HUM 204 American Popular Culture (5 credits)
Distribution Area Fulfilled Humanities; General Transfer Elective Formerly HUMAN 204
Course Description HUM 204 explores the impact and influence of popular culture on American society by examining various cultural theories of popular culture as they apply to cultural trends and fads, stereotypes and technologies.
Course Content A. Terminology of popular culture, mass media, and popular entertainment
B. Application of prominent popular culture theories (e.g. Cultural Studies, Frankfurt School, Semiotics, Structuralism, Postmodernism, Multiculturalism) to popular culture analysis
C. Popular culture artifacts and their impact on personal, societal, and cultural identities
D. Cultural trends and fads, genres, and modalities
E. Cultural stereotypes and their formation in American society
F. Changing technologies as they impact popular culture
Student Outcomes
- Utilize popular culture terminology and prominent theories in order to analyze popular cultural works and their impact on society.
- Examine the relationship between how individuals utilize cultural trends and fads to construct personal identity and how societal interpretations impact that process.
- Identify examples of cultural stereotypes across various genres and modalities of American popular culture in order to examine the impact of their changes and stasis in American society.
- Analyze the formation of cultural stereotypes and the processes by which they are reified, transgressed, and reinscribed in American culture.
- Describe how changing technologies and modalities impact American popular culture in order to identify the roles that popular culture play in defining eras of American society.
Degree Outcomes Critical, Creative, and Reflective Thinking: Graduates will evaluate, analyze, synthesize, and generate ideas; construct informed, meaningful, and justifiable conclusions; and process feelings, beliefs, biases, strengths, and weaknesses as they relate to their thinking, decisions, and creations.
Intercultural Engagement: Graduates demonstrate self-efficacy in intercultural engagement to advance equity, diversity, and inclusion through reflections and expressions of cultural humility, empathy, and social and civic engagement and action. Further, graduates examine how identities/positionalities such as races, social classes, genders, sexual orientations, disabilities, and cultures impact perceptions, actions, and the distribution of power and privilege in communities, systems, and institutions.
Humanities: Graduates acquire skills to critically interpret, analyze and evaluate forms of human expression, and create and perform as an expression of the human experience.
Lecture Contact Hours 50 Lab Contact Hours 0 Clinical Contact Hours 0 Total Contact Hours 50
Potential Methods A. Formal writings: essays, essay exams, research reports, reading responses
B. Projects: group presentations, individual presentations, multimedia productions
C. Informal writings: journals, in-class responses, brainstorming, freewriting, paraphrase and summary
D. Group discussions and classroom activities
E. Exams and quizzes: short answer, matching, multiple choice
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