Social problems in popular culture

Social problems in popular culture PDF Author: Maratea, R. J.
Publisher: Policy Press
ISBN: 144732160X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
‘Popular culture’ is more than just a broad term for entertainment and frivolous diversions and is highly relevant to many aspects of society. In this exciting textbook, the authors offer insights into the important, but often overlooked, relationship between popular culture and social problems. Drawing on historical and topical examples, they apply an innovative theoretical framework to examine how facets of popular culture—from movies and music, to toys and games, as well as billboards, bumper stickers, and bracelets—shape how we think about, and respond to, social issues. Including student features and evocative case studies, this is the first book to make the link between popular culture and social problems and will help students understand the relationship between them. Deftly combining the fun and irreverence of popular culture with a critical scholarly inquiry, this timely book delivers an engaging account of how our interactions with popular culture matter more than we think!

Social problems in popular culture

Social problems in popular culture PDF Author: Maratea, R. J.
Publisher: Policy Press
ISBN: 144732160X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Get Book

Book Description
‘Popular culture’ is more than just a broad term for entertainment and frivolous diversions and is highly relevant to many aspects of society. In this exciting textbook, the authors offer insights into the important, but often overlooked, relationship between popular culture and social problems. Drawing on historical and topical examples, they apply an innovative theoretical framework to examine how facets of popular culture—from movies and music, to toys and games, as well as billboards, bumper stickers, and bracelets—shape how we think about, and respond to, social issues. Including student features and evocative case studies, this is the first book to make the link between popular culture and social problems and will help students understand the relationship between them. Deftly combining the fun and irreverence of popular culture with a critical scholarly inquiry, this timely book delivers an engaging account of how our interactions with popular culture matter more than we think!

Social Problems in Popular Culture

Social Problems in Popular Culture PDF Author: Maratea, R. J.
Publisher: Policy Press
ISBN: 144732157X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Get Book

Book Description
‘Popular culture’ is more than just a broad term for entertainment and frivolous diversions and is highly relevant to many aspects of society. In this exciting textbook, the authors offer insights into the important, but often overlooked, relationship between popular culture and social problems. Drawing on historical and topical examples, they apply an innovative theoretical framework to examine how facets of popular culture—from movies and music, to toys and games, as well as billboards, bumper stickers, and bracelets—shape how we think about, and respond to, social issues. Including student features and evocative case studies, this is the first book to make the link between popular culture and social problems and will help students understand the relationship between them. Deftly combining the fun and irreverence of popular culture with a critical scholarly inquiry, this timely book delivers an engaging account of how our interactions with popular culture matter more than we think!

Connecting Social Problems and Popular Culture

Connecting Social Problems and Popular Culture PDF Author: Karen Sternheimer
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0813347246
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 163

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Book Description
Is violence on the streets caused by violence in video games? Does cyber-bullying lead to an increase in suicide rates? Are teens promiscuous because of Teen Mom? As Karen Sternheimer clearly demonstrates, popular culture is an easy scapegoat for many of society's problems, but it is almost always the wrong answer. Now in its second edition, Connecting Social Problems and Popular Culture goes beyond the news-grabbing headlines claiming that popular culture is public enemy number one to consider what really causes the social problems we are most concerned about. The sobering fact is that a "media made them do it" explanation fails to illuminate the roots of social problems like poverty, violence, and environmental degradation. Sternheimer's analysis deftly illustrates how welfare "reform," a two-tiered health care system, and other difficult systemic issues have far more to do with our contemporary social problems than Grand Theft Auto or Facebook. The fully-revised new edition features recent moral panics—think sexting and cyberbullying—and an entirely new chapter exploring social media. Expanded discussion of how we understand society's problems as social constructions without disregarding empirical evidence, as well as the cultural and structural issues underlying those ills, allows students to stretch their sociological imaginations.

Major Problems in American Popular Culture

Major Problems in American Popular Culture PDF Author: Kathleen Franz
Publisher: Wadsworth Publishing Company
ISBN: 9780495911722
Category : Amusements
Languages : en
Pages : 470

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Book Description
MAJOR PROBLEMS IN AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE, International Edition is part of a highly respected series of edited collections of primary documents and scholarly essays designed for use in history courses at the undergraduate level. The basic goal of these texts is to provide students and instructors with the most distinguished, readable, and stimulating writing available: essays centered on major historical questions, complemented by related primary source materials.

Connecting Social Problems and Popular Culture

Connecting Social Problems and Popular Culture PDF Author: Karen Sternheimer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429974973
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Is violence on the streets caused by violence in video games? Does cyber-bullying lead to an increase in suicide rates? Are teens promiscuous because of Teen Mom? As Karen Sternheimer clearly demonstrates, popular culture is an easy scapegoat for many of society's problems, but it is almost always the wrong answer. Now in its second edition, Connecting Social Problems and Popular Culture goes beyond the news-grabbing headlines claiming that popular culture is public enemy number one to consider what really causes the social problems we are most concerned about. The sobering fact is that a "media made them do it" explanation fails to illuminate the roots of social problems like poverty, violence, and environmental degradation. Sternheimer's analysis deftly illustrates how welfare "reform," a two-tiered health care system, and other difficult systemic issues have far more to do with our contemporary social problems than Grand Theft Auto or Facebook. The fully-revised new edition features recent moral panics (think sexting and cyberbullying) and an entirely new chapter exploring social media. Expanded discussion of how we understand society's problems as social constructions without disregarding empirical evidence, as well as the cultural and structural issues underlying those ills, allows students to stretch their sociological imaginations.

Popular Culture and Social Change

Popular Culture and Social Change PDF Author: Kate Fitch
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351788248
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
Popular Culture and Social Change: The Hidden Work of Public Relations argues the complicated and contradictory relationship between public relations, popular culture and social change is a neglected theoretical project. Its diverse chapters identify ways in which public relations influences the production of popular culture and how alternative, often community-driven conceptualisations of public relations work can be harnessed for social change and in pursuit of social justice. This book opens up critical scholarship on public relations in that it moves beyond corporate understandings and perspectives to explore alternative and eclectic communicative cultures, in part to consider a more optimistic conceptualisation of public relations as a resource for progressive social change. Fitch and Motion began with an interest in identifying the ways in which public relations both draws on and influences the production of popular culture by creating, promoting and amplifying particular narratives and images. The chapters in this book consider how public relations creates popular cultures that are deeply compromised and commercialised, but at the same time can be harnessed to advocate for social change in supporting, reproducing, challenging or resisting the status quo. Drawing on critical and sociocultural perspectives, this book is an important resource for researchers, educators and students exploring public relations theory, strategic communication and promotional culture. It investigates the entanglement of public relations, popular culture and social change in different social, cultural and political contexts – from fashion and fortune telling to race activism and aesthetic labour – in order to better understand the (often subterranean) societal influence of public relations activity.

Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination

Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination PDF Author: Henry Jenkins
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479891258
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
How popular culture is engaged by activists to effect emancipatory political change One cannot change the world unless one can imagine what a better world might look like. Civic imagination is the capacity to conceptualize alternatives to current cultural, social, political, or economic conditions; it also requires the ability to see oneself as a civic agent capable of making change, as a participant in a larger democratic culture. Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination represents a call for greater clarity about what we’re fighting for—not just what we’re fighting against. Across more than thirty examples from social movements around the world, this casebook proposes “civic imagination” as a framework that can help us identify, support, and practice new kinds of communal participation. As the contributors demonstrate, young people, in particular, are turning to popular culture—from Beyoncé to Bollywood, from Smokey Bear to Hamilton, from comic books to VR—for the vernacular through which they can express their discontent with current conditions. A young activist uses YouTube to speak back against J. K. Rowling in the voice of Cho Chang in order to challenge the superficial representation of Asian Americans in children’s literature. Murals in Los Angeles are employed to construct a mythic imagination of Chicano identity. Twitter users have turned to #BlackGirlMagic to highlight the black radical imagination and construct new visions of female empowerment. In each instance, activists demonstrate what happens when the creative energies of fans are infused with deep political commitment, mobilizing new visions of what a better democracy might look like.

Pop Culture Panics

Pop Culture Panics PDF Author: Karen Sternheimer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317751337
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 157

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Book Description
Moral panics reveal much about a society’s social structure and the sociology embedded in everyday life. This short text examines extreme reactions to American popular culture over the past century, including crusades against comic books, music, and pinball machines, to help convey the "sociological imagination" to undergraduates. Sternheimer creates a critical lens through which to view current and future attempts of modern-day moral crusaders, who try to convince us that simple solutions—like regulating popular culture—are the answer to complex social problems. Pop Culture Panics is ideal for use in undergraduate social problems, social deviance, and popular culture courses.

Crime, Deviance and Popular Culture

Crime, Deviance and Popular Culture PDF Author: Dimitris Akrivos
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030049124
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
This book explores the links between crime, deviance and popular culture in our highly-mediatised era, offering an insight into the cultural processes through which particular practices acquire a criminal or deviant status, and come to be seen as social problems. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, the edited collection brings together international scholars across various areas of specialisation to provide an up-to-date analysis of some important and topical issues in 21st-century popular culture. The chapters look at different aspects of popular culture, including fictional detective narratives and the true crime genre, popular media constructions of sexual deviance and Islamophobia, sports, graffiti and outlaw biker subcultures. The authors examine a wide range of relevant case studies through a number of crime and deviance-related theories. Crime, Deviance and Popular Culture will be of importance to scholars and students across several disciplines, including criminology, sociology of deviance, social anthropology, media studies, cultural studies, television studies and linguistics.

The Society of the Selfie

The Society of the Selfie PDF Author: Jeremiah Morelock
Publisher: University of Westminster Press
ISBN: 1914386264
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
This book explores how the Internet is connected to the global crisis of liberal democracy. Today, self-promotion is at the heart of many human relationships. The selfie is not just a social media gesture people love to hate. It is also a symbol of social reality in the age of the Internet. Through social media people have new ways of rating and judging themselves and one another, via metrics such as likes, shares, followers and friends. There are new thirsts for authenticity, outlets for verbal aggression, and social problems. Social media culture and neoliberalism dovetail and amplify one another, feeding social estrangement. With neoliberalism, psychosocial wounds are agitated and authoritarianism is provoked. Yet this new sociality also inspires resistance and political mobilisation. Illustrating ideas and trends with examples from news and popular culture, the book outlines and applies theories from Debord, Foucault, Fromm, Goffman, and Giddens, among others. Topics covered include the global history of communication technologies, personal branding, echo chamber effects, alienation and fear of abnormality. Information technologies provide channels for public engagement where extreme ideas reach farther and faster than ever before, and political differences are widened and inflamed. They also provide new opportunities for protest and resistance.