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Critique And “Controversy” In Pedagogy And Pop Culture [Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal Of Popular Culture And Pedagogy, Volume 9, Issue 3 (August 2022)], Miriam Sciala

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Critique and “Controversy” in Pedagogy and Pop Culture [Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, Volume 9, Issue 3 (August 2022)]

Editorial

Teaching for Change, Miriam Sciala

Articles

Peril and Promise: Student Experiences of Virtual Reality and Implications for Inclusive Social Justice Pedagogy, Michelle VanNatta

Will the Odds Ever Be in Her Favor? Katniss Everdeen and the Female Athlete, Tony Kemerly

Don’t Sweat the Technique: Rhetoric, Coded Social Critique, and Conspiracy Theories in Hip-Hop, Josh Chase

Cake and Conclusions: Rhetorical Roots in “Sheetcaking” and Fallacious Community Responses, Marissa Lammon

Musings (Online Only)

Teaching and Learning Popular Media Cultures: …

Don’T Sweat The Technique: Rhetoric, Coded Social Critique, And Conspiracy Theories In Hip-Hop, Josh Chase

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Conspiracy theories are once again a topic of heated debate in both popular and scholarly media. Critics on one side of this debate often take for granted an “underlying assumption that conspiracy theories should be subdued if not eliminated” (Uscinski 444). Other scholars have expressed concern over the ways the “conspiracy theorist” pejorative stifles dissent and regulates political rationality (Rankin; deHaven-Smith). Bratich argues that social anxieties about issues like emerging technology and race “get managed” through the public debate about conspiracy theories as an “object of concern” (160–61). This paper asks, what are the consequences when “conspiracy panic” spreads beyond …

Peril And Promise: Student Experiences Of Virtual Reality And Implications For Inclusive Social Justice Pedagogy, Michelle Vannatta

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Virtual reality (VR) is a fast-evolving technology rapidly being integrated into education and training in multiple sectors of society. As the use of VR spreads, it is important to critically analyze both its role in effective pedagogies and how students experience it. Virtual reality has extraordinary promise for deeply engaging students, and it also poses particular challenges for equitable and effective teaching of diverse students. This paper discusses students’ responses to a VR exercise and examines some of the complexities VR presents around racial justice, gender equity, and economic fairness. Virtual reality technology may be less effective and less comfortable …

Review Of The Tragic Odes Of Jerry Garcia And The Grateful Dead: Mystery Dances In The Magic Theater, By Brent Wood, Routledge, 2020, Christopher K. Coffman

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Review of The Tragic Odes of Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead: Mystery Dances in the Magic Theater, by Brent Wood, Routledge, 2020.

Teaching With The Dead: A Short Personal Remembrance, Robert G. Weiner

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

This essay is a personal remembrance of teaching an Honors course related to the Grateful Dead, the Beat Generation, and the Counterculture at Texas Tech University during the Spring of 2019. It describes the readings, assignments, techniques, and overall class response to the material. The goals of the course are explained and the syllabus is added as an appendix.

Discoursing The Grateful Dead: Scholars, Fans, And The 2020 Meeting Of Southwest Popular/American Culture Association, Nicholas G. Meriwether

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Academic conferences serve many functions but at heart they are pedagogical enterprises, designed to teach, share, and refine knowledge. This paper uses the 2020 meeting of the Grateful Dead area of the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association to explore some of the issues and challenges that define the pedagogical and scholarly work of a conference section. The 2020 meeting offers a useful lens for discussing the area’s contributions and problems within the larger framework and history of the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association and the broader field of Grateful Dead studies. The experience of the Dead area illustrates issues in conference dynamics …

Collaborative Pedagogy: Teaching (With) The Grateful Dead On Tour, On Campus, And Online, Rebecca G. Adams

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

This essay describes my experiences teaching with the Grateful Dead “on tour” in 1989, on campus in the early 2000s, and online in 2019. Using a life course framework, I discuss how my own development as a teacher, Deadhead, and Grateful Dead scholar and the changing context over time shaped these experiences and how teaching with the Grateful Dead opened a pedagogical space for experimentation that allowed the students and me to take risks and to collaborate despite status differences. Rather than unpacking these experiences entirely, my goal here is to focus on how these three experiences of teaching with …

Teaching (And Studying) The Music Of The Grateful Dead, Brian Felix

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

This article aims to provide answers to two questions: why teach about the music of the Grateful Dead, and how to do so? In an effort to engage the former, this article examines the ways that the Grateful Dead provides a rich and unique case study towards a deeper understanding of American popular music. The contributing factors are their distinct brand of eclecticism, career-long commitment to extended musical improvisations, and the depth and durability of their songbook. In order to answer the latter question (how?), I provide a framework for approaching the Grateful Dead’s voluminous output from a …

Media Literacy, Education, And A Global Pandemic: Lessons Learned In A Gender And Pop Culture Classroom, Jessica Lowell Mason, Ebehitale Imobhio

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

In Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, bell hooks writes that “to engage in dialogue is one of the simplest ways we can begin as teachers, scholars, and critical thinkers to cross boundaries.” Hence, this paper explores, through narrative dialogue, teacher and student perspectives on the pedagogical impact of the global pandemic on the process of engaging with and learning about media literacy. By naming and narrating teacher and student experiences and perspectives from a course on gender and pop culture that took place during the Spring 2020 semester, the paper aims to demonstrate the …

Evolving Awareness In Popular Culture And Pedagogy [Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal Of Popular Culture And Pedagogy, Volume 8, Issue 1 (February 2021)], Miriam Sciala, Anna S. Cohenmiller

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Evolving Awareness in Popular Culture and Pedagogy [Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, Volume 8, Issue 1 (February 2021)]

Editorial

Evolving Awareness of Popular Culture and Pedagogy: A View into Celebrity, Song, Narrative, and Superheroes, Miriam Sciala and Anna S. CohenMiller

Articles

The Power of Cool: Celebrity Influence in Higher Education, Jena Hawk

Society Doesn’t Owe You Anything: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas & Video Games as Speculative Fiction, Marc A. Ouellette

The Many Ways of Wakanda: Viewpoint Diversity in Black Panther and Its Implications for Civics Education, Justin Frank Martin

Guiding Students Down that “Old …

The Power Of Cool: Celebrity Influence In The Ivory Tower, Jena L. Hawk

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Since the earliest of times, student orations and student debates served as the main attractions at college and university commencement ceremonies. However, these elements faded over time, and commencement speakers, specifically politicians or academics, eventually replaced student performances. Often, the commencement speaker emphasized the students’ rite of passage into adulthood as well as the development of their moral character. During the 1800s, celebrities began to receive invitations to serve as commencement speakers, and since then, celebrity influence has increased greatly in higher education as celebrities now teach classes at colleges and universities. The use of celebrities allows colleges and universities …

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 …

Engaged Popular Culture And Pedagogy: Awareness, Understanding And Social Justice [Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal Of Popular Culture And Pedagogy, Volume 7, Issue 2 (Summer 2020)], Anna S. Cohenmiller, Kirk Peterson

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Engaged Popular Culture and Pedagogy: Awareness, Understanding and Social Justice [Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, Volume 7, Issue 2 (Summer 2020)]

Editorial

Can popular culture speak to issues of equity in educational spaces? Anna S. CohenMiller and Kirk Peterson

Guest Editorial

Cruel Summer, Travis D. Boyce

Articles

Triple Threat or Triple Opportunity: When a Pop Culture Course Goes Online at a Community College, Lance Eaton and Alex Rockey

Cultivating Anti-Racist Feminist Pedagogy Queerly, Laurie Fuller

Afrosurrealism, Aristotle, and Racial Presence in Netflix’s Luke Cage, Angela DeAnn Mack

Sexual Harassment Effects on Bodies of Work: Engaging …

Hell You Talmbout: Mixtapes As Method For Online Environmental Justice Pedagogy, Elspeth Iralu, Caitlin Grann

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

This paper takes on the mixtape as a pedagogical method for approaching urgent and critical topics within the undergraduate online classroom. Drawing on two case studies from different sections of an introductory course on environmental and social justice taught in an American studies department, we demonstrate how mixtape-inspired assignments offer a method for theorizing and enacting the connections between popular culture and critical scholarship around injustice in the humanities and social sciences while also altering the space of the classroom to promote deeper student engagement, comprehension, and reflection. We argue that introducing popular culture as both content and method within …

Queerly Cultivating Anti-Racist Feminist Pedagogy, Laurie Fuller

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Queerly Cultivating Anti-Racist Feminist Pedagogy raises questions and analyzes classroom practices based on adrienne maree brown’s (2017) Emergent Strategy, a radical self-help manual for our current political climate that calls for a paradigm shift in organizing work. Black, mixed, queer, pansexual, feminist writer, pleasure activist, facilitator and sci-fi scholar, brown builds on a continuous tradition of women of color feminists resisting oppression to bring together science fiction and permaculture, biomimicry and organizing, pleasure and activism. She offers fresh perspectives on how to imagine liberation and provides dynamic ways to think about teaching and learning. Emergent Strategy provides principles to …

Editorial: Can Popular Culture Speak To Issues Of Equity In Educational Spaces?, Anna S. Cohenmiller, Kirk Peterson

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Editorial for Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, Volume 7, Issue 2 (Summer 2020), Engaged Popular Culture and Pedagogy: Awareness, Understanding and Social Justice.

Bodies In Motion: Challenging Imagery, Tradition, And Teaching [Dialogue: The The Interdisciplinary Journal Of Popular Culture And Pedagogy, Volume 7, Issue 1 (February 2020)], Anna S. Cohenmiller

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Bodies in Motion: Challenging Imagery, Tradition, and Teaching [Dialogue: The The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, Volume 7, Issue 1 (February 2020)]

Editorial

Challenging the Normative in Popular Culture and Pedagogy, Anna S. CohenMiller

Articles

The Tin Woodman, Captain Fyter, and Chopfyt: L. Frank Baum’s Portrayal of Body image and Prostheses in the Wake of World War I, Marie Gethins

Relandscaping the Rhetorical Tradition through Hip Hop, Robert Tinajero

The Batman Comes to Class: Popular Culture as a Tool for Addressing Reflexive Pain, Kyle Hammonds and Karen Anderson-Lain

Pedagogy, Ideology, & Composition: Is There a Better Way …

Finding The Sacred In The Profane: The Mardi Gras In Basile, Louisiana, Luc Guglielmi

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

In Basile, a small community in Southwest Louisiana, there would not be any Mardi Gras without Ash Wednesday and vice-versa. Most of the people in Basile speak of Ash Wednesday when defining the Mardi Gras as there is a reciprocal spiritual relationship between Mardi Gras and Ash Wednesday. The people from Basile, therefore, in giving equal spiritual value to these two feasts, assign a liturgical value to Mardi Gras because they need, and will admit this freely, to have a good Mardi Gras in order to enter into the sacred season of Lent.

Mardi Gras performs a function that is …

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 …

The Tin Woodman, Captain Fyter, And Chopfyt: L. Frank Baum’S Portrayal Of Body Image And Prostheses In The Wake Of World War I, Marie Gethins

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Nineteenth and early twentieth-century children’s literature frequently depicts characters with disabilities as flat stereotypes — villains or saintly invalids. L. Frank Baum’s The Tin Woodman of Oz (1918) provides a sharp contrast to these typical portrayals, as well as contemporary “socio-cultural” beliefs on physical normalcy and sense of self. Written as the U.S. entered World War I and details of trench warfare reached the home-front, it presents an interesting exploration of society’s response to physical disability and prostheses. In addition, it highlights the psychological devastation associated with body changes.

During Baum’s formative years, disabled Civil War veterans returned to New …

Internet Of Things-Based Automated Solutions Utilizing Machine Learning For Smart And Real-Time Irrigation Management: A Review, Bryan Nsoh, Abia Katimbo, Hongzhi Guo, Derek M. Heeren, Hope Njuki Nakabuye, Xin Qiao, Yufeng Ge, Daran R. Rudnick, Joshua Wanyama, Erion Bwambale, Shafik Kiraga

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Faculty Publications

This systematic review critically evaluates the current state and future potential of real-time, end-to-end smart, and automated irrigation management systems, focusing on integrating the Internet of Things (IoTs) and machine learning technologies for enhanced agricultural water use efficiency and crop productivity. In this review, the automation of each component is examined in the irrigation management pipeline from data collection to application while analyzing its effectiveness, efficiency, and integration with various precision agriculture technologies. It also investigates the role of the interoperability, standardization, and cybersecurity of IoT-based automated solutions for irrigation applications. Furthermore, in this review, the existing gaps are identified …

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, 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, 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 …

Making The Case For Teaching Character Change In Complex Tv: The Closer And Major Crimes, Emily C. Hoffman

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Jason Mittel’s 2015 book Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling offers enough material to sustain a semester-long undergraduate course. Because of its approachability and students’ interest in discussing characters, his chapter devoted to viewers’ parasocial relationships and characters’ potential for change is among the most teachable. However, teaching complex television that relies on intensely serialized story elements can make choosing televisual texts for study and discussion challenging. Therefore, series that skew episodic yet still incorporate serial elements, like police procedurals, can prove to be a practical alternative for classroom study. This article describes how using the interrelated …

Behind The Scenes: Uncovering Violence, Gender, And Powerful Pedagogy [Dialogue: The Interdiscplinary Journal Of Popular Culture And Pedogogy, Volume 5, Issue 3 (October 2018)], Anna S. Cohenmiller

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Behind the Scenes: Uncovering Violence, Gender, and Powerful Pedagogy [Dialogue: The Interdiscplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedogogy, Volume 5, Issue 3 (October 2018)]

Editorial

Persistent Need to Look behind the Curtain, Anna S. CohenMiller

Articles

Grounded Aesthetics: Pedagogy for a Post-Truth Era, Becca Cragin

We All Have Jobs Here: Teaching and Learning with Multiple Intelligences in The Walking Dead, Elizabeth Gartley

A Gendered Perspective on Policing Violence in Happy Valley and Fargo, T. Allen Culpepper

The Many Faces of Foley: A Journey of Discovery and Influence on Professional Wrestling, Adam Michael Nicks

The Many Faces Of Foley: A Journey Of Discovery And Influence On Professional Wrestling, Adam Michael Nicks

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Though the academic community often looks down on professional wrestling, there are examples in which the medium allows for elaborate and complex storytelling rivaling other forms of literature. During the 1990s, due to the constant blurring of the lines between reality and fiction within the world of wrestling and the increasingly intelligent audience that consumed the product, performers were forced to adapt to a more realistic style integrating their actual life events and personality into their on-screen personas. One sports entertainer of note was Mick Foley, who crafted three splintered characters he portrayed amongst numerous promotions. Each had their own …

Grounded Aesthetics: Pedagogy For A Post-Truth Era, Becca Cragin

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

With the rise of cultural studies, positivism and formalism fell out of favor. But in recent years, altered versions of these methodologies have been suggested as solutions to the deficiencies of the ideological approach dominating the field. Where the ideological approach looks at the content of texts to determine their meaning, the aesthetic approach adopted by media scholars in recent years returns to the close textual readings of formalism (while abandoning its assertion that meaning resides in the text alone). Similarly, where the ideological approach tends to use textual analysis devoid of sociological empiricism, the use of “big data” in …

Reading Into Creativity: New Approaches In Concept And Practice [Dialogue, Volume 5, Issue 2 (June 2018)], Anna S. Cohenmiller, Kurt Depner

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Reading into Creativity: New Approaches in Concept and Practice [Dialogue: The Interdiscplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedogogy, Volume 5, Issue 2 (June 2018)]

Editorial

Embracing Changes and Creativity in Popular Culture and Pedagogy, Anna S. CohenMiller and Kurt Depner

Working with Students

Teaching Technical Writing through Designing and Running Escape Rooms, Marijel (Maggie) Melo and Antonnet

Johnson Deconstructing "Proper Condom Use" as an Introduction to Literary Analysis, Julie Stewart, Tom Clark, and Marilyn Clark

Working with Teachers

The Stonewall Books: LGBTQ-Themed Young Adult Novels as Semiotic Beacons, Marcos Antuna, Janis Harmon, Roxanne Henkin, Karen Wood, and Kyle Kester

Working …

The Stonewall Books: Lgbtq-Themed Young Adult Novels As Semiotic Beacons, Marcos Antuna, Janis Harmon, Roxanne L. Henkin, Karen Wood, Kyle Kester

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

In a society where the LGBTQ community continues to feel the stings of prejudice and discrimination, a straightforward means of conveying accurate information about LGBTQ student lives is urgently needed. The Stonewall Awards, an annual literary prize for “exceptional merit relating to the gay/lesbian/bisexual/ transgender experience” (American Library Association, 2016), has the potential to serve as an appropriate semiotic beacon for both the acceptance of LGBTQ students as well as LGBTQ self-affirmation. This study investigated the perceptions of secondary school students and future high school teachers toward two Stonewall Award-winning novels. The findings revealed obvious similarities as well as critical …