Pop Academy

As I begin week 5 of the semester, the exhaustion of course/conference prep and grading has united with the germs crowding campus to offer me the first cold of the academic year. Despite my abuse of Kleenex and Sudafed, I’ve been able to find joy in the new TV season and my students’ use of Twitter. Regarding the former, I know there is a research project in Fox’s Glee, but I’m holding out until the network has at least picked it up through mid-season. I still have essays on A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila and Mad Men that I need to complete. However, one of the great things about my job (but also a curse) is that I’m never at a loss for new material. I can never simply enjoy a new TV show or film, at least not the mass-market kind. My feminist, queer-theoried brain goes into overdrive before I have to remind myself to relax and do my best to take in the aesthetic pleasure on the screen. For example, does Glee transgress prime-time network representations of gender and sexuality because it highlights straight men as comfortable being associated with a glee club or a cappella group and provides us a supporting young gay male character who is struggling to come out publicly, not to mention that the show’s creator is the openly gay Ryan Murphy, who also brought us the simultaneously homoerotic and homophobic Nip/Tuck? Or does Glee reinforce hegemonic masculinity by comforting straight audiences with tired heteronormative love triangles in not one, but two subplots as well as narrate the pressures on middle-class husbands to provide for their over/under-sexed wives? See? My head is going to explode.The point here is that while i love my job, it’s often hard to find enjoyment in the subject I study. Perhaps that’s why I consume so much TV, film, music, blogs, and magazines–to increase the chance I’ll find something so fabulous that I can’t tear it apart with critical theory. I can dream, can’t I?

This tension presented itself to me in a different way last week when I attended a required workshop on writing intensive courses. About ten faculty from different disciplines on campus convened to swap stories and take notes on how to enhance our courses that expect lots of student writing. I offered advice such as beginning the semester with a small stakes, short essay in which  students can connect course topics to something they enjoy. While the other attendees clearly saw value in this statement and some had already done so in their own courses, one prof pointed out how I have the privilege of teaching something fun, which in turn leads to more student interest than other disciplines.  I won’t deny that I usually enjoy a good academic debate, but I didn’t feel like pushing the issue. Sure, I mostly love what I teach. Even in the drier theory classes I can bring in media and pop culture examples. However, no matter what discipline we teach in, we must strive to keep our content relevant to our students’ daily lives. As much as some would believe otherwise, not every student is led easily to the waterfront that is Twitter or even popular TV. Students have busy lives, just like us, and are selective in their popular culture choices. It takes more time and energy then I could describe with the gusto deserved of it to stay on top of pop culture topics. I don’t consume more than I can handle, but I would bet good money that my brain is just as tired after reading through blogs and news stories about TV, current events and other important topics as it would be prepping a classics lecture, a political science debate or chemistry lab.

The beauty of teaching at a liberal arts institution is that I know I have enough colleagues and students to appreciate the value of what I do as “real” work and not just a good time. On the flipside, this interaction has fueled yet another potential essay (darn it, even my interpersonal interactions are now becoming research topics!) regarding the privileged space of popular culture scholarship. Evidenced by my students’ use of Twitter and blogging, technology and the politics of the popular are indeed lively intellectual endeavors. However, the struggle for academic currency of the popcultural continues. Time to do a bit more course prep before settling in for the Emmys. I’ll likely live tweet the broadcast. *Sigh.

I intended to do a post-Week 1 recap, but since I spent last weekend moving and this past week unpacking and settling in to the new place, a two-week recap it is. The Critical Theory and Study of Popular Culture course is going very well. However, the time-intensive nature of the course is hitting both my students and I.  Although the course is only 50 minutes three days a week, the Twitter assignment keeps many students glued to their digital media devices, or at least feeling guilty if they haven’t updated. A guilt trip is most certainly not the goal of the course. The idea is to participate in popular culture, but I guess as with any new cultural form, sometimes we have to hit burnout before we step back and take a break. Since I’ve been taking a metaphorial scalpel to pop culture for many years in my teaching and research, the effects are less obviously visible on me. Sure, I’ve only been using Twitter since January, but the idea of using the technology to comment on and critique public life, celebrity, politicians and the like, is simply an extension of how I’ve already used Facebook and previous blogs to demonstrate the critical theories of my field. To that end, I at least hope my students are enjoying some of those moments of “Wow, we talked about this [insert smart critical concept here] in class and there it is on [insert title of popular TV show or video game here].”When they officially start blogging later this week, maybe I’ll see that process in action.

Because pop culture is simultaneously recycled and current, we’re never at a loss for topics. We’ve used McLuhan and the idea of symbolic artifacts to name the iPod generation as the “plugged in” individuals grounded in the needs/desires of constant stimulation (multiasking) and instant gratification (I want it NOW!).  And because I’m also teaching our major’s upper level Communication Theory course, pop culture topics are great for demonstrating otherwise heavy rhetorical theories. This week we used Burke’s Terministic Screens to explain our views and mediated images of working class life via Dirty Jobs. We also performed a pentadic dissection of Jon & Kate Plus 8. I don’t want to give too much away here since my students (or myself even) may write papers on these topics that we might eventually want to publish. Despite some very cool calls for making the academic publishing process more open from other academic bloggers, including these fabulous commentaries from Academic Evolution, working within the current system is the best way for my untenured self for now. Regardless, pop culture is providing great stuff for my teaching and research these days–and so are learning technologies. I’ve been invited by our IT crowd to do another workshop on using blogs in the classroom. As exhausting as it is some times, I am still an advocate for integrating blogs in courses where possible. I’ll try to refine the first presentation–of which i just realized I need to post the edited audio–and post some notes here later in October after the workshop. In the meantime, if you’re aching for new Pop Academy content, click on the Blog link in the Sitewide Directories box in the bottom right of the home page anytime, to see what my pop culture topics my students are critiquing and/or celebrating. You can also select random member posts in the top right corner under the Visit tab. Okay, back to my regularly scheduled Sunday: coffee, CBS Sunday Morning, New York Times headlines, then grading over laundry.