Theorising the Popular

Theorising the Popular PDF Author: Michael Brennan
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443893714
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 190

Get Book Here

Book Description
While chiefly a site of popular pleasure and merriment, popular culture also offers a profound sense of meaning-making, where it functions as a site and source through which identities are inhabited, brokered and contested. As a significant domain within contemporary society, popular culture is both shaped by and has the capacity to shape developments occurring at the wider social, cultural and political levels of human life. Taking popular culture seriously – as an arena of everyday life that has merit in its own right – the contributors to this wide-ranging collection of essays offer unique insight into various elements of contemporary popular culture. Drawn from across the humanities and social sciences, as well as the performing arts and creative industries, this volume offers theoretical reflections on the significance of particular elements of popular culture: from the performative effects of interactive and immersive theatre, through developments in the shifting cultural landscape of a post-television age, to contemporary popular literature of various sorts and its basis for identity and fandom. Above all else, what these essays demonstrate is the radically porous nature of popular culture, and the ways in which it continually defies attempts at neat categorisation by transcending traditional boundaries and genres.

Theorising the Popular

Theorising the Popular PDF Author: Michael Brennan
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443893714
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 190

Get Book Here

Book Description
While chiefly a site of popular pleasure and merriment, popular culture also offers a profound sense of meaning-making, where it functions as a site and source through which identities are inhabited, brokered and contested. As a significant domain within contemporary society, popular culture is both shaped by and has the capacity to shape developments occurring at the wider social, cultural and political levels of human life. Taking popular culture seriously – as an arena of everyday life that has merit in its own right – the contributors to this wide-ranging collection of essays offer unique insight into various elements of contemporary popular culture. Drawn from across the humanities and social sciences, as well as the performing arts and creative industries, this volume offers theoretical reflections on the significance of particular elements of popular culture: from the performative effects of interactive and immersive theatre, through developments in the shifting cultural landscape of a post-television age, to contemporary popular literature of various sorts and its basis for identity and fandom. Above all else, what these essays demonstrate is the radically porous nature of popular culture, and the ways in which it continually defies attempts at neat categorisation by transcending traditional boundaries and genres.

Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

Cultural Theory and Popular Culture PDF Author: John Storey
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820328492
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 684

Get Book Here

Book Description
Whether used on its own or in conjunction with Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction, this reader is a theoretical, analytical, and historical introduction to the study of popular culture within cultural studies. The readings cover the culture and civilization tradition, culturalism, structuralism and poststructuralism, Marxism, feminism, and postmodernism, as well as current debates in the study of popular culture. New to this edition: Four new readings by Stuart Hall, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Judith Butler, and Savoj Žižek Fully revised general and section introductions that contextualize and link the readings with key issues in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction Fully updated bibliography Ideal for courses in: cultural studies media studies communication studies sociology of culture popular culture visual studies cultural criticism

Unlocking Social Theory with Popular Culture

Unlocking Social Theory with Popular Culture PDF Author: Naomi Barnes
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030770117
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book demonstrates how pop culture examples can be used to demystify complex social theory. It provides tangible, metaphorical examples that shows how it is possible to "do philosophy" rather than subscribe to a theorist by showing that each theorist intersects and overlaps with others. The book is embedded in the literary theory that tapping into background knowledge is a key step in helping people engage with new and difficult texts. It also acknowledges the important role of popular culture in developing comprehension. Using a choose your own adventure structure, this book not only shows students of social theory how various theories can be applied but also reveals the multitude of possible pathways theory provides for comprehending society.

Theorising the Contemporary Zombie

Theorising the Contemporary Zombie PDF Author: Scott Hamilton
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1786838583
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 302

Get Book Here

Book Description
Zombies have become an increasingly popular object of research in academic studies and, of course, in popular media. Over the past decade, they have been employed to explain mathematical equations, vortex phenomena in astrophysics, the need for improved laws, issues within higher education, and even the structure of human societies. Despite the surge of interest in the zombie as a critical metaphor, no coherent theoretical framework for studying the zombie actually exists. Addressing this current gap in the literature, Theorising the Contemporary Zombie defines zombiism as a means of theorising and examining various issues of society in any given era by immersing those social issues within the destabilising context of apocalyptic crisis; and applying this definition, the volume considers issues including gender, sexuality, family, literature, health, popular culture and extinction.

Theorising Media

Theorising Media PDF Author: John Corner
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1847797776
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this book, John Corner explores how issues of power, form and subjectivity feature at the core of all serious thinking about the media, including appreciations of their creativity as well as anxiety about the risks they pose. Drawing widely on an interdisciplinary literature, he connects his exposition to examples from film, television, radio, photography, painting, web practice, music and writing in order to bring in topics as diverse as reporting the war in Afghanistan, the televising of football, documentary portrayals of 9/11, reality television, the diversity of taste in the arts and the construction of civic identity. Theorising media brings together concepts both from Social Studies and the Arts and Humanities, addressing a readership wider than the sub-specialisms of media research. It refreshes ideas about why the media matter and how understanding them better remains a key aim of cultural inquiry and a continuing requirement for public policy.

Theorising Modernity

Theorising Modernity PDF Author: Martin O'Brien
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317884183
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 237

Get Book Here

Book Description
What is modernity? Do we all experience modernity in the same way? How should we understand contemporary social change? This volume explores questions of modernity through critical engagements with the work of Anthony Giddens, focusing in particular on the relationships between his social theory and political sociology. Three substantive areas - reflexivity, environment and identity - are examined theoretically through the relationships between reflexivity and rationality, life politics and institutional power, and universalism and 'difference'. As well as specifically addressing Giddens' reconstruction of sociology, the contributors also explore a wide variety of critical issues currently occupying centre stage in social theory. These include questions about the character of contemporary societies, the periodisation of social change, the processes of change by which societies are constantly made and remade by people, the relationships between the 'social' and the 'natural', the formation and maintenance of identities and matters of epistemology and methodology in social science. Theorising Modernity will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students of sociology, modern political thought, social geography and social policy and to social scientists trying to make sense of the modernity debate. Martin O'Brien is Research at the University of Derby. Sue Penna is a Lecturer in Applied Social Science at Lancaster University. Colin Hay is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham (UK), a Visiting Fellow of the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) and Research Affiliate of the Centre for European Studies at Harvard University (US).

Theorising Religion

Theorising Religion PDF Author: John Walliss
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351879618
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 298

Get Book Here

Book Description
Religion is controversial and challenging. Whilst religious forces are powerful in numerous societies, they have little or no significance for wide swaths of public or private life in other places. The task of theoretical work in the sociology of religion is, therefore, to make sense of this apparently paradoxical situation in which religion is simultaneously significant and insignificant. The chapters of Part One consider the classical roots of ideas about religion that dominated sociological ways of thinking about it for most of the twentieth century. Each chapter offers sound reasons for continuing to find theoretical inspiration and challenge in the sociological classics whilst also seeking ways of enhancing and extending their relevance to religion today. Part Two contains chapters that open up fresh perspectives on aspects of modern, post-modern and ultra-modern religion without necessarily ignoring the classical legacy. The chapters of Part Three chart new directions for the sociological analysis of religion by fundamentally re-thinking its theoretical basis, by extending its disciplinary boundaries and by examining previously overlooked topics.

Postfeminisms

Postfeminisms PDF Author: Ann Brooks
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134822332
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book examines how feminism is being redefined for the twenty-first century. Concepts covered include: feminist epistemology, Foucault, psychoanalytic theory and semiology, cultural politics and sexuality and identity.

Theorising the Contemporary Zombie

Theorising the Contemporary Zombie PDF Author: Scott Hamilton
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1786838591
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 307

Get Book Here

Book Description
Zombies have become an increasingly popular object of research in academic studies and, of course, in popular media. Over the past decade, they have been employed to explain mathematical equations, vortex phenomena in astrophysics, the need for improved laws, issues within higher education, and even the structure of human societies. Despite the surge of interest in the zombie as a critical metaphor, no coherent theoretical framework for studying the zombie actually exists. Addressing this current gap in the literature, Theorising the Contemporary Zombie defines zombiism as a means of theorising and examining various issues of society in any given era by immersing those social issues within the destabilising context of apocalyptic crisis; and applying this definition, the volume considers issues including gender, sexuality, family, literature, health, popular culture and extinction.

Theorising Democide

Theorising Democide PDF Author: M. Chou
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137298693
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 104

Get Book Here

Book Description
Beginning with the premise that democracies are often deeply implicated in their own downfall, The Theory of Democide challenges the conventional view of how and why democracies collapse by demonstrating that democratic collapse is often a direct result of the inherent logic of democracy itself.