American Popular Culture Commons^™

Private Equity Success: High Returns In A Risky World, Ross Corey

Pop Culture Intersections

This article will be covering how a private equity firm, despite the firm’s investment preferences, can lessen their risk without negatively affecting the potential gains in their assets and capital by making the right considerations. Investing in platforms such as stocks, bonds, and real estate may offer good long term returns. A small percentage of people look to invest in private equity markets. A reason for this is because funds have high minimum investments which makes private equity more exclusive compared to many public markets. A private equity investment, in most cases, is an opportunity for higher returns, with the …

Streaming Services, Binging, And Cultural Consequences, Sean Flanagan

Pop Culture Intersections

This article discusses how streaming services such as Netflix are affecting cultural ideas and attitudes towards media.

Rap Music As A Positive Influence On Black Youth And American Politics, Natalie Wilson

Pop Culture Intersections

This article will examine the impact of rap music on Black American youth as well as contemporary American politics with an emphasis on police brutality.

Social Media And Consumer Culture: Addicted To The Idealized Consumer, James Laeder

Pop Culture Intersections

For better or for worse, social media has become party of the fabric of society. As technology and social networking sites increasingly affect the behavior and culture around us, signs of digital addiction are on the rise. This article discusses the connection between consumer culture and social networking site addiction.

The Effect Of Cws On Adolescent Health, Mitchell Shi

Pop Culture Intersections

This article will be covering the problem of celebrity worship. Celebrity worship has been in debate over the past few years regarding whether it is a harmful activity or not among adolescents, but with the recent established psychological disorder of Celebrity Worship Syndrome, it can be shown that it has become a serious health issue. One side argues that celebrity worship is harmless, even a helpful practice to pursue. The other side, however, argues that celebrity worship is detrimental to the mental and physical wellbeing of the adolescents. It is important to understand what celebrity worship entails, the different tests …

City Backdrop: Television And Its Gentrifying Influence On A City's Black Community, Ana Hoshovsky

Pop Culture Intersections

This paper will focus on the issue of race representation in television and its implications to real life communities in the cities featured in television. Scenes from the comedy show Portlandia will be examined to determine the effects the show has on the black community of Northeast Portland, Oregon. Characters from HBO’s Treme will also be analyzed to assess the show’s claim of representing the struggles of locals in a post-Katrina New Orleans. The lack of diverse representation throughout Portlandia’s eight seasons has caused the show to help to fuel the gentrification in the city. Viewers of the show are …

Social Impacts Of Popular Culture During The Vietnam War, Chris Ashton

Pop Culture Intersections

In this paper, I will argue that popular culture is imperative to a population overcoming and learning from a time of economical, political, and social turmoil. Focusing on the Vietnam War, I will demonstrate how common it is for people to rely on popular culture for hope and education during times of crises and it is often that music, movies, or artwork are those outlets.

By dissecting the messages of other popular songs recorded during the Vietnam War while also examining books like The Vietnam War and American Music written by David James and Songs of the Vietnam Conflict by …

The Effects Of Social Media And Apps On Exercise And Health Habits Of Millennial Women, Sarah Mason

Pop Culture Intersections

Exercise and eating healthy have become the next big trends, with new technology and social media allowing them to flourish. It is difficult to avoid this trend when “#fitspiration” is the caption of over 15 million instagram posts and there are hundreds of smartphone applications (apps) focused on health and fitness, that function to track your goals, provide tips or even include full workouts and healthy recipes.

The Missing “X” In Ethnic And Cultural Acceptance, Sofia Michelle Sandoval Larco

Pop Culture Intersections

In our modern world of heightened wall building, we are confident more separates us than brings us together. Added to our intrinsic differences, we find distinctions amongst people of our same gender, ethnicity, and race. These separations, in the long run, can turn into acts of miscommunication, create discomfort and animosity; and thus begins a tragic cycle of thinking in binaries. In this article I will argue that by reclaiming rhetoric traditions Latinx creators have continued a hesitant social move to refashion the aggregate memory of bondage and discrimination that began in colonial times. These creators are not blaming a …

Social Media’S Effect On Mental Health: How America’S Youth Are More Vulnerable To Its Negative Implications, Melissa Magner

Pop Culture Intersections

This article explores the potentially negative psychological effects social media photo-sharing platforms have on America’s adolescents. While most studies on mental health effects related to social media use have focused on Facebook and the young adult age group 18-35, this article focuses on users under the age of 18 with an emphasis on Instagram and Snapchat – the two most rapidly growing social networking sites for adolescents. Photo-sharing sites have characteristics different than other social media sites, specifically the ability to alter photos and to communicate live time through videos and photos, which may have different mental health consequences on …

African American Performers In Stalin’S Soviet Union: Between Political Promise And Racial Propaganda, Christopher E. Silsby

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the first half of the twentieth century, a significant number of African Americans left the United States for the promise of racial and economic equality in the supposedly class-less society of a post-Revolution Soviet Union. This dissertation uses a series of interrelated case studies to contextualize the theatrical work of Paul Robeson, jazz dancer Henry Scott, actor Wayland Rudd, and the 1955-56 international tour of Porgy and Bess within the overlapping social, political, and aesthetic landscapes of African American and Soviet performance in Moscow during the rise and height of Stalinism.

Starting with an overview of race in the …

Resonant Texts: The Politics Of Nineteenth-Century African American Music And Print Culture, Paul Fess

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Resonant Texts: the Politics of Nineteenth-Century African American Music and Print Culture, investigates musical sound as a discursive tool African American writers and activists deployed to contest enslavement before the Civil War and claim citizenship after Emancipation. Traditionally, scholars have debated the degree to which nineteenth-century African American music constituted evidence of black culture and marked a persistent African orality that still abides within African American textual production. While these trends inform this project, my inquiry focuses on the ways that writers placed elements of musical sound—such as rhythm, melody, choral singing, and harmony—at the center of their …

Making It Pay To Be A Fan: The Political Economy Of Digital Sports Fandom And The Sports Media Industry, Andrew Mckinney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a series of case studies and sociological examinations of the role that the sports media industry and mediated sport fandom plays in the political economy of the Internet. The Internet has structurally changed the way that sport fans access sport and accelerated the processes through which the capitalist actors in the sports media industry have been able to subsume them. The three case studies examined in this dissertation are examples of how digital media technologies have both helped fans become more active producers and consumers of sports and made the sports media industry an integral and vanguard …

The Warner Brothers Prove Their Patriotism, Lara Jacobson

Voces Novae

Warner Bros. Pictures did not become the widely successful company they are today by sitting back and letting “the world go to pot.” The Brothers patriotic beginnings in America earned them a reputation as trailblazers in the motion picture industry. Their Polish and Jewish family heritage initially motivated the four brothers to take a stand when they released Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) as a direct result of Hitler’s growing reign in Europe. Many of the Brothers’ early movies focused on injustice, prejudice, and violation of basic human rights; the era of World War II would be no different. …

Review Of Chris Ware: Conversations, Carly Diab

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

No abstract provided.

Sharing Identity: Indexing Cultural Perspectives Through Writing Responses To Graphic Novels, Alex Romagnoli

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

Indexing identity through writing responses among ELL students in response to a graphic novel helps provide insight into how writing responses represent people and how graphic novels can aid in that process of self-discovery through their inherent multimodalities. This study takes looks at four students in an ELL class at an urban high school in southern Pennsylvania as they responded in writing to a portion of Will Eisner's New York: Life in the Big City (2006). All of the participants took events from the portion of the graphic novel provided to them and indexed their urban, cultural perspectives through their …

Pre-Service Teachers’ Perspectives On How The Use Of Toon Comic Books During Guided Reading Influenced Learning By Struggling Readers, Ewa Mcgrail, Alicja Rieger, Gina M. Doepker, Samantha Mcgeorge

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

The study presented in this article examines the use of comic books, specifically the TOON comic books during guided reading instruction. The instruction was provided to struggling readers by the Literacy Center at a comprehensive university in southeastern United States. What most pre-service teachers in this study agreed upon was that comic books served as an effective tool for getting their students interested in reading. Reading comic books with tutors as partners in conversation with the struggling readers in this study was also a powerful medium for facilitating students’ literacy skills development, particularly in the areas of reading fluency and …

Cultures And Politics Of The Global Drug War [Urban Studies/English], Justin Rogers-Cooper

Open Educational Resources

This staged and high stakes Urban Studies assignment was developed in conjunction with two Center for Teaching and Learning Seminars at LaGuardia Community College: “The Pedagogy of the Digital Ability” and “The Next Generation ePortfolio.” All Urban Studies courses at LaGuardia are writing intensive, and all are designated for the college’s Global Learning Core Competency and the Written Communication Ability. Urban Studies courses exist on different points of many programmatic curriculum maps for Liberal Arts majors, but students usually take it as a midpoint course. Dozens of different majors completed this assignment and take Urban Studies courses more generally, including …

Tinker, Robert Rush (Fa 1149), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project 1149. Student folk studies project titled “Playground Language: [Newburg, Kentucky]” which includes survey sheets with a brief description of playground rhymes in Newburg, Jefferson County, Kentucky. Sheets may include rope skipping rhyme, group game, informant’s name, and text classification.

Electronics And The Music Of Miles Davis, Darren E. Shekailo

Theses and Dissertations

Miles Davis produced a wealth of music relying on the use of electronic instruments and new technology. With their adoption, the famous trumpeter began his “electric” period. Examining the electric period of Davis’s career helps us trace the profound impact of electronic instruments and technological advances on his music.