COMM-480 Popular Culture and Communication (3)

Barbenheimer, #booktock, The Bear, telenovelas, BTS, Black Lives Matter, #metoo, the Kardashians, M3GAN, the Eras and Renaissance tours, AI, Andre 3000’s flute album, Goop’s skiing trial, the Hollywood strikes, the Las Vegas sphere, nepo babies, and selfies are all a small part of the pop culture world. This course examines what the consumed and created sea of media says about individuals, communities, and a culture or subcultures. This course focuses on critical/cultural studies approaches to media with the aim of more conscious consumers (and producers) of pop culture. Students learn how to examine and analyze pop culture artifacts and genres to start to understand the complex things they tell us about what is valued (or what their producers think should be valued). Students also explore the complex ways in which they are interpellated (or hailed) by the media consumed daily and the larger ideological work it does. Crosslist: COMM-680. Prerequisite: COMM-100.