Teaching American Media and Popular Culture: Expansion, Inclusion, Interdisciplinarity
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22439/asca.v56i2.7379Keywords:
American media, popular culture, media spectacle, media and everyday life, globalization, media and politics, interdisciplinarityAbstract
This is a reflection on my experiences in teaching American media at the Swedish Institute for American studies from 2015 to 2021. By way of concrete descriptions of classes taught and topics raised, I make a case for an approach to popular media that looks beyond both an all-too-limited focus on “mass media” and the text-centric, hermeneutically based discussions about media representations that have otherwise been the most common way of engaging with media in American studies. I also discuss challenges of interdisciplinarity that are a key concern not only when teaching media, but for the field of American studies more broadly.
References
Deloria, Philip J., and Alexander I. Olson. Ameri-can Studies: A User’s Guide. Oakland: Univer-sity of California Press, 2017. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctv1xxw8h.
Gitelman, Lisa. Always Already New: Media, Histo-ry and the Data of Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006.
Hjorthén, Adam. “Curriculum Development in American Studies: Interdisciplinarity, Stu-dent Progression, and the Swedish-American Paradox.” Högre utbildning 11, no. 3 (2021): 76–87. https://doi.org/10.23865/hu.v11.2943.
Lundén, Rolf. “The Eternal, Irresoluble Tensions in American Studies.” American Studies in Scandinavia 38, no. 1 (2006): 1–28. https://doi.org/10.22439/asca.v38i1.4546.
Nordic Association for American Studies. “Ar-chives.” American Studies in Scandinavia. Ac-cessed September 30, 2024. https://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/assc/issue/archive.
Nordic Association for American Studies. “NAAS 2023 Conference Program.” Accessed Sep-tember 30, 2024. https://naas2021.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/naas2023-full-conference-program-20.38.35.pdf.
Olsson, Jan, and Kingsley Bolton. “Mediated America: Americana as Hollywoodiana.” In Media, Popular Culture, and the American Century, edited by Kingsley Bolton and Jan Olsson, 7–33. London: JL, 2010.
Uppsala University. “Reading List for American Mass Media, Valid from Spring 2013.” Ac-cessed September 30, 2024. https://www.uu.se/en/study/reading-list?query=13340.
Uppsala University. “Syllabus for American Mass Media, Valid from Spring 2013.” Ac-cessed September 30, 2024. https://www.uu.se/en/study/syllabus?query=26104.
Uppsala University, “Syllabus for American Mass Media II, Valid from Autumn 2015.” Accessed September 30, 2024. https://www.uu.se/en/study/syllabus?query=30667.
Uricchio, William. “Things to Come in the Amer-ican Studies-Media Studies Relationship.” In American Studies Today: New Research Agen-das, edited by Winfried Fluck et al., 363–82. Heidelberg: Winter Universitätsverlag, 2014.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.