Popular Culture

This volume looks at televangelism, punk culture, the music of Bruce Springsteen, films produced for classroom use, and other artifacts of popular culture in order to turn the terrain most familiar to students into a critical literacy leading to 'moral resonsibility through forms of public leadership.' ... an ambitious and worthy project that is theoretically provocative and offers instructive readings of a number of cultural texts that index popular and adolescent norms. Harvard Educational Review

It shows how cultural forms such as Hollywood films, pop music, soap operas, and televangelism are organized by gender, age, class, race, and ethnicity, thus providing the contradictory text that both enables and disables emancipatory interest, so fundamental to the formation of self and society.Illuminating one of the most pervasive issues of our time, Popular Culture is the first book to link the importance and implications of popular culture with pedagogical practice. It shows how cultural forms such as Hollywood films, pop music, soap operas, and televangelism are organized by gender, age, class, race, and ethnicity, thus providing the contradictory text that both enables and disables emancipatory interest, so fundamental to the formation of self and society. What emerges is a redefinition of the very notion of popular culture.