Course:WMST307
| WMST 307 | |
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| Gender and Popular Culture | |
| Instructor: | Dr. Janice Stewart |
| Email: | janice.stewart@ubc.ca |
| Office: | IBLC 355 |
| Office Hours: | Monday 3-4 Tuesday 2-3 |
| Course Pages | |
| Syllabus | |
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Gender and Popular Culture Dr. Janice Stewart Office: 2080 West Mall, Room 137 Jack Bell Building 604-8221391 janice.stewart@ubc.ca Office Hours: Monday 3-4, Tuesday 2-3 IBLC 355 and by appt Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice http://www.grsj.arts.ubc.ca
Course Description This course introduces students to the field of cultural studies, as well as the relationship between popular culture and the media. Students will be asked to look critically at movies, television, radio, and print, in order to ponder a number of important questions. To what extent do the media lead or follow trends in popular culture? The emphasis in the course is on examining cultural artifacts as artistic objects seen in the light of various socio-political contexts. Cultural analysis will be studied to connect what’s ‘popular’ to what’s going on in our society. By taking a closer look at the movies and television shows you are watching, the clothes you are wearing, and the music you listen to, students will endeavour to understand the role of popular culture in maintaining and reproducing the kind of society we live in. We will explore the ways in which each of us is both a user of and is used by popular culture. Popular culture is all around us, influencing how we think, how we feel, how we relate, how we live our lives in countless ways. This course will use your own expertise as consumers of popular culture as a take-off point for exploring the various roles played by massmediated popular culture in our lives. We will look primarily at television, film, advertising, and popular music, with occasional forays into other types of pop culture. We will analyze how such critical factors as ethnicity, race, gender, class, age, and sexuality are shaped by and reshaped in popular culture.