Approaches to Media Studies: Media and Popular Culture
Loosely based on Julian McDougall’s text Media Studies: the basics (2012), this course will invite students to investigate
various approaches to the study of media and popular culture, focusing in particular on the analysis of representation, of
reception, fandom and interpretation, of technology and materiality, and of globalization and cultural impact. Through the
term, we will take up a set of three cases studies centred on iconic, significant media figures and configurations: Harry
Potter, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, and Bob Marley. We will engage with this material through various
media and media platforms: recordings and on-line archives, performances, podcasts, television, fiction, comics, video games.
How do the studies of mass media and of popular culture intersect? What do popular media tell us about how we think and
communicate and create today? What are the impacts of our consumption of popular media on everyday lives? We will address such
themes and concepts as screening and interfaces, encoding and decoding, corporealities, audiences (publics and counterpublics,
fandoms), texts and scripts, technology and materialism, commodification, archive and memory, globalization. Assignments for
the course will include a response blog, a brief YouTube-style video, three formal analysis essays and a final examination.
Core Texts
Julian McDougall, Media Studies: The Basics (Routledge, 2012)
Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Volume One: Summary -- Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future. (Lorimer, 2015) An electronic copy of this first volume of the TRC report is also available, as a pdf, here.
Kwame Dawes, Bob Marley: Lyrical Genius (Bobcat, 2002)
J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Scholastic/Raincoast 1997)
Grade Breakdown
Three short analysis papers (maximum 1600 words, or approximately five typed, double-spaced pages) -- 20% each, for a total of 60% Click here for a topic sheet for the short analysis papers.
A YouTube-style video, of no more than two minutes duration -- 10% Click here for a description of the format for the video project, along with a sample video.
Blog/discussion group, five postings -- 5% Click here for instructions about the blog posts.
Attendance and participation -- 5%
Final examination (Due on Monday, December 18, 2017 before or during the scheduled examination, 12:00 to 2:30 in BuA203) -- 20% Click here for the final examination paper for this course.
Plagiarism and Citation of Sources
Please refer to the UBC Learning Commons FAQ on plagiarism. All of the written work you submit in this course must be your own original work. Copying the work of others without acknowledgement is a serious academic offence with significant consequences. Don't do it.
Lecturer's Course Blog
Please click here to access my blog for this course. I will be posting my own responses to our class, additional material and commentary here.
Lecture Schedule
Links are still being updated. (Please note that I can't necessarily endorse the contents of any linked sites. They're here for background information.)
All classes take place on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9:30am to 10:50am in Buchanan B 208.
September 5 and 7, 2017
No class on Tuesday: UBC IMAGINE DAY
For Thursday's (first) class, please watch "Free Voice Lesson" by Miranda Sings on YouTube. (It's also embedded below.)
Click here for a YouTube clip when "Colleen Ballinger Transforms into Miranda Sings to Interview Jimmy [Fallon]," from October, 2016.
Click here for a YouTube clip of "Pictionary with Martin Short, Jerry Seinfeld and Miranda Sings" on Jimmy Fallon in 2014.
Click here to watch the episode of Jerry Seinfeld's Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee that features Miranda.
Click here for "L’Oreal dropping black trans model Munroe Bergdorf is a lesson for those who claim white supremacy isn’t a thing" from The Independent, September 1, 2017.
Click here for "L’Oréal Drops Transgender Model Over Comments on Race" from The New York Times, September 2, 2017.
Click here for L’Oréal Paris's official website in Canada.
Click here for "My fellow white people: if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem" by Katherine Craig, from The Guardian, September 6, 2017.
Audio from a lecture for another section of English 232 earlier this year:
September 12 and 14, 2017
Harry Potter
Please read Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
Please read "Studying Media" (McDougall 5-33)
Click here for Julian McDougall's homepage at Bournemouth University.
Click here for "Pottermore: the heart of the digital Wizarding World."
Click here for "New 'Harry Potter' Exhibit packed with never-before-seen J.K. Rowling artifacts coming to New York."
Click here for "Harry Potter: A Journey Through a History of Magic release date announced"
Click here to view a video of a colloquium called Harry Potter, Brands of Magic, which took place on October 29, 2015 at the Sauder School of Business at UBC; the webpage about the colloquium is here.
This week's keyword(s): literacy, interpretation, hermeneutics
September 19 and 21, 2017
Harry Potter
Please read Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
Click here for a brief, accessible blog entry by Michael Lee on Louis Althusser and Interpellation.
Click here for the entry on Louis Althusser from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
This week's keyword(s): interpellation, poiesis, praxis, speech act, haptic
September 26 and 28, 2017
Harry Potter
Please read Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
Please read "Reading Media" (McDougall 34-61)
For Thursday's class, please watch one or more of the three "Let's Play" YouTube videos embedded below. (You can also choose your own. Or make one.)
Click here for an introduction to the work of Ferdinand de Saussure (on the sign), an on-line presentation from Columbia University.
Click here for an electronic copy of "Myth Today," the afterword from Roland Barthes's Mythologies (1957) in which he outlines a theory of popular-culture semiology. (I used a diagram of the sign in class taken from this essay.)
Click here for a critique of Roland Barthes's Mythologies by the New Yorker film critic Richard Brody.
Click here to watch a video of a 2009 lecture on structuralism and semiotics by Yale professor Paul Fry.
Click here to read a copy of Roland Barthes's 1971 essay "From Work to Text."
Click here for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Charles Sanders Peirce.
Click here for "Peirce's Theory of Signs" [distinguishing the icon, the index and the symbol].
First essay due in class on Thursday, September 28.
[Please note that for Tuesday's class, because of some scheduling challenges, we will be visiting UBC Rare Books and Special Collections to have a look at the university's Harry Potter collection. Please come to class for 9:30 as usual, and we will organize ourselves and walk over to the IKBLC.]
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada
Please read "Introduction" and "Calls to Action" from Volume 1 of the TRC Report.
Click here to read and view material on territorial acknowledgements at UBC.
Click here for the website of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation at the University of Manitoba.
Click here for Jesse Wente's page from the National Speakers Bureau site.
Click here to watch "Prime Time 2017 - Closing Keynote – Jesse Wente, Broadcaster, activist and curator."
Click here for a CBC article on Grassy Narrows and Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne (referred to by Jesse Wente in the video below).
Click here for a more recent article (from The Toronto Star, June 2017) on the "gross neglect" at Grassy Narrows.
The Edward S. Curtis photograph I used in class of Three Horses can be accessed through the American Library of Congress here. (Consider how my use of this photo also tends to level indigeneity into a homology, a set of likenesses: how do differences and pluralities also emerge into such representations of First Nations people?) Try too to think about the indexical in this photograph: how does it direct us outside of itself? How is it framed?
Journalist Jesse Wente on Ontario's 2016 apology for residential schools:
This week's keyword(s): curation, archive, museum, database, repository, materialism, decolonization
October 10 and 12, 2017
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada
Please read "The History" and "The Legacy" from Volume 1 of the TRC Report.
Please read "Powerful Media" (McDougall 62-108)
Click here to view materials on and around Gord Downie's The Secret Path.
Click here to view The Secret Path: Freedom to Speak.
Click here to view The Secret Path: In the Classroom.
Click here to read "OPINION: Destroying personal accounts of residential schools would just compound the tragedy" by Tim Fontaine -- the article we discussed in class.
Videos to screen this week: Danny
This week's keyword(s): biopower, hegemony, icon
October 17 and 19, 2017
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada
Please read "The Challenge of Reconciliation" from Volume 1 of the TRC Report.
Please read "Powerful Media" (McDougall 62-108)
Click here to read "Decolonization is Not a Metaphor" (2012) by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. Notice how they negotiate a set of tensions and contradictions between (certain kinds of) language and action, between representation and materiality.
Click here to read excerpts from Decolonizing the Mind by Ngugi wa Thiong'o (whom I mentioned at the very end of Tuesday's class). Chapter 4 is reproduced here.
Click here to read "The Legacy of Duncan Campbell Scott: More than just a Canadian Poet."
Click here to read about Burning in this Midnight Dream by Louise Bernice Halfe.
Click here to read "'We are less as a country': Politicians pay tribute to Gord Downie" and to view a video of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's impromptu tribute to Gord Downie.
Click here for a description of the Reconciliation Pole at UBC, carved by James Hart.
Click here for "A Conversation with the Artist behind UBC’s Reconciliation Pole" (from Canadian Art, April 2017).
Videos to screen this week: Aidan, Jhena, Vasilisa, Maxine, Jacob
This week's keyword(s): colonialism, decolonization, land, voice, listening
Clck here for a wikipedia entry on the flag(s) of Ethiopia. The "Lion of Judah" flag, associated with Haile Selassie and the Rastifai, is pictured below.
Click here for "A Brief Guide to Négritude," a movement comprable to Rastifarian Pan-Africanism. The entry on Négritude from The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is here.
Videos to screen this week: Emily, Karina, Jana, Ileana, Bryan, Amanda
An early text, from the Harlem Renaissance, of American Afrocentrism, Langston Hughes's "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (1920).
This week's keyword(s): post-colonialism, globalization, network
October 31 and November 2, 2017
Bob Marley
Please read Dawes, "Natty Dread and Rastaman Vibration" and "Exodus and Kaya" (101-242)
Please read "Global Media" (McDougall 109-143)
For Tuesday's class -- we're now about a week behind -- please have a look at the videos embedded above for Tanya Tagaq's "Centre" and Bob Marley's "Stir It Up." We will do a writing-workshop style class that will focus on methods, techniques and practices for writing critically about media. We will imagine that we are going to produce a comparative essay on these two songs (or recordings, media artifacts). Have a look too at what Kwame Dawes says about "Stir It Up" in the chapter on Catch a Fire.
Here is a page about the West African griot, mentioned on page 48 of the Dawes book.
Second essay due in class on Thursday, November 2. Please note that I have moved this due date forward.
Videos to screen this week: Mariana, Kennedy, Elizabeth, Madison, Vasisht
This week's keyword(s):
November 28 and 30, 2017
Bob Marley
Please read "Making Media" (McDougall 162-174)
Videos to screen this week: Lan, Tyler, Jamie, Valiant
This week's keyword(s): horizon of truth,
The FINAL EXAMINATION is scheduled for Monday, December 18, 2017 from 12:00 to 2:30 in BuA203. I have made a take-home examination, which will be available by noon on Monday, December 4, which must be submitted during or before the scheduled examination. Click here for the final examination paper for this course.