Category: Critical/Cultural Studies
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Compassionate Pedagogy for Online Teaching
In this blog post, I am collecting my thoughts as well as links to other people’s thoughts and writings about how to teach online from a perspective and position of compassion for learners. This information was originally collected on Twitter. Additionally, this notion of “compassionate pedagogy” is not limited to online teaching and learning but…
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The Grinch and the War on Christmas
I really liked doing this episode of The Pop Culture Lens podcast. I loved it because we got to talk about the secular nature of Christmas in the United States, and why that shouldn’t be seen as a bad thing that we have to — almost literally — go to war over. For the fifty-fourth…
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Der Dibuk: An Early Judaic Take on Exorcism
Now it is time to watch one of the first exorcism movies, and one of the few Polish/Yiddish movies: Der Dibuk (1937). This is one of the few Yiddish language movies to come out of Poland, and it is based on a famous Polish play. Opening prolouge talking about the dybbuk, about how all spirits,…
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Indian Cinema Godfather
For the fifty-third episode of The Pop Culture Lens podcast, Christopher Olson and I are joined by friend and Ph.D. candidate Anis Rahman to consider one of the most important creators in Indian cinema: Satyajit Ray. Thanks to his Bangladeshi heritage, Anis provides important insights into the life and work of Ray. Along with these…
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Happy 25th Anniversary, Friends!
Welcome back to a new season! For the fifty-first episode of The Pop Culture Lens podcast, Christopher Olson and I are joined by our colleague and pop culture scholar Jennifer Dunn to discuss the 25th anniversary of one of the most successful sitcoms of all time: Friends (1994-2004). In this episode, the trio consider the impact of…
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(The makings of) A Psychoanalytical Critique of Capitalism
This essay comes from probably 2002 when I was living in Los Angeles and working at an agency — and coming to realize that I had an academic deep down inside of me. I had the privilege of listening to Deepak Chopra and his son, Gotham, today at separate panel discussions at the Los…
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On Studying the Other
Sometimes it is very useful to go back, find those old writings, and revisit them to see the trajectory of your thoughts, and how much they have matured. In this 15-year-old piece that I wrote for a class, I can see some basic ideas I still have about people (especially given my exorcism cinema work),…
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The Multiplicity of “Pop”
To start with, I’m not even sure I would continue to call popular cultural studies the study of the culture of the working class, and my reluctance to do so underlies my entire argument about what is the current status of the mass and the pop. The culture studies of the 1970s, with its focus…
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San Diego Comic Con
In a first, the forty-eighth episode of The Pop Culture Lens podcast finds friend of the podcast Joan Miller (@a_wild_acafan) joining Christopher Olson and myself to discuss the importance of the grand-daddy fan convention, San Diego Comic Con. In this episode, the trio discuss how SDCC came to be the pop cultural juggernaut that it…
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The Pop Culture Lens on Fraggle Rock
In a first, the forty-seventh episode of The Pop Culture Lens podcast finds friend of the podcast Greg Clark joining Christopher Olson and I to discuss the Jim Henson television show, Fraggle Rock. In this episode, we discuss the transnational and transcultural nature of the series that sought to create something universally human with nonhuman…
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