Media Literacies: Understanding U.S. Popular Culture - Detailseite

As consumers of popular culture, we often feel we already understand U.S. popular culture and its social impact. Yet despite its global accessibility and dominance, U.S. popular culture requires critical frameworks to be properly analyzed. This course provides students with conceptual and historical tools to examine the development, circulation, and influence of U.S. popular culture. It aims to cultivate media literacy across a range of forms, including television, film, advertising, and social media. We begin by examining the emergence of U.S. popular and mass culture in the nineteenth century and trace it into contemporary media forms. A central focus lies on the historical contexts in which specific media technologies, genres, and texts were produced and gained popularity in the United States. The course combines cultural history with theoretical approaches to popular culture (including work by Stuart Hall, bell hooks, Henry Jenkins, and John Storey) and applies these frameworks through close readings of selected media and cultural texts. Readings will be made available on Moodle and some material will be accessed through streaming services.