Do you love watching Crazy Ex-Girlfriend but wish you could more deeply analyze its gender, race, and class politics? Do you want to irritate your family with intricate explanations of media ownership during Thanksgiving this year? Do you want to discuss taste, fandom, fashion, pop music, The Lego Movie, and Hamilton? Then, this class is for you!

Over the course of the semester, we will work hone our argumentative, critical thinking, and analytical skills as applied to the media and culture we consume every day. This course does not offer a comprehensive history or overview of popular culture or an introduction to the basics of analyzing the media, rather, it offers more advanced tools and strategies through which to understand and analyze popular culture, media, and communication.

This course fulfills the advanced research requirement for communication majors, and so will focus on methods and theories for researching popular culture. The first half of the semester, we will work through various approaches to pop culture research. The second half of the semester, students will collaborate on a research project examining pop culture producers, texts, and audiences in addition to teaching the class about one aspect of their project.