Locating Imagination in Popular Culture
Locating Imagination in Popular Culture

Author: Nicky van Es

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-12-29

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 1000223876

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Locating Imagination in Popular Culture offers a multi-disciplinary account of the ways in which popular culture, tourism and notions of place intertwine in an environment characterized by ongoing processes of globalization, digitization and an increasingly ubiquitous nature of multi-media. Centred around the concept of imagination, the authors demonstrate how popular culture and media are becoming increasingly important in the ways in which places and localities are imagined, and how they also subsequently stimulate a desire to visit the actual places in which people’s favourite stories are set. With examples drawn from around the globe, the book offers a unique study of the role of narratives conveyed through media in stimulating and reflecting desire in tourism. This book will have appeal in a wide variety of academic disciplines, ranging from media and cultural studies to fan- and tourism studies, cultural geography, literary studies and cultural sociology.

Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination
Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination

Author: Henry Jenkins

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2020-02-04

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 1479891258

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How popular culture is engaged by activists to effect emancipatory political change One cannot change the world unless one can imagine what a better world might look like. Civic imagination is the capacity to conceptualize alternatives to current cultural, social, political, or economic conditions; it also requires the ability to see oneself as a civic agent capable of making change, as a participant in a larger democratic culture. Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination represents a call for greater clarity about what we’re fighting for—not just what we’re fighting against. Across more than thirty examples from social movements around the world, this casebook proposes “civic imagination” as a framework that can help us identify, support, and practice new kinds of communal participation. As the contributors demonstrate, young people, in particular, are turning to popular culture—from Beyoncé to Bollywood, from Smokey Bear to Hamilton, from comic books to VR—for the vernacular through which they can express their discontent with current conditions. A young activist uses YouTube to speak back against J. K. Rowling in the voice of Cho Chang in order to challenge the superficial representation of Asian Americans in children’s literature. Murals in Los Angeles are employed to construct a mythic imagination of Chicano identity. Twitter users have turned to #BlackGirlMagic to highlight the black radical imagination and construct new visions of female empowerment. In each instance, activists demonstrate what happens when the creative energies of fans are infused with deep political commitment, mobilizing new visions of what a better democracy might look like.

Touristic World-Making and Fan Pilgrimage in Popular Culture Destinations
Touristic World-Making and Fan Pilgrimage in Popular Culture Destinations

Author: Vassilios Ziakas

Publisher: Channel View Publications

Published: 2024-02-13

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 1845418964

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This volume considers world-making as the intersection of the fan pilgrimage experience and the responses of destinations. It critically examines the emerging field of popular culture tourism and its close connection with fan studies and placemaking. The chapters illustrate how different destinations capitalise on expressive cultural practices to attract fan tourists, the processes involved in their tourismification, and the outcomes for both visitors and local communities. The book establishes a common ground for the comprehensive and critical study of popular culture tourism development and fandom. It integrates theory and practice and provides evidence-based recommendations for popular culture destinations. It is a useful resource for researchers in tourism management, fandom, pop culture and media studies, as well as for those working in the tourism industry.

Imagining the Global
Imagining the Global

Author: Fabienne Darling-Wolf

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2014-12-22

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 0472900153

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Based on a series of case studies of globally distributed media and their reception in different parts of the world, Imagining the Global reflects on what contemporary global culture can teach us about transnational cultural dynamics in the 21st century. A focused multisited cultural analysis that reflects on the symbiotic relationship between the local, the national, and the global, it also explores how individuals’ consumption of global media shapes their imagination of both faraway places and their own local lives. Chosen for their continuing influence, historical relationships, and different geopolitical positions, the case sites of France, Japan, and the United States provide opportunities to move beyond common dichotomies between East and West, or United States and “the rest.” From a theoretical point of view, Imagining the Global endeavors to answer the question of how one locale can help us understand another locale. Drawing from a wealth of primary sources—several years of fieldwork; extensive participant observation; more than 80 formal interviews with some 160 media consumers (and occasionally producers) in France, Japan, and the United States; and analyses of media in different languages—author Fabienne Darling-Wolf considers how global culture intersects with other significant identity factors, including gender, race, class, and geography. Imagining the Global investigates who gets to participate in and who gets excluded from global media representation, as well as how and why the distinction matters.

The Coronavirus Pandemic in Japanese Literature and Popular Culture
The Coronavirus Pandemic in Japanese Literature and Popular Culture

Author: Mina Qiao

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-09-01

Total Pages: 175

ISBN-13: 1000953300

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This volume is the first book-length collection on Japanese literary and popular cultural responses to the coronavirus pandemic in English. Disrupting the narrative of COVID-19 as a catastrophe without precedent, this book contextualizes the COVID-19 global public health crisis and pandemic-induced social and political turbulence in a post-industrial society that has withstood multiple major destructions and disasters. From published fiction by major authors to anonymous accounts on social media, from network TV shows to contents by Virtual YouTubers (VTubers), in both "high" and "low" culturescapes, timely representations of coronavirus and individual and social livings under its impact emerge. These narratives, either personal or top-down, all endeavor to fathom this unexpected disruption of modern linear progress. Exploring the paradoxes underlying the "new normal" of Japanese society of the present day, the book collectively demonstrates how the narratives of coronavirus are not "neo-" but "re-": returning to the past, revealing existing problems and reclaiming memories lost and lessons forgotten. This edited volume will be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of Japanese culture and society, Japanese literature, and pandemic studies.

Secular Steeples
Secular Steeples

Author: Conrad Ostwalt

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2003-03-24

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 1563383616

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Conrad Ostwalt explores the confluence of religion and popular cultural forms in the secular world, demonstrating that a secular religiosity has co-opted some of the functions previously reserved for religions institutions.

Locating China
Locating China

Author: Jing Wang

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2007-05-07

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 1134212283

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Taking a multidisciplinary approach, this volume examines the relationship between space and the production of local popular culture in contemporary China. The international team of contributors examine the inter-relationship between the cultural imaginary of a given place and China’s continuing drive towards urbanization. This has led to the development of new spaces and places, and new forms of spatial practices that destabilize old concepts of the ‘local’ and ‘locality’. Delivering ethnographic observations and theoretical speculations, this work furthers our understanding of the link between spatial thinking and the production of consumer culture in China.

Eyes Wide Open
Eyes Wide Open

Author: William D. Romanowski

Publisher: Brazos Press

Published: 2007-02-01

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1441200800

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Grounded in Christian principles, this accessible and engaging book offers an informed and fascinating approach to popular culture. William D. Romanowski provides affectionate yet astute analysis of familiar, well-loved movies and television characters from Indiana Jones to Homer Simpson, and he speaks with historical depth and expertise on films from Casablanca to Crash and music from Bruce Springsteen to U2. Romanowski's confessional approach affirms a role for popular culture in faithful living. Practical, analytical approaches to content, meaning, and artistic style offer the tools to participate responsibly and imaginatively in popular cultural activities. An engaging read, this new edition introduces students and thoughtful readers to popular culture--one of the most influential forces in contemporary society.

Spinning Popular Culture as Public Pedagogy
Spinning Popular Culture as Public Pedagogy

Author: Jon Austin

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-01-28

Total Pages: 137

ISBN-13: 9463008489

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"Spinning Popular Culture is a book about the effervescent activity lying (perhaps dormant) beneath the surface of seemingly inert and mundane cultural items in everyday life. It is a book about the power of the Everyday to maintain loyalty to or, at the very least, an unthinking acceptance of particular ways of being in the world. It is also about the capacity of such seemingly mundane artefacts to provoke resistance to this, and to enliven the visioning of social alternatives. It is a book about individual critical analyses of album cover art.Following a brief history of the development of the aesthetics of the packaging of recorded music, eleven internationally recognised critical scholars each interrogate the cover of a particular vinyl record album they grew up with or with which they have some personal experience or resonance. The totality of the cultural artefact that is the vinyl record album is, essentially, dissected and considered from perspectives of paratextuality and pedagogy.In this book, the contributors make the connections of everyday life to memory and history by locating the album in their personal biographies. They then look to the artwork on the album cover to explore the pedagogical possibilities they see resident there. The individual chapters, each in very different ways, provide examples of the exposure of such broad public pedagogies in practice, through critiquing the artwork from both reproductive and resistance positions.Hopefully, readers will be encouraged to look more consciously at the Everyday – the mundane and the taken-for-granted – in their own lives with a view to becoming more critically aware of the messages circulating, unnoticed, through popular culture. Spinning Popular Culture might also encourage the reader to pull out that box of old vinyl records sitting in the back of a storage cupboard somewhere and revisit and rethink their histories. Or maybe, to just find a turntable somewhere and play them one more time!"