Intercultural Representations in Pop Culture

Popular culture is a powerful way for individuals to learn about other cultures without personally experiencing those cultures. Martin and Nakayama (2012) define popular culture as "cultural products most people share and know about" (p. 361). Examples include:

Television

Film

Advertisements like the much talked about new ads from Cheerios featuring an interracial/ethnic family

Music videos such "Same Love" by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis featuring Mary Lambert

It is important that we think about how cultural groups are portrayed through these systems of communication that are consumed and resisted. Specifically, pop culture assists in the creation and reinforcement of stereotypes (Martin & Nakayama, 2013). 

For this blog post, I would like you to select a popular culture text that you regularly consume and conduct an analysis of this cultural text. For instance, watch a few episodes of your favorite TV show, watch your favorite film, read a few issues of a magazine you subscribe to, watch your favorite YouTube videos, advertisements, or if you are up @ 7am you can sometimes catch actual music videos on MTV. Shocking I know!

You will then perform a thematic analysis of this text. You will consume these texts and take notes on what you find intriguing. You will make notes based on repetition (specific words, phrases, and images that are consistently used), recurrence (ideas and concepts that keep coming up), and forcefulness (the capacity to persuade). You will use these notes to organize your data around three key themes that shine a light on the relationships between pop culture and stereotyping. Continue to read and reread the text until you can begin to group likeminded things together and create labels and larger categories to explain these stereotypes. Your goal is to describe three themes that inform the use of stereotypes in pop culture.

This approach of conducting a thematic analysis is how you will process your own data for the Cultural Reporter project. You will begin by conducting interviews, recording them, and transcribing those interviews (I recommend that you download ExpressScribe for this). You will also need to document your observations with written field notes. You will put all of these documents together and begin a process of open and axial coding. You will first read through all of your data to get a feel for it. Then you will begin open coding. Start this process by looking at chunks of information and creating descriptors for these chunks. Some chunks will contain multiple codes. Once you have coded all the data, you will go back and create axial codes, which are broader categories of information/insight that unite a few of your open codes together under one central theme. I would recommend that you use Atlas ti for coding your data. You can download a trial version of this software - http://www.atlasti.com/demo.html

We will use this blog post to familiarize yourself with the process of open and axial coding. For this blog, consume a pop culture text of your choosing and then present three key themes that appear in your analysis. See pages 371-376 for themes found in previous research. This might be a good place to start the coding process. You can use these codes to begin to make sense of the data and then add in your own unique codes. Identify three themes in your blog post and describe how they create certain representations and assumptions about cultural groups. Then discuss how these cultural texts and stereotypical messages might be resisted. See the section in chapter 9 on resistance. It's important to note that resistance does not always mean refusing to consume pop culture. Think dialectical tensions in terms of resistance.