American Popular Culture Commons^™

Editorial: Traversing Borders, Transgressing Boundaries In Popular Culture And Pedagogy, Karina A. Vado, Anna S. Cohenmiller

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Editorial for Dialogue: The The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, Volume 8, Issue 3 (November 2021), Traversing Borders, Transgressing Boundaries in Popular Culture and Pedagogy.

Infusing Pedogogy With Empathy, Social Action And Value Through Popular Culture [Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal Of Popular Culture And Pedagogy, Volume 8, Issue 2 (September 2021)], Karina A. Vado, Anna S. Cohenmiller

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Infusing Pedogogy with Empathy, Social Action and Value through Popular Culture [Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, Volume 8, Issue 2 (September 2021)]

Editorial

Teaching Wicked Problems: Critical Pedagogy, Personal Transformation, and Social Action through Popular Culture, Karina A. Vado and Anna S. CohenMiller

Articles

Conceptualizing Empathy and Prosocial Action: Teaching Film within the Literature Classroom, Mayuri Deka

What We Owe Our Students: The Good Place, Pedagogy, and the Architecture of Engaged Learning, Shala Mills and Darrell Hamlin

Experimental Forms and Identity Politics in 21st Century American Poetry, Ronnie Stephens

Reviews (Online only)

Review of The …

Experimental Forms And Identity Politics In 21st Century American Poetry, Ronnie Stephens

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

“Experimental Forms and Identity Politics in 21st Century American Poetry” explores the function of form in American poetry and its proximity to whiteness. Through an analysis of experimental and nontraditional forms I argue that poets Fatimah Asghar, Jericho Brown, Franny Choi, Natalie Diaz, Ilya Kaminsky, and Danez Smith challenge traditional notions of what a poem is; these authors use graphics and co-opt familiar text objects to challenge larger assumptions about gender identity, ableism, and the immigrant experience. These experimental forms are grounded in a larger poetic tradition that alters traditional forms, such as the sonnet, to disrupt and further dialogue …

What We Owe Our Students: The Good Place, Pedagogy, And The Architecture Of Engaged Learning, Shala A. Mills, Darrell Hamlin

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Pedagogy is the architecture of a learning environment. The discipline of philosophy has often operated according to a pedagogy of conversation, clarity, and reflection, certainly since the era of Socratic dialogue in the streets of Athens. We argue that The Good Place occupies that space, re-setting this pedagogy as an architecture of learning through entertainment associated with ultimate matters of eternal disposition. A critical character driving conversation, clarity, and reflection across four seasons of the story’s arc is a philosopher – doomed by their own indecisive flaws – who teaches deep understanding of ethical development through a variety of relevant …

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 …

Editorial: Teaching Wicked Problems: Critical Pedagogy, Personal Transformation, And Social Action Through Popular Culture, Karina A. Vado, Anna S. Cohenmiller

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Editorial for Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, Volume 8, Issue 2 (September 2021), Infusing Pedagogy with Empathy, Social Action and Value through Popular Culture .

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 …

Guiding Students Down That “Old Town Road:” Writing Pedagogy, Relatability And The Sitch, Lynn D. Zimmemran

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

This study draws on media literacy to suggest pedagogical techniques that aim to combat boredom and enhance student engagement in freshman writing classes. Students often complain they cannot relate to course work; they maintain that course materials do not connect to their real lives and are therefore uninteresting. Because writing classes can serve as an introduction to academic discourse and skillful writing promotes academic success, negative attitudes about writing matter. Instructors craft courses to achieve learning outcomes but also to foster the habits of mind effective writing demands. I contend that discussing and writing about timely, controversial topics from students’ …

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 …

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

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, popular and scholarly commentators have been looking for speculative and/or dystopic literary works that might provide analogues for the Trump-era. Perhaps the most famous of these was the renewed popularity of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. In this regard, though, video games remain an underexplored fictional form. With its exaggerated and parodic satire of an America ruled by the corruption and greed of extreme right-wing populism, Grand Theft Auto (GTA): San Andreas (2004) offers a speculative fiction that players can enact as well as imagine, and simulate as well as prepare. …

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 …

Editorial: Evolving Awareness Of Popular Culture And Pedagogy: A View Into Celebrity, Song, Narrative, And Superheroes, Miriam Sciala, Anna S. Cohenmiller

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

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

(Un)Conscious Representation: Race, Gender, Ideology [Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal Of Popular Culture And Pedagogy, Volume 7, Issue 3 (Fall 2020)], Kirk Peterson, Anna S. Cohenmiller

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

(Un)conscious Representation: Race, Gender, Ideology [Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, Volume 7, Issue 3 (Fall 2020)]

Editorial

Making the Invisible Visible through Popular Culture, Kirk Peterson and Anna S. CohenMiller

Articles

Visuality of Race in Popular Culture: Teaching Racial Histories and Iconography in Media, Joni Boyd Acuff and Amelia M. Kraehe

Unmasking Male Voices in Woman Hollering Creek: Contributions to Pedagogy and Masculinity Studies, Ramón J. Guerra and Joan Latchaw

D&D Beyond Bikini-Mail: Having Women at the Table, Daniel Carlson

A Heartbeat Away: Popular Culture’s Role in Teaching Presidential Succession, Jay Wendland

Pop Culture and …

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 …

A Heartbeat Away: Popular Culture’S Role In Teaching Presidential Succession, Jay L. Wendland

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

The role of popular culture in civic education is important. Many television viewers learn about the American political process through various dramatized depictions. The 25th Amendment has often received much attention from Hollywood, as it provides writers, directors, and producers a tool with which to further dramatize presidential succession. Through the television shows West Wing, Designated Survivor, Commander in Chief, Madam Secretary, and Political Animals, viewers are exposed to storylines revolving around the 25th Amendment. By viewing these dramatized versions of presidential succession, viewers are better able to understand the process and political science instructors …

D&D Beyond Bikini-Mail: Having Women At The Table, Daniel Carlson

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Dungeons and Dragons represents a space that is often treated as an echo chamber for young (usually white) men to act out fantasies of power and control, which makes up for their inability to perform such actions in the real world. Using the work of Sherry Turkle and Michelle Dickey, I posit that this game is a nuanced location acting as a safe space for people to act out different aspects of their identity or life experiences in a low-risk environment enhanced by the connections made between the players and their characters. In this work, I have utililzed feminist frames …

Unmasking Male Voices In Woman Hollering Creek: Contributions To Pedagogy And Masculinity Studies, Ramón Javier Guerra, Joan Latchaw

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

In teaching Sandra Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek to undergraduates, we have developed a sociocultural and historical framework, beginning with the theoretical work of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands and the concept of transfrontera feminism. With incidents of seduction and sexual abuse of women, spousal abuse, and patriarchal family structures, the collection of stories strongly indicates the oppressive representation of machismo. Scholars and teachers have drawn important critiques of Cisneros’s work based on destructive sociocultural forces on women. However, in rereading the text with an intended focus on the representations of male characters, we have surmised that Cisneros structured the stories in the …

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 …

Editorial: Making The Invisible Visible Through Popular Culture, Kirk Peterson, Anna S. Cohenmiller

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Editorial for Dialogue: The The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy Volume 7, Issue 3 (Fall 2020), (Un)conscious Representation: Race, Gender, Ideology.

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 …

Sexual Harassment Effects On Bodies Of Work: Engaging Students Through The Application Of Historical Context And Communication Theory To Pop Culture And Social Media, Bryan Vizzini, Kristina Drumheller

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Rarely do professors have the opportunity to branch out and create a course that is literally shaped by the day’s news. The mediated unveiling of sexual predators in the summer of 2018 provided an opportunity to teach an honors seminar that wrote itself over the course of five weeks. Professors from the communication and history disciplines drew on theory commonly used in the communication discipline and used historical readings to frame a discussion of popular culture and its relation to current events. Each week, a film was incorporated for discussion and student projects were drawn from examples of popular culture, …

Afrosurrealism, Aristotle, And Racial Presence In Netflix’S Luke Cage, Angela D. Mack

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

This essay examines Netflix’s Luke Cage as a rhetorical reading of racial embodiment and productions of the cultural identity of Blackness and People of Color, and the tensions they produce to help audiences understand the current climatic flux between racial hostility and American idealism. With only two seasons in the small-screen version of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), Cheo Hodari Coker’s adaptation of the 1970s Blaxploitation Power Man comic foregrounded the recent wave of superhero narratives that expanded minority/gender representation from both major comic houses (MCU and DC Extended Universe [DCEU]). This examination employs the lens of Afrosurrealism, a conceptual …

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 …

Triple Threat Or Triple Opportunity: When A Pop Culture Course Goes Online At A Community College, Lance Eaton, Alex Rockey

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Teaching popular culture comes with many opportunities and challenges in a traditional classroom, but equally interesting and valuable are the possibilities that teaching such a course online can provide. This article explores how “Popular Culture in the US,” an online course at a community college, embraces some key attributes of the digital world such as multimodal communication and Web 2.0 interactivity. Evolved from a face-to-face community college course, the online version has increasingly developed to move from an instructor-centered to a student-centered approach that relies upon various engagement strategies. By using student choice, OER-enabled pedagogy, and constructivist approaches, the instructor …

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 …

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 …

Renegade Or Paragon?: Categorizing Narrative Choice In Video Game Storylines, Graham Oliver

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Choices made during video game gameplay set the stories told in that media apart from other media. Narrative-affecting choices have existed since the earliest games, from character creation in role-playing games to performance-based narrative changes in Metroid to morality-based choices in Ogre Battle. In the contemporary gaming landscape, some games derive a significant portion of their gameplay from character decisions: exploration, dialogue options, quick-time event reactions, etc. In this article, I give a history and breakdown of how choices have existed and evolved in gaming narratives since their inception. I then propose three categories for significant narrative choices: aesthetic, …

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 …