Pop Culture and Protest in U.S. History

Overview

In this module, we will examine critical approaches to the study of American popular culture in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Pop culture has served many purposes in American history, and in this course, we’ll examine how different kinds of pop culture—music, fiction, television, film, advertisements, and poetry, to name a few—have been used in the recent past as resistance, or as a means of protesting the contemporary status quo. In particular, we will explore the following questions: Who has produced resistant pop culture in different eras of American history, and with what intentions? How did these cultural producers construct these texts to specific ends? Who has consumed this pop culture in the past, and how did they make sense of the message? What accounts for the changes in protest pop culture over time? As we explore these questions, we’ll also analyse our current culture, and each of you will produce your own protest pop cultural text in accordance with the themes, questions, and types of protest we will discuss this semester.

Learning Objectives

On successful completion of this module, students should be able to:
Students will identify the primary eras and themes of protest in recent American history (1900-present).
Students will learn the basic theories and methods of cultural and textual analysis.
Students will critically examine a variety of primary sources as a means of understanding change over time in American cultural history.
Students will evaluate relevant historiographical debates and approaches.
Students will apply these basic methods to specific pop cultural texts from American history.
Students will generate original pop cultural texts based on their mastery of the history of protest and the methods of cultural and textual analysis.

Skills

Students will improve their ability to engage with and critique a variety of historical interpretations.
Students will develop their ability to identify and locate primary and secondary sources and to exploit them in constructing sustained and coherent arguments.
Students will enhance their self-confidence, team-working and oral and written communication skills by engaging in group discussions, making presentations, and submitting written work.

Assessment

Portfolio, 90%, comprised of:

• Essay, 50%
Each student will choose a social issue and explore how it has historically been protested in the United States in a 3000-word essay. This essay should incorporate secondary research as well as primary examples of protest popular culture, and it should both explore a historical problem and offer a clear argument about it (e.g., the problem might be the limits of feminist activism in the 1960s-1970s, and the argument might be about the intersectional failures of that movement). Students will be expected to use relevant secondary sources in the form of scholarly books and journal articles, as well as primary sources that exemplify their arguments about popular culture and protest. This essay should provide direct and relevant context for the Pop Cultural Product described below. We will discuss these essays in tutorials each week.

• Pop Cultural Products, 20%
Each student will create a pop cultural text—such as a short story, podcast, script, website, blog, song, film, performance, zine, poster, advertisement, etc.—that protests the social problem explored in their essay. Students will be expected to incorporate the theories and themes of pop culture that we examine in class. We will discuss this requirement throughout the semester, and I encourage students to be bold and creative, but they will also need to approach this academically. We will discuss this assignment in tutorials each week and in two scheduled workshops during our lecture timeslot. (Note: I taught this class very effectively and got some truly great submissions from QUB students in 2019, and I also taught this class for years at my previous job in the US, so I am confident with the academic rigor of this creative assessment. Also, the combination of requiring creativity and reflection/justification in the portfolio seems to me to be a potential way around the misuse of generative AI.)

• Pop Cultural Product Reflection and Bibliography: 20%
In a reflective essay of 1000 words, students will explain how their Pop Cultural Product is embedded within the historical analysis and argument they explore in the essay. This Reflection should also include a Bibliography listing all sources (secondary, primary, and any others used for creative inspiration). This portion of the portfolio is meant to provide academic justification for the student’s creative choices on the Pop Cultural Product described above. The wordcount for this assessment includes the Bibliography.

Participation, 10%