The Rhetorical Interlude In Alfonso Cuarón’S Gravity: Suggesting A Model For Examining Rhetorical Discourse In Film,
2024
University of Texas at Tyler
The Rhetorical Interlude In Alfonso Cuarón’S Gravity: Suggesting A Model For Examining Rhetorical Discourse In Film, Brent Yergensen, Scott Church
Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy
This essay advances the concept of the “rhetorical interlude,” a means by which scholars and teachers may examine how rhetorical messages are embedded in films. To illustrate, this study includes an examination of the rhetorical interlude in the film Gravity (Cuarón, 2013) as the film’s protagonist, Ryan Stone, is visited by the apparition of her dead colleague, Matt Kowalski, who instructs her on survival in space and on the significance of moving on from personal tragedy. In a pattern of ghostly apparitions appearing in perplexing outer space situations, Gravity situates scientific complexity as capable of being transcended with the help …
Will The Odds Ever Be In Her Favor? Katniss Everdeen And The Female Athlete,
2024
High Point University
Will The Odds Ever Be In Her Favor? Katniss Everdeen And The Female Athlete, Tony Kemerly
Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy
Autoethnography is a qualitative research method that allows the author to write in a highly personalized style, drawing on his or her experience to extend understanding about a specific issue. One subset of autoethnography, critical autoethnography, combines the narrative or storytelling aspect of autoethnography with critical theory approaches in order to gain illustrate for the reader a specific site of oppression within one’s culture. Through an examination of the books and films of The Hunger Games’ saga, this paper will examine the interaction between students and professor in regard to the journey of the female athlete through the power …
Crossing Over: The Migrant “Other” In The Marvel Cinematic Universe,
2024
University of Texas at Austin
Crossing Over: The Migrant “Other” In The Marvel Cinematic Universe, Casey Joe Walker, Anthony Ramirez, Arthur D. Soto-Vásquez
Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy
Two mainstream films from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) reflect anxiety about the alien (migrant) “other” through difference and crisis. In this article, we explore how refugees and “shithole” planets form a major plot point in Captain Marvel (2019). At the most extreme, alien exclusion is articulated in Avengers: Infinity War (2018), from the villain’s perspective, as a Malthusian need for extermination of lives to preserve environmental balance. Seemingly innocuous, these narratives are symbolic of a creeping right-wing discourse that dehumanizes outsiders, refugees, and migrants in popular culture. Inspired by the call to consider how film and new media …
Conceptualizing Empathy And Prosocial Action: Teaching Film Within The Literature Classroom,
2024
University of the Bahamas
Conceptualizing Empathy And Prosocial Action: Teaching Film Within The Literature Classroom, Mayuri Deka
Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy
The experience of viewing a movie in the global era is multi-faceted. A viewer’s response to a cinematic experience as Carl Plantinga explains in Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience is not only admiration for the aesthetics and techniques employed in the movie but also in the emotions aroused by the storyline. Audiences react to the story and characters presented with directed emotions by imagining either their mental lives and feelings or their situations. Empathy occurs within this framework of imagination where the audience engages with the story and character based on these directed emotions. The audience …
The Many Ways Of Wakanda: Viewpoint Diversity In Black Panther And Its Implications For Civics Education,
2024
Whitworth University
The Many Ways Of Wakanda: Viewpoint Diversity In Black Panther And Its Implications For Civics Education, Justin Frank Martin
Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy
Like many of its superhero film predecessors, Black Panther (2018) achieved widespread popularity both domestically and internationally. Although the film examines the focal character T’Challa’s (Black Panther) attempt to balance his dual responsibilities as king and protector of Wakanda, the viewpoint diversity displayed by its citizens suggests that the film’s central character is Wakandan society. Drawing on events and themes from the film, the essay argues that social domain theory (SDT)—a theory that attempts to explain the development of sociomoral concepts across the lifespan—provides a useful lens to examine Wakandans’ viewpoint diversity as portrayed in the film, specifically with regards …
Pop Culture And Politics: Engaging Students In American Government Through Art, Music, And Film,
2024
University of Indianapolis
Pop Culture And Politics: Engaging Students In American Government Through Art, Music, And Film, Laura Merrifield Wilson
Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy
Strategically and thoughtfully employing popular culture in teaching political science can enable students to better understand, analyze, and relate to the material. In a discipline that can be viewed by students as too boring, too distant, and too polarizing, the use of relevant music, TV/film clips, toys, memes, and other popular culture artifacts can engage otherwise unengaged students in a meaningful way. This paper argues that using popular culture in teaching political science can demonstrate relevance, serve as a generational translator, expose the bias of experience, and enable an expression of self. In demonstrating relevance, popular culture makes material fresh …
Visuality Of Race In Popular Culture: Teaching Racial Histories And Iconography In Media,
2024
Ohio State University
Visuality Of Race In Popular Culture: Teaching Racial Histories And Iconography In Media, Joni Boyd Acuff, Amelia M. Kraehe
Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy
The repetition of racist imagery from historical to contemporary popular culture is indicative of a lack of visual culture education among artists, designers, and other creative cultural producers working today. This paper addresses the dearth of resources for teaching visual codes and conventions of racial iconography that are recycled in popular media and contribute to the fabrication of racial differences, maintenance of racial hierarchies, and normalization of white supremacist ideology. Inspired by Critical Race Theory in art and visual culture education, the essay proposes teaching tactics and sites/sights that can support students in developing visual understandings of race in popular …
Guest Editorial: Cruel Summer,
2024
San Jose State University
Guest Editorial: Cruel Summer, Travis D. Boyce
Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy
2020 has been one of the most eventful and consequential years in the United States as well as around the world. Along with COVID-19, the sociopolitical climate that has allowed White supremacy and cruelty to thrive consequently resulted in a Cruel Summer. As we reflect on this Cruel Summer, popular culture can serve as a powerful lens to understand history as well as our contemporary world. We must remain vigilant and use our scholarship to push back against anti-Black racism and White supremacy. I look forward to your thoughts on this issue and hope you enjoy, Engaged Popular …
The Batman Comes To Class: Popular Culture As A Tool For Addressing Reflexive Pain,
2024
University of Oklahoma
The Batman Comes To Class: Popular Culture As A Tool For Addressing Reflexive Pain, Kyle A. Hammonds, Karen Anderson-Lain
Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy
In this essay, a case study approach is used to examine ways in which comics and graphic narratives can be used to provide a context within which undergraduate students may theorize about culture. The authors employed Batman: Year One as an organizing narrative for students to theorize about culture and communication. Specifically, students were challenged to (1) understand applications of communication theory in the context of graphic narrative, (2) use graphic narrative as a space for theorizing about communication and culture outside of comics, (3) utilize narrative theory to extrapolate meaning from complex, multi-modal forms of communication. While this …
Consider The Dementor: Discipline, Punishment, And Magical Citizenship In Harry Potter,
2024
Borough of Manhattan Community College
Consider The Dementor: Discipline, Punishment, And Magical Citizenship In Harry Potter, Tracy Bealer
Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy
In his 2004 essay “Consider the Lobster”, David Foster Wallace investigated the ethics of boiling alive an aesthetically unappealing, yet sentient and perceiving, creature to augment the pleasure of a human consumer. In the Potterverse, dementors are described by our human heroes as “terrible things” with “rotting” bodies, “unseen” mouths, and characterized as “among the foulest creatures that walk this earth” . Their occupation as guards of Azkaban Prison does little to improve their reputation among wizard-kind. However, how much of the dementors’ evil is ontological? Is it possible that these beings have been actively constructed as villains by wizarding …
Bad Girls: Agency, Revenge, And Redemption In Contemporary Drama,
2024
Radford University
Bad Girls: Agency, Revenge, And Redemption In Contemporary Drama, Courtney Watson
Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy
Cultural movements including #TimesUp and #MeToo have contributed momentum to the demand for and development of smart, justified female criminal characters in contemporary television drama. These women are representations of shifting power dynamics, and they possess agency as they channel their desires and fury into success, redemption, and revenge. Building on works including Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and Netflix’s Orange is the New Black, dramas produced since 2016—including The Handmaid’s Tale, Ozark, and Killing Eve—have featured the rise of women who use rule-breaking, rebellion, and crime to enact positive change.
Breaking The Rules: Playing Criminally In Video Games,
2024
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Breaking The Rules: Playing Criminally In Video Games, James Tregonning
Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy
Video games have long courted controversy for their frequent valorisation of criminality. However, in this article, I consider heroic criminals in video games from a different perspective. I focus on two games – Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please (2013) and Osmotic Studio’s Orwell (2016) – that position the player as a low-level government operative in a fictional authoritarian regime. Players are expected to process information for their governments, although they are also given opportunities to undermine or subvert the regime. Thus, the trope of heroic criminal is used to comment on the function and role of the state. It becomes …
Studying Silence In Popular Culture,
2024
Virginia Wesleyan University
Studying Silence In Popular Culture, Kathy Merlock Jackson, Terry Lindvall
Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy
This article explains the impetus for and execution of a team-taught, interdisciplinary class in silence using popular culture materials and practices, such as silent film, music, meditation, and mime. The course identifies individuals as possessing characteristics of introversion and extraversion and explores the role of silence in the modern world, incorporating the following: (1) Foundations for the Study of Silence, (2) The History of Silence, (3) The Role of Silence in Spirituality, Creativity and Reflection, (4) Silence in Communication Study, (5) Silent Film and Silence in Film, (6) The Role of Silence in a Highly Technological, Mediated World, and (7) …
Human Sacrifice And Propaganda In Popular Media: More Than Morbid Curiosity,
2024
Georgia Southern University, Armstrong
Human Sacrifice And Propaganda In Popular Media: More Than Morbid Curiosity, Jason Tatlock
Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy
Representations of human sacrifice, whether based upon real or fictitious events, powerfully demonstrate societal norms and fascinations related to the acceptability of slaying humans for religious or national interests, particularly given the divisive and bloody nature of the topic. Readers of eye-witness accounts, newspaper reports, and historical narratives, and viewers of cinematic productions, war posters, and political cartoons come face to face with the beliefs and agendas of the creators of popular media. Such sources represent the slaying of victims in sacred rituals, as individuals attempt to demarcate societal boundaries along the etic/ emic spectrum, be they commentaries on their …
A Gendered Perspective On Policing Violence In Happy Valley And Fargo,
2024
Tulsa Community College
A Gendered Perspective On Policing Violence In Happy Valley And Fargo, T. Allen Culpepper
Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy
Portrayal of a police officer determined to fight crime and execute justice in a harsh, isolated environment has become a television and film subgenre, often featuring women facing gender-related challenges. The issues raised in Sally Wainwright’s British television series Happy Valley, can be made more accessible, particularly to American undergraduate students, via its commonalities with the Coen brothers film Fargo. In both, a tough but compassionate policewoman pursues the more sociopathic of a pair of criminals involved in a botched kidnapping attempt instigated by an inept businessman, taking on the case for personal and professional honor, and as …
Applications In The Classroom: Teaching Disney/Pixar’S Inside Out Within The Tradition Of Allegorical Personification,
2024
Rutgers University
Applications In The Classroom: Teaching Disney/Pixar’S Inside Out Within The Tradition Of Allegorical Personification, Jason John Gulya
Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy
Several years ago, I noticed that the widespread distinction between high and low culture was wreaking havoc on my classroom. My students would read and analyze texts like Robinson Crusoe and Pride and Prejudice with little to no prompting because (in their minds) these texts were already part of the recognized canon and it was therefore permissible to pick them apart and analyze them closely. But I would get strange looks when I asked undergraduates to think critically about how the mock-news programs The Daily Show and The Colbert Report worked or when I asked them to discuss how the …
Hyping The Hyperreal: Postmodern Visual Dynamics In Amy Heckerling’S Clueless,
2024
York University
Hyping The Hyperreal: Postmodern Visual Dynamics In Amy Heckerling’S Clueless, Andrew Urie
Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy
An iconic staple of 1990s Hollywood cinema, director-screenwriter Amy Heckerling’s Clueless (1995) is a cult classic. This article examines the film’s postmodern visual dynamics, which parody hyperreal media culture and its connection to feminine teen consumerism amidst the image-saturated society of mid-’90s era Los Angeles.
Flm320.1 Upskillin’ It Example,
2024
SAE Institute Australasia
Flm320.1 Upskillin’ It Example, Sae University College
Exemplars
Project Brief was slightly different, but still relevant. Another major component of the project is a one-on-one meeting with the facilitator talking through their progress.
Review Of Love Between The Covers By Laurie Kahn (Blueberry Hill Productions, 2015),
2024
Fort Hays State University
Review Of Love Between The Covers By Laurie Kahn (Blueberry Hill Productions, 2015), Lexey A. Bartlett
Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy
A review of Love Between the Covers by Laurie Kahn (Blueberry Hill Productions, 2015).
Film Review: Joss Whedon’S Much Ado About Nothing: Whedon, Branagh, And The Anxiety Of Influence,
2024
University of Arizona
Film Review: Joss Whedon’S Much Ado About Nothing: Whedon, Branagh, And The Anxiety Of Influence, Jessica Maerz
Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy
Review of Joss Whedon’s film Much Ado About Nothing, reflecting on Whedon, Branagh, and the anxiety of influence.
