Volume 7, Issue 2 — Engaged Popular Culture and Pedagogy: Awareness, Understanding and Social Justice
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Item Open Access TRIPLE THREAT OR TRIPLE OPPORTUNITY: WHEN A POP CULTURE COURSE GOES ONLINE AT A COMMUNITY COLLEGE(Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, 2020) Eaton, Lance; Rockey, AlexTeaching 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 engages students by leveraging the Internet to educate students, empower them as creators of content, and support critical participation in popular culture. The article illustrates how teaching within the online space can enhance teaching and learning, particularly for courses that have a disciplinary focus on popular culture and media. Keywords: pop culture, online course, constructivism, community college, universal design for learning, open pedagogy, open educational resources, interaction, multimodalItem Open Access QUEERLY CULTIVATING ANTI-RACIST FEMINIST PEDAGOGY(Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, 2020) Fuller, LaurieQueerly 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. A 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 help us change and grow, essential for all pedagogical work, and asks us to imagine liberation. In fact, emergent strategy principles can be integrated into classroom teaching and educational practices to create more meaningful learning, engagement, and measurable success: Trust people, what you pay attention to grows, less prep more presence, never a failure always a lesson, and change is constant (brown, 2017, pp. 41-42). This article addresses present moment classroom concerns using these five principles to explore why and how to cultivate anti-racist feminist pedagogy and to do it queerly. In this case, queer is an action, a verb, something to do, and something to do to counter normative approaches, to queer them. Thus, queerly cultivating anti-racist feminist pedagogy questions the status quo, and can be used to challenge taken for granted, problematic and oppressive classroom practices and educational theories. Keywords: Feminist, Anti-Racist, Queer, Pedagogy, Privilege, Oppression, Organizing, Emergent Strategy, TeachingItem Open Access SEXUAL HARASSMENT EFFECTS ON BODIES OF WORK: ENGAGING STUDENTS THROUGH THE APPLICATION OF HISTORICAL CONTEXT AND COMMUNICATION THEORY TO POP CULTURE AND SOCIAL MEDIA(Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, 2020) Vizzini, Bryan; Drumheller, KrisRarely 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, creating a course that allowed a historical and modern popular culture to collide. Students articulated the significance of both the historical context and rhetorical relevance in a fractured society. The course and its content continued to be discussed well after it ended. Keywords: sexual harassment, Orwellian, LGBTQ+, #MeToo, framing, terministic screensItem Open Access AFROSURREALISM, ARISTOTLE, AND RACIAL PRESENCE IN NETFLIX’S LUKE CAGE(Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, 2020) Mack, Angela D.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 framework of understanding Blackness through its many complex manifestations of cultural and aesthetic representations in art across time. It is through this Afrosurrealist concept where references to race such as “Black”, “Brown”, “White,” and “People of Color” are applied to describe specific people groups/collectives throughout this essay. Using Afrosurrealism, I argue that Luke Cage can be analyzed through Aristotle’s three species of rhetoric: the judicial rhetoric of the past, the epideictic rhetoric of the present, and the deliberative rhetoric of the future. By using these three rhetorical branches, this analysis demonstrates a diasporic reading of race with Harlem as its bridge to the “realms” of New York City and beyond. This reading of a Black superhero’s world, Luke Cage’s “Harlem World,” thus brings about an awareness of a necessary racial presence, resulting in a grounding of racial realities, that subverts an ideal post-racial afterlife in the post-Obama “American” universe. By understanding the show’s characters and the setting of Harlem as another type of Americana manifestation, an America that from its origin to its current iteration is constructed through race, we can continue to learn the significance of representation and how working through issues of race for African Americans and People of Color impacts everyone. If we continue to resist the racial tensions and realities in our social climate, then we run the risk of contributing to the racial issues we say we would like to help heal. Keywords: Luke Cage, race, rhetoric, Afrosurrealism, Aristotle, Marvel, MCUItem Open Access HELL YOU TALMBOUT: MIXTAPES AS METHOD FOR ONLINE ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE PEDAGOGY(Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, 2020) Iralu, Elspeth; Grann, CaitlinThis 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 an undergraduate course not only strengthens student understanding of key concepts and the relevance of these outside the classroom, but also acknowledges the importance of time and context within the space of the online course. Popular culture, a component of this context, enriches the online learning experience and responds to contemporary issues and events that students encounter in the material world. Mixtapes serve as a conceptual tool for understanding the contents of a syllabus and as a pedagogical tool for assessment. The practice of making mixtapes within a course on environmental and social justice opens the possibility for radical expression. Keywords: mixtape, environmental justice, online classroom, online teaching and learning, popular culture, pedagogy