Popular Culture

This year’s chapter looks at books published in the field of popular culture in 2016 and steers a course through contemporary and historical popular culture. The emphasis across the sample, which ranges from texts dealing with digital media, such as memes and algorithms, to through to sound, noise and popular music, before ending with a reassessment of the Frankfurt School, is upon the appropriateness of accepted Cultural Studies approaches and frameworks to new media forms. The chapter also questions what it means to be a good listener to the popular and highlights work that lends a critical yet sympathetic ear to pop forms and practices of the present and the past. One of the many, many striking things about these early days in the Trump administration has been the prodigious creativity evidenced in the placards and signs brought by protesters to rally against the President and the volley of Executive Orders issued in his first three weeks of office. Media and press interest in the content of the protests has been matched by a delight in its form, with medium and message occasioning regional, national and international attention. As British broadsheets, tabloids and the local press curated slideshows of the best signs, so did the US media, with a number staking claims in imagined community: no one can protest quite like the British/Americans/Scousers/women.

Creativity · Media studies · Political science · Popular culture · Sociology · Gender, Feminism, and Media · History · Law