi writer does not simply open the discussion within the fictional world of the novel. She also creates a series of characters whose dressed bodies silently project a broad spectrum of attitudes towards hijab, attitudes that range from the rejection to the ardent celebration of such a practice. Relying on socio-cultural studies on the subject, the present contribution intends to examine the politics of hijab as represented in Brick Lane, demonstrating how the novel fictionalizes many of the competing discourses which have surrounded the question of hijab in recent decades. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The ubiquity of the Harry Potter phenomenon offers an opportunity to examine the different ways educators use popular books to teach reading. This study analyses a number of journal articles that address the Harry Potter novels as tools for the classroom. These articles show a great diversity of approaches. Government testing of discrete, assessable skills can dominate contemporary discussions of literacy, and the Harry Potter books are sometimes used to address these targets. Other educators use Harry Potter to teach children about multimedia technologies. Most often, educators who embrace the Harry Potter novels affirm the value of reading for pleasure. This view often also promotes reading as a route to the critical literacy goal of social inclusion and the psychological development of the child. Taken together, these uses of Harry Potter present a confused picture, with no clear agreement on what good reading is or how it should be taught. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies have found evidence for the existence of a `categorical imperative'. Objects that do not unambiguously fit within the categories of their field pay a price: they are either ignored or devalued. In this article we examine whether this categorical imperative also applies to the clas- sification of pop albums in genre categories and compare the effects of genre ambiguity within two (sub) fields of popular music. The results show that genre ambiguity has a negative effect within the commercial subfield, but a positive effect in the artistic subfield. This analysis confirms the theory of DiMaggio (1987), which argues that the boundary strength of classification systems varies between fields. INSET: The categorical imperative in popular music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the scholarship of teaching and learning popular romance studies. Topics discussed include the place of popular romance studies in the university classroom and the position of popular romance studies in the scholarship about romantic love in global popular culture. Also mentioned is the passion of academics for teaching according to the book "Balancing Acts: The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Academic Careers" by Mary Taylor Huber.

American exceptionalism has been an organizing concept in American literary and cultural studies for decades, but recent years have witnessed the proliferation of new approaches to this topic. After an introduction to the history of American exceptionalism, the essay traces the arguments of several key figures in this debate, especially Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, in order to provide an introduction to the utility of their claims for literary scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of religion leads a curiously secluded life within intellectual circles. This article argues that this is to our loss, particularly on the part of students of popular culture, since a number of the most widely discussed artefacts depend on religious themes for their effect. Taking note of the largely non-religious reception of one TV show, the reimagined Battlestar Galactica, the article offers a detailed reading of its constitutive religious narrative, aiming to demonstrate how this narrative owes very much indeed to Mormon theology. In conclusion, the article argues that intellectuals need to regain the skills needed to identify and analyse religious thinking, lest we miss the hermeneutic level on which religiously based artefacts are actually consumed by many viewers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author discusses the teaching of the content of pulp magazines with titles like "Amazing Stories" and "Weird Tales," as of 2014. He notes that the impact of pulps, including genre formation, the creation of enduring characters, and the nurturing of literary figures like Edgar Rice Burroughs and Ray Bradbury has only been recently recognized by intellectuals. The author states that a historical study of pulps allows students to appreciate their continuing influence on popular culture.

The article discusses the teaching of digital storytelling, which combines images, text and sound for producers and consumers, and its focus on everyday cultural practices. It describes a 36-hour intensive documentary assignment for students in which the cities of Chicago and St. Louis were turned into experimental cultural research sites. The article notes that integrating digital storytelling into a popular culture course invites students to study how everyday life is practiced.

An introduction is presented in which the guest editor discusses the popularity of teaching popular culture and its classroom entry as its own subject, as a means for tackling other subjects, or as a result that demonstrates students' learning via twenty-first century skills.

Copyright of Global Media Journal: Turkish Edition is the property of Global Media Journal, Turkish Edition and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Using a narrative approach of 'scenario building', this paper documents the author's quest to find her own wisdom in her professional practice and considers that quest in light of recent theorizing in the area of New Literacies research. Through the telling of four critical incidents and a subsequent analysis drawing on theories of cultural studies, critical literacy, critical pedagogy and critical disabilities studies, the author explores the process that led to the development of the Salty Chip: A Canadian Multiliteracies Collaborative. The network challenges outdated institutional frameworks that privilege developmentalism and practices rooted in intellectual measurement and standardization, and considers how new forms of participation that include digital spaces mediate our evolving subjectivities and cultural practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter has five sections: 1. Cultural Studies and Prose; 2. The Novel; 3. Poetry; 4. Drama; 5. Periodicals and Publishing History. Sections 1 and 2 are by William Baker with the assistance of Amanda Smothers and Kelsey Williams; section 3 is by Martin Dubois and Summer J. Star, section 4 is by Alexis Easley; section 5 is by David Finkelstein. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the complex relationship of anthropology with the study of popular culture in southern Africa. In an insightful review of South African culture studies, Karin Barber argued a decade ago that while South African culture studies of the early post-apartheid era closely followed the model of British cultural studies, two of the British school's characteristics were lacking in the South African studies, i.e., ethnographic depth and attention to audiences. These absences seemed astounding, Barber wrote, considering the distinguished history of South African anthropology. I present an intellectual history that charts the genealogy of southern African ethnographic studies of popular culture, starting from the 1950s when anthropologists studied a variety of popular cultural forms. This trajectory changed track with the emergence of a neo-Marxist political economy approach in anthropology, which was not much inclined to study "things cultural." I show that South African culture studies of the late apartheid and early post-apartheid periods focused on reading mediated texts; deep ethnographies, on the other hand, were rare. This was due to the fact that after the retreat of anthropology, culture studies had become the domain of scholars, who had been trained in literary criticism, who were, for the most part, more interested in text and representation than in audiences. I conclude with a brief discussion of the current resurgence of anthro-pological studies of popular culture, including collaborative projects with media and literary studies, which investigate questions of difference, belonging, and citizenship through popular culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the discipline of cultural studies, the Americanization of popular culture in Asia seems to be taken-for-granted as a coherent whole and thereby unproblematized. This paper argues that such anti-hegemonic, anti-colonial approaches to culturalism are inadequate. Reflecting on cricket as British imperialists' moralizing, culturalizing and politicizing force in their colonized states, I analyze cultural forms. namely baseball and ‘American’ popular music in relation to its production, dissemination and commoditization in Taiwan. Keeping the similarities and differences of the ‘effects’ of both cultural forms taking root in Taiwan, I argue that the discipline of cultural studies requires a critical subjectivity that privileges the strategizing choices of the agent within a framework that acknowledges the multiplicity of cultural reception and/or variable literacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the teaching of American popular culture (APC) in the English Departments in Indonesia. It states that the research in APC was often pursued by students doing American Studies at the postgraduate level or as art of their undergraduate program in the English Departments. It says that APC within the Indonesian context contributes on research and writing in the subject that graduate students can possibly do in American Studies or English Departments.

Recent scholarship in genre studies has extended its focus from studying single genres to multiple genres, as well as how these genres interact with one another. This essay seeks to contribute to this growing scholarship by adding a new concept, intermediary genre. That is, a genre that facilitates the “uptake” of a genre by another genre. This concept is designed to reveal a particular aspect of multiple genres: that one genre can be used to connect and mobilize two otherwise unconnected genres to make uptake possible. The concept is illustrated in case study of knowledge mobilization, an instance in which scientific research was used in the judicial system to inform public policies on eyewitness handling and police-lineup procedures. The case study shows how intermediary genres emerge, how they connect other genres, and how knowledge circulates as a result of such connections and affects policy decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper reflects on the conceptual framework of the CSAA 2010 conference, which was focused on the theme of ‘a scholarly affair.’ The argument posed is that cultural studies scholars have an ongoing concern for the difficulties, complexities, challenges, limitations as well as critical, creative and clarifying possibilities bound up in the very institutional and everyday contexts of knowledge and cultural production in which they live, work and play. An overview is given of how contributions in this special section of Continuum investigate diverse sites, theories, issues and methodologies that respond to this concern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The stories of everyday life traverse the crossroads of perception and experience. They give voice to the inner contours of a reflected cosmos whose whirls they follow. They undulate with the moving world in which they seek to live, survive and know intimacy. Stories are the navigations of people whose vulnerabilities plumb unknown depths, whose sea anchors seek to moderate the tumultuous events and circumstances of life. On occasion, they surf as a slide of supreme pleasure. The narratives they follow and the spaces they embody are critical to any understanding of the conditions of everyday life, including the daily life of academics. In the context of this paper, creative research practice offers an emergent form of cultural studies, engaging the world in more descriptive and speculative terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the use of editorial cartoons in foreign language classrooms as a method of engaging students with a second language, cultural issues, and controversial current events in a single activity. It addresses the cartoons of political cartoonist for "Le Monde" Jean Plantureux, better known as Plantu. It specifically investigates the themes of popular culture, national education, and immigration in French editorial cartoons.

Although the Middle Ages is present and alive in popular culture, for instance in movies or other forms of entertainment such as reenactments or computer games, teaching its history at college level still365 requires an exercise of the imagination. The research on history learning in American contexts clearly suggests it: we need to find ways to make the study of the medieval past more locally rooted in order to create a necessary level of familiarity; at the same time, we need to keep it intellectually engaging and open to visions of diversity. The article describes the experience of teaching undergraduate college students the history of Medieval Europe through individual research projects using the city of Baltimore (USA), its buildings, monuments, museums, and the professional medievalists working and residing in the area. The students collaborate in a web-based project with texts and multimedia objects, thus building a repository of the knowledge they have acquired through their research projects about the urban landscape of this American city and its social history, and about the Middle Ages as an object of history but also of cultivated memory, creative inspiration and esthetic apreciation in contemporary America [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how early childhood (K-3) preservice teachers perceive the use of popular culture in teaching. In particular, it focuses on possible reasons for their negative perceptions of using popular culture by discussing what they have experienced in teacher education and in early childhood classrooms. Moreover, it explores other variables, such as social views on popular culture and childhood and the contents of popular culture that have influenced the use of popular culture in their classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the use of pedagogy to examine popular culture, the body and gender from a personal perspective. It explores the effectiveness of using reflexive auto-ethnography in the classroom by having students explore their conception of gender. The author explores her own raced and engendered position as an educator and researcher, and the challenges and politics of teaching academic inquiry.

The article discusses the influence of acclaimed rap artist Jay-Z for exploring identity discourse that benefits students and professionals alike in the U.S. It tackles on the increasing number of literature that explores hip-hop pedagogy in teaching popular culture. It provides an overview of the book "Decoded" which was written by Sean Carter popularly known as Jay-Z that is part autobiography, part history lesson and a tribute to his chosen profession.

This study illustrates a set of learning activities designed from two hip-hop aesthetics and explores their use among a classroom of African American preservice teachers who graduated from urban school districts. Based on the two hip-hop aesthetics of kinetic consumption and autonomy/distance, the specific goal of these learning activities is to enable students to respond to justice-oriented teaching and democratic curriculum. Through an ethnographic and grounded theory approach, this study illustrates that these learning activities are useful for these purposes but that they also create potential barriers to student learning. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Genres are staged, structured, communicative events, motivated by various communicative purposes, and performed by members of specific discourse communities (Swales 1990; Bhatia 1993, 2004; Berkenkotter & Huckin 1995). Since its inception, with the two seminal works on the topic by Swales (1990) and Bhatia (1993), genre analysis has taken pride of place in much of the ongoing research in languages for specific purposes (LSP). The goal of much of this research is pedagogic, the understanding being that good genre descriptions can feed into pedagogy in the form of syllabus and materials design. Whereas genre analysis usually focuses on language as action, this paper argues that analysis needs to focus also on content and identity. The discussion sketches out what this might mean in terms of pedagogic application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on how to set out K-12 students' interests and make connections from pop culture to sophisticated art. It states that the teachers' instruction on pop culture discussion inside the classroom must be evaluated. It also mentions that the use of pop culture must not only be played but also be shown using video clips, and that careful selection of the pop cultures can facilitate learning and skill development.

In this article, the author discusses his experiences teaching a college course on representations of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in U.S. popular culture. Particular focus is given to students' reactions to the comic strip "Get Your War On" by David Rees. According to the author, students initially seemed uncomfortable with the Rees' critique of expressions of grief after the attacks, but as time passed younger cohorts of students seemed to think it not provocative enough. Details related to other elements of the course, including the celebrity telethon "America: A Tribute to Heroes" and performer Kanye West's criticisms of U.S. President George Bush, are presented. Other topics include journalist Mark Lawson's concept of September 12th art and Web 2.0.