Sample Syllabus for Lower-Division Undergraduate Course in Media and Cultural... | #popstudies

Sample Syllabus for Lower-Division Undergraduate Course in Media and Cultural Studies
The Politics of the Popular: Gender, Race, and Cultural Studies
http://popcultstudies.wordpress.com | #popstudies
Alexis Lothian | alexislothian@gmail.com |@alothianedu | Office hours & location
Class location and time
“Popular culture, commodified and stereotyped as it often is ... is a theater of popular
desires, a theater of popular fantasies.” ––Stuart Hall
This course will introduce you to theories of gender, race, and sexuality in media and cultural
studies, offering a set of tools for thinking seriously about popular media (film, TV, music, online
culture)––and some practice at using them. We will spend the first third of the course getting to
grips with the critical tools of cultural studies analysis, from the British Cultural Studies tradition to
recent transnational trends in American studies, from Marxist critique to feminist analysis. Then we
will work through some specific examples of popular culture, exploring the meanings,
representations, and struggles over gendered and racial identities that take place around music
scenes, television, and digital practices. Our course will range widely across popular cultural
economies, mainly in the US but also transnationally: from subcultures and processes of
mainstreaming in punk and hip hop to global music cultures, from soap operas and reality TV to the
changes digital media has made to our experience of popular culture, including the cultural politics
of YouTube and Facebook. You will have the opportunity to critically pursue your own pop-cultural
fascinations at many points during the course.
Required Text
Raiford Guins and Omayra Zaragoza Cruz, Popular Culture: a Reader. (PCR)
Additional readings available to download (DL)
Course Schedule
Week 1
Unit 1: Theorizing the Popular
Popular? Culture?
Raymond Williams, “Culture” and “Masses” (PCR)
Due: twitter bios Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson, and Jane Shattuc, “Defining Popular Culture”
Group signups
(DL)
Shelly Streeby, “Popular, Mass, and High Culture” (DL)
Week 2
Culture Industries
David Ruccio, “Capitalism” from Keywords for American Cultural Studies (DL)
Theodor Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered” (PCR)
Guy Debord, “The Commodity as Spectacle” (PCR)
Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing the Popular” (PCR)
Week 3
Due: group
planning meeting
report (on blog)
Gender and Sexuality
Judith Halberstam, “Gender”; Siobhan Somerville, “Queer” from Keywords for
American Cultural Studies
Tania Modleski, “Femininity as Mas(s)querade” (PCR)
from Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth (DL)
Alexander Doty, from Making Things Perfectly Queer (DL)
Lothian 2
Week 4
Race and Ethnicity
Roderick Ferguson, “Race” and Henry Yu, “Ethnicity” from Keywords for American
Cultural Studies
Coco Fusco, “We Wear the Mask” (DL)
Anne DuCille, “Black Barbie and the Deep Play of Difference” (DL)
Lauren Berlant, “The Face of America” (PCR)
Week 5
Due:
short paper 1
Transnationalism
Shelly Streeby, “Empire”; Brent Hayes Edwards, “Diaspora” from Keywords for
American Cultural Studies
Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd, from the Introduction to The Politics of Culture in the
Shadow of Capital (PCR)
Gayatri Gopinath, “Bombay, UK, Yuba City: Bhangra Music and the
Engendering of Diaspora” (DL)
Week 6
Revisiting concepts and in-class theory quiz
Week 7
Unit 2: Popular Music
Punk, Subculture, and Incorporation
Dick Hebdige, from Subculture: the Meaning of Style (DL)
Angela McRobbie, “Second-Hand Dresses and the Role of the Ragmarket”
(PCR)
Tavia Nyong’o, “Intersections of Punk and Queer in the 1970s” (DL)
Week 8
Hip-hop Histories and Politics
George Lipsitz, “Diasporic Noise: History, Hip Hop, and the Post-Colonial
Politics of Sound” (PCR)
Robin Kelley, from Yo Mama’s Disfunktional (DL)
Tricia Rose, “A Style Nobody Can Deal With” (PCR)
T. Sharpley-Whiting, from Pimps Up, Ho’s Down (DL)
Week 9
Due:
short paper 2
Global and Local Cross- fertilizations
Jayna Brown, “Buzz and Rumble: Global Pop Music and Utopian Impulse” (DL)
Victor Viesca, “Straight Out of the Barrio: Ozomatli and the Importance of Place
in the Formation of Chicano/a Popular Culture in Los Angeles” (PCR)
Karen Tongson, from Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (DL)
Week 10
Unit 3: Television
TV as gendered and racialized cultural form
from Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (DL)
Lynn Spigel, “The Suburban Home Companion: Television and the
Neighborhood Ideal in Postwar America” (DL)
Herman Gray, from Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness (DL)
Lothian 3
Week 11
Reality?
Chad Raphael, “Political Economy of Reali-TV” (DL)
from Mark Andrevich, Reality TV: the Work of Being Watched (DL)
José Munoz, “Pedro Zamora’s Real World of Counterpublicity” (PCR)
Screening: The Truman Show
Week 12
Responding to TV: Gender and Audiences
Joanna Russ, “Pornography By Women For Women, With Love” (DL)
Francesca Coppa, “Star Trek, Women, and the History of Fannish Vidding”
(online)
Sarah Gwenllian Jones, “The Sex Lives of Cult Television Characters” (DL)
Jonathan Gray, “Anti-fans and Non-fans” (DL)
Week 13
Unit 3: Digital Cultures
Social Networking and Race
danah boyd, “White Flight and Networked Publics: How Race and Class Shaped
American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook” (DL)
Craig Watkins, from The Young and the Digital (DL)
Screening: The Social Network
Due:
short paper 3
Week 14
YouTube
From Jean Burgess and Josh Lukin, Youtube (DL)
Julie Levin Russo, “User-Penetrated Content” (DL)
From Alex Juhasz, Learning from YouTube (online)
Week 15
Gaming
Ian Bogost, from Persuasive Games (DL)
Evan W. Lauteria, “Sexuality and Sexual Orientation in Console and Computer
Games” (DL)
Lisa Nakamura, “Virtual Head-Hunting” (PCR) and “Don’t Hate the Player, Hate
the Game: the Racialization of Labor in World of Warcraft” (DL)
Short paper 4 due: one week after the final class
Course Requirements and Expectations
Assignments
1. Keep up (10% of your grade, and a prerequisite for the rest)
Do the reading. Really. Whether you skim along and aim just to keep up, or go online to search
out commentary and examples and share your new knowledge with your internet friends is up to
you––but the interactive elements of this course will be impossible to complete adequately if you
don’t keep up with the assigned readings. This includes checking the course blog, where I
will post announcements and you will post assignments, several times a week.
Participate. This doesn’t mean talking all the time, interrupting lecture with questions, or
dominating discussion. It means engaging in active listening, speaking when you have something
to say, and putting the work in so that if you are called on, you will be able to respond. In this
class, it also includes:
Lothian 4
2. Connect on Twitter (10% of your grade)
This course requires you to have a Twitter account and to use it to practice the skills of online
intellectual community. Our course hashtag will be #popstudies. During lecture, you can tweet
questions to each other or to me (@alothianedu); there will be moments when I ask what has
come up, or when I project the Twitter stream in front of class. We’ll schedule a twitter intro for
novices in the first week. Bear in mind that this is an interactive mode of communication, not just
a soapbox for your opinions. In-class tweeting is not required; you are very welcome not to use a
laptop. But everyone should tweet a question or comment about the reading, or a relevant link, at
least once a week. The earlier the better; if I can see what your impressions are before class, I can
make sure my lecture covers your concerns.
Note that I will be reading the twitter stream regularly. Insults or hateful language will be
treated the same way as if you had yelled them out in class: as serious verbal abuse.
3. Theory quiz (15% of your grade)
To make sure that you have grasped the central ideas from our first five weeks of theoretical
analysis, we will have a short-answer exam in week six.
4. Short papers (30% of your grade)
You will write a short (2-3-page) paper to reflect on key terms and ideas from each section of the
course, in response to a detailed assignment.
3. Group presentation and accompanying paper (35% of your grade)
Near the beginning of class, you will sign up to join a group based on your interests in the course.
Each group (or more than one, depending on the size of the class) will commit to working on the
readings and examples for one week of the semester after week 6. Following milestones I will lay
out for you, you will collaboratively prepare a presentation on the subject of the week you have
chosen. You should:
• explore the readings well in advance
• research other texts on the subject (the bibliographies of the readings will be a good place
to start)
• curate some examples from popular culture. Bear in mind that showing some YouTube
videos isn’t enough––you need context and some solid arguments for why the works
you’ve chosen are important.
• plan to take up about 20 minutes of class time
• include an online component: you can develop this as creatively as you like, or just use the
class blog to share examples and readings before and after their presentations.
You’ll sign up for the week you prefer in week 1; in week 3 your group will make a blog post
about how you have planned to organize your work. I strongly recommend that you choose a
week based on your personal media interest and enjoyment, rather than simply because it is
appropriately timed.
A 4-5 page paper is due one week after your group’s presentation. A detailed assignment will be
given with the formal group presentation assignment sheet, but this should be a formal, individual,
thesis-driven argument that you develop out of the reading and thinking.
Classroom participation
You are required to be present, punctual, prepared, and ready to engage in every scheduled class
session. Bring the texts under discussion, including handouts, every day, as well as any assigned
Lothian 5
tasks. You are more than welcome to bring your laptop, but please use it to participate: to access
readings and the class blog, take notes, or find information online that will add to the discussion.
Liveblogging or otherwise sharing notes is welcome, but please do not post names or personal
information without explicit permission. If I notice that you are tuned out, reading Facebook, etc, I
will ask you to close your computer and not take it out in class in future. Know yourself: if you
won’t be able to resist the internet’s siren call, turn off your wireless or take notes on paper.
Absence and tardiness
Missing class without a good reason or arriving late is disrespectful both to me and to your fellow
students. Please contact me as soon as possible if you are unable to attend. More than 4 absences
will cause your grade to drop significantly; tardiness of more than 20 minutes counts as an absence.
Electronic communication
If you have a question, look at the course blog (http://popcultstudies.wordpress.com) and syllabus
before you email me. I will not read substantial drafts in email, or open attachments unless I have
asked you to send them. You can expect a response to your queries within 24 hours; 48 if you email
at the weekend. I will expect the same response times from you if I email you with a question. You
may also DM or @ me on Twitter, @alothianedu, which may garner a speedier (if shorter) response.
A note on discussion
Part of critical analysis is figuring out where assumptions––both yours and those of the texts you are
engaging––come from. This can mean raising awkward questions about complicated subjects
including politics, religion, race, gender, sexuality, and identity. Disagreement is encouraged, but
please remember that the subject matter under discussion may affect the feelings of people around
you. The classroom should be a space where everyone can express their thoughts as they develop
and explore their responses to the reading and writing tasks. That said, some forms of language are
simply unacceptable: I do not tolerate racist, sexist, homophobic, ablist, or any other slurs in the
classroom. If at any point you feel that the classroom or the class’s online space is not a comfortable
space for you, please speak to me in office hours or by email and I will endeavor to do something
about it.
Academic integrity
Plagiarism will not be tolerated. If you present another writer’s ideas or words as your own, it will
result in an automatic F. Bear in mind that excessive help from a parent, friend, or tutor also
constitutes plagiarism. If in doubt, attribute––and check in with me to be sure.
Accessibility and accommodations
I will do my best to work with any student who requires accommodations for a disability; please get
in touch with me as soon as possible if any of the course requirements pose an access barrier for
you. Any student requesting academic accommodations for a disability is required to register with
Disability Services each semester.