Popular Culture Minor

College of Arts and Sciences
For information contact Allan Austin, PhD

The minor in popular culture provides its students with the analytical tools to investigate the intersections of “popular” products—film, television, radio, music, comic books, the internet, social media, advertising, etc.—with culture and society. This interdisciplinary curriculum will foster in students a critical lens through which they can perceive not only how popular culture reflects cultural and societal values, but also functions to constitute and promulgate those values. Rather than mere “entertainment,” this minor emphasizes the pivotal functions that the “popular” or “everyday” plays within today’s media-saturated societies.

Students completing the Popular Culture Minor will

1. Critically analyze the cultural productions constituting everyday life or the “popular” through a variety of methods/techniques,
2. Write effective arguments across multiple disciplines,
3. Develop critical speaking skills for varied audiences,
4. Examine aesthetic, political, historical, social, and economic relationships between “popular” cultural productions and society