Pursuing Popular Culture: Methods for Researching the Everyday
Edition: 1
Copyright: 2017
Pages: 226
Edition: 1
Copyright: 2017
Pages: 226
Choose Your Format
$127.63
Ebook
$60.78
Popular culture surrounds us every day. Pursuing Popular Culture assists instructors by providing both a rich blend of new and relevant popular culture artifacts that appeals to diverse students and the analytical tools needed to understand these artifacts. It explains theoretical approaches and makes clear how these can be applied to better understand popular culture. Finally, the book provides straightforward approaches that allow students to think, talk, and write critically about popular culture.
Pursuing Popular Culture includes
- textual analysis and representation, production and media technologies, audience engagements, and presenting research.
- specific instructions in major methodological approaches and references to additional quality materials.
- how to choose targets for analysis, write research questions, and select methods that will help them to answer those questions.
- Instructions to help students learn how to develop their own explanatory frameworks and/or choose existing theories to make sense of their analyses.
Award Winner for Best Book for Use in the Classroom by Midwest Popular Culture Association
Acknowledgements
Introduction for Instructors
Popular Culture Examples by Chapter
Chapter 1: Introduction to Popular Culture
Section I - Representation
Chapter 2: Reading Texts: How to Do Textual Analysis
Chapter 3: Explaining Textual Analysis: Value Neutral Theoretical Frameworks
Chapter 4: Explaining Textual Analysis: Critical Theoretical Frameworks
Section II – Production and Contexts
Chapter 5: Researching Production Contexts: Political Economy
Chapter 6: Focusing on Technologies: The Medium
Section III - Audience Engagement
Chapter 7: Interacting with Media: Audience Reception
Chapter 8: Entering the Field: Ethnographic Studies
Section IV – Conducting and Presenting Research
Chapter 9: Elevating Popular Culture Analysis: Mixed Methods
Chapter 10: Presenting Research: How to Deliver Popular Culture Studies
Glossary
About the Authors
Jennifer C. Dunn (PhD, Ohio University) works as an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Public Culture at Dominican University. Her teaching and scholarship focus on rhetoric, gender, media, popular culture, and qualitative field methods. Her recent article, “Going to Work at the Moonlite Bunny Ranch: Potentials of Rhetorical and Ethnographic Methods for Cultural Studies” (Cultural Studies _ Critical Methodologies, 2016), provides an exemplar of her research agenda of using multiple methods to investigate popular culture. Some of her other publications that demonstrate both the methods she uses to examine popular culture and the topics she has engaged with include: “Does Craft Beer Culture Have a Place for Women?: A Co-Cultural Autoethnography” (in Beer Culture in Theory and Practice: Working to Understand Craft Beer Culture in the United States, Lexington, 2016), Lucky Strikes and a Three Martini Lunch: Thinking About Television’s Mad Men, 2nd ed. (Cambridge Scholars, 2015), and Virginity for Sale: A Foucauldian Moment in the History of Sexuality (co-authored with Tennley Vik; in Sexuality & Culture, 2014). In her free time, she enjoys watching reality television, traveling, and tasting craft beer with her husband, Anthony, and playing with their two dogs, Josie and Jack.
Stephanie L. Young (PhD, Ohio University) is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Southern Indiana. Her research interests include rhetorical criticism, autoethnography, popular culture, and issues related to gender, sexuality, and race. She has published in a number of scholarly journals including the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, Communication Theory, and Women and Language. Her recent article, “Running Like a Man, Sitting Like a Girl: Visual Enthymeme and the Case of Caster Semenya” (Women’s Studies in Communication, 2015) explores the controversy surrounding Caster Semenya, an 18-year-old South African athlete subjected to “sex testing” during the 2009 World Championships in Berlin. Currently, she is working on a project that examines the sympathetic-yet-devious antagonist of Thomas Barrow in the popular television series Downton Abbey. In her spare time, she enjoys critically analyzing television, cooking, running, and hanging out with her two cats, KitKat and Mclovin.
Popular culture surrounds us every day. Pursuing Popular Culture assists instructors by providing both a rich blend of new and relevant popular culture artifacts that appeals to diverse students and the analytical tools needed to understand these artifacts. It explains theoretical approaches and makes clear how these can be applied to better understand popular culture. Finally, the book provides straightforward approaches that allow students to think, talk, and write critically about popular culture.
Pursuing Popular Culture includes
- textual analysis and representation, production and media technologies, audience engagements, and presenting research.
- specific instructions in major methodological approaches and references to additional quality materials.
- how to choose targets for analysis, write research questions, and select methods that will help them to answer those questions.
- Instructions to help students learn how to develop their own explanatory frameworks and/or choose existing theories to make sense of their analyses.
Award Winner for Best Book for Use in the Classroom by Midwest Popular Culture Association
Acknowledgements
Introduction for Instructors
Popular Culture Examples by Chapter
Chapter 1: Introduction to Popular Culture
Section I - Representation
Chapter 2: Reading Texts: How to Do Textual Analysis
Chapter 3: Explaining Textual Analysis: Value Neutral Theoretical Frameworks
Chapter 4: Explaining Textual Analysis: Critical Theoretical Frameworks
Section II – Production and Contexts
Chapter 5: Researching Production Contexts: Political Economy
Chapter 6: Focusing on Technologies: The Medium
Section III - Audience Engagement
Chapter 7: Interacting with Media: Audience Reception
Chapter 8: Entering the Field: Ethnographic Studies
Section IV – Conducting and Presenting Research
Chapter 9: Elevating Popular Culture Analysis: Mixed Methods
Chapter 10: Presenting Research: How to Deliver Popular Culture Studies
Glossary
About the Authors
Jennifer C. Dunn (PhD, Ohio University) works as an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Public Culture at Dominican University. Her teaching and scholarship focus on rhetoric, gender, media, popular culture, and qualitative field methods. Her recent article, “Going to Work at the Moonlite Bunny Ranch: Potentials of Rhetorical and Ethnographic Methods for Cultural Studies” (Cultural Studies _ Critical Methodologies, 2016), provides an exemplar of her research agenda of using multiple methods to investigate popular culture. Some of her other publications that demonstrate both the methods she uses to examine popular culture and the topics she has engaged with include: “Does Craft Beer Culture Have a Place for Women?: A Co-Cultural Autoethnography” (in Beer Culture in Theory and Practice: Working to Understand Craft Beer Culture in the United States, Lexington, 2016), Lucky Strikes and a Three Martini Lunch: Thinking About Television’s Mad Men, 2nd ed. (Cambridge Scholars, 2015), and Virginity for Sale: A Foucauldian Moment in the History of Sexuality (co-authored with Tennley Vik; in Sexuality & Culture, 2014). In her free time, she enjoys watching reality television, traveling, and tasting craft beer with her husband, Anthony, and playing with their two dogs, Josie and Jack.
Stephanie L. Young (PhD, Ohio University) is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Southern Indiana. Her research interests include rhetorical criticism, autoethnography, popular culture, and issues related to gender, sexuality, and race. She has published in a number of scholarly journals including the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, Communication Theory, and Women and Language. Her recent article, “Running Like a Man, Sitting Like a Girl: Visual Enthymeme and the Case of Caster Semenya” (Women’s Studies in Communication, 2015) explores the controversy surrounding Caster Semenya, an 18-year-old South African athlete subjected to “sex testing” during the 2009 World Championships in Berlin. Currently, she is working on a project that examines the sympathetic-yet-devious antagonist of Thomas Barrow in the popular television series Downton Abbey. In her spare time, she enjoys critically analyzing television, cooking, running, and hanging out with her two cats, KitKat and Mclovin.