SOCL 3470 - Popular Culture

5 credit hours
Sociological examination of how popular culture is produced, evaluated, and disseminated. Investigation of the relation-ships between consumer culture, media organization and cultural production, and the ways that popular media promote or impede political action, civic involvement and movements for social justice. Topics include: theories of mass media and ‘mass society’; class, culture, and power; intersection of race, class, gender and sexuality in media representation; systematic production of culture; cultural evaluation and audience reception; and current sociological methods for the empirical study of culture.