Lexington Books Communication Perspectives on Popular Culture

Popular culture helps construct, define, and impact our everyday realities and must be taken seriously because popular culture is, simply, popular. Communication Perspectives on Popular Culture brings together communication experts with diverse backgrounds, from interpersonal communication, business and organizational communication, mass communication, media studies, narrative, rhetoric, gender studies, autoethnography, popular culture studies, and journalism. The contributors tackle such topics as music, broadcast and Netflix television shows, movies, the Internet, video games, and more, as they connect popular culture to personal concerns as well as larger political and societal issues. The variety of approaches in these chapters are simultaneously situated in the present while building a foundation for the future, as contributors explore new and emerging ways to approach popular culture. From case studies to emerging theories, the contributors examine how popular culture, media, and communication influence our everyday lives. Review An invaluable contribution to popular culture studies in media and communications. This volume has an excellent cast of contributors who discuss a variety of fascinating subjects, from popular television shows to the Tea Party movement, to illuminate our mediated, transmediated, polymediated world. Smart and accessible, this volume will appeal to scholars and students alike.--Ann Larabee, Michigan State University Andrew F. Herrmann and Art Herbig provide an exciting collection of essays with their edited series Communication Perspectives on Popular Culture. From fan culture to polymediation to the personal, interpersonal, and political ways by which we engage in popular culture, this book offers cutting edge theoretical and methodological research at the intersection of popular culture and communication scholarship.--Stephanie Young, University of Southern Indiana Communication Perspectives on Popular Culture delivers on the promise of the series to come by including a number of different popular culture artifacts analyzed from numerous academic perspectives that create space for larger discussions. The book includes foundational concepts (such as discussions for high vs. low culture) and traditional analyses of popular culture artifacts (such as textual analyses of television shows) which provide excellent introductions for the uninitiated. The greatest strength of the book, however, lies with the unexpected and unique theoretical perspectives suggested (such as queering popular culture and approaching popular culture as a verb) and contexts explored (organizational communication and politics). Students and scholars of popular culture, communication, media, and politics would benefit greatly from including this book in their classes and future research.--Jennifer C. Dunn, Dominican University In this volume Andrew and Art coordinate and smartly contribute to the advancement of popular culture scholarship. Their text reminds readers in vivid fashion that popular culture in all of its iterations is both pervasive and persuasive. Pop culture serves as THE most significant resource that citizens of our polymediated world use to construct and understand the fluid and fragmented realities (in both progressive and repressive ways) that comprise their everyday lives. The individual chapters provide beautifully written, rich examples of critical and interpretive analysis that Communication scholars and scholars-in-training will find engaging, thought provoking, and worthy of emulating. As an ethnographer and interpretive scholar, how various contributors addressed a wide range of research questions inspired me to think differently about what I consider when I operate in the liminal space between data and local cultural understandings.--Robert L. Krizek, Saint Louis University About the Author Andrew F. Herrmann is assistant professor of communication studies at East Ten