Mass media has played, and is currently playing, a role in the way individuals make sense of their identities, roles and that of society. Through these media outlets—whether in TV, media, and music or in newspaper, articles, and books—people are learning. In other words, we are experiencing daily a pedagogical onslaught of information through popular media that can create conflict within ourselves or elicit great insights for change and acceptance. 

Viewing the world around us informs our thinking. As children, there is frequently a lens of awe in seeing new ideas and mechanisms of the world working in unique ways. Each new piece of information is a fact to translate into a growing mental map. For those entering formal education, new ideas tend to come in the form of “texts” intended to show fact and truth about disciplinary learning. The new pieces of information are then often coded within boxes, compartmentalized for instance into learning about science, math, and language. In institutions of higher education, concepts of identity, race, class, and hierarchy persist. Through peer relations, students find commonalities and cohesion or on the flip-side experience “Othering” based upon race, class and gender (Crozier, Burke, & Archer, 2016). Outside the classroom, informal learning through experience (Marsick & Watkins, 2011) presents itself everywhere, allowing students to learn through interactions about how to behave with one another, about identity, about one another, and ones place within a hierarchical world. 

But what happens beyond the openminded learning of young children and formal learning within schools? As adults beyond the constraints of educational institutions, we may understand that what we pay attention to informs our understanding of ourselves and of others. Historically, for example, mass media has amplified the presence of heteronormativity of white men in written and visual texts. For those not fitting the hegemonic discourse, they are often depicted as deviant in one manner or another. These depictions have negative impacts for those being objectified, whether through TV shows normalizing sexual objectification of women (Guizzo, Cadinu, Galdi, Maass, & Latrofa, 2017) or popular culture’s perpetuation of the racialization of black bodies (Tate, 2015). 

In this issue of Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, we are pleased to present six articles speaking to the idea of what we learn from popular culture related to Otherness, survival and hope. Within and across these articles, you will hear about ways in which we need to consider ourselves and what we may have thought to be “the Other.” As such, the authors in this issue provide us with the chance to reconsider language, music, news, and cultural stories. The articles in this issue are divided into three related sections: Learning about Otherness within the Formal Classroom, Informal Learning for Survival, and Societal Learning as Control, Conflict, and Hope. 

Across these articles, two address providing new insights to teaching and learning in the university classroom. In Section 1: Learning about Otherness within Formal Education, Laura Dumin and Misty Thomas’s works encourage deeper thinking about popular media and its relation to our identity and perceptions of others. In Thomas’s, “I am a Conversation:” Media Literacy, Queer Pedagogy, and Steven Universe in College Curriculum,” she emphasizes the importance of opening discussion for students to investigate and analyze identity through integrating critical media literacy with queer pedagogy. Thomas demonstrates the importance of actively engaging with popular media, such as articulated through the example of Steven Universe, a cartoon show presenting both normative and non-normative identities for students and teachers as a “new approach to the inclusion of media in the university classroom” (p. 1).

In Dumin’s “Using News to Start Class: How Small Daily Interactions Affect Larger Classroom Interactions,” she shows the ways in which engaging college students in learning and discussing current news stories can enhance learning about one another. Dumin’s study highlights how our conceptualization of difference, such as for topics on racial tensions and police brutality, can be addressed, providing intellectual growth through extra credit assignments and encouraging students to open-up and share with one another. With these first two articles, Thomas and Dumin show how pedagogical practice can expand individual understanding of self and others. 

In Section 2, we move beyond the classroom into Informal Learning for Survival with Sharon Marie Nuruddin’s article, “No te voy a dejar nunca” Culture and Second Language Acquisition for Survival in Fear the Walking Dead. In this work, Nuruddin illustrates the essential nature of informal learning as a matter of avoiding death. Applying Lev Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory to developing bilingual and bicultural abilities, the author demonstrates how informally learning Spanish and cultural traditions can provide individuals within a post-apocalyptic world with the needed means for survival.

With the final three articles, Tracy Bealer, T. Hunter Strickland, and Scott Haden Church present analyses of literature and music in Section 3: Societal Learning as Control, Conflict, and Hope. First, in Tracy Bealer’s article, “Consider the Dementor: Discipline, Punishment, and Magical Citizenship in Harry Potter,” she explores the ways in which “fearsome” dementors can be considered through varied lenses to better understand power hierarchies presented in the texts. Through her analysis, Bealer discusses how dementors are positioned as a feared Other, an embodiment of fear at the individual and societal level, intended to teach about maintaining control and order.

Then in T. Hunter Strickland’s article, “Zombie Literature: Analyzing the Fear of the Unknown through Popular Culture,” he reflects on the ways universal fears can be attributed and portrayed through the genre of zombie literature. Strickland draws from the Russian philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin’s description of carnival as a way to describe the paradox of fear and repulsion, along with shock and humor as a way to learn and move through deep-seated individual and societal fears. 

The final article in the section also draws from Bakhtin’s carnival, through the lens of counter culture and breaking of social hierarchies to examine music in the United States. Haden Church presents an interdisciplinary analysis in “Resistance, Race, and Myth: A Survey of American Popular Music Culture in the 20^th Century,” laying a framework for informing future studies of 21^st century popular music by conceptualizing the landscape as a paradox of hegemony and resistance.

In addition to the full-length articles, the concept of Otherness, survival and hope can be demonstrated in Tabitha Parry Collin’s film review of Michelle Memran’s The Rest I Make Up. Parry Collin’s describes how the film demonstrates how Maria Irene Fornés made a significant impact on playwriting and teaching, yet as a “queer, brown playwright” is positioned outside of normative culture, thus “overshadowed by more mainstream voices.” 

The six full-length articles in this issue encourage us to expand our scholarship and teaching to consider how individual and societal perceptions and fears are portrayed and overcome. We see how the concept of the Other can stand in for an embodiment for fear–creating pressure to act or the potential to change and grow. With the inclusion of the film review, we can see how these works can teach us about our fears, the voices that are prioritized and ways to continually push to better understand and incorporate pedagogies in popular media. 

We look forward to your thoughts on this issue and hope you enjoy, Otherness, Survival and Hope: Pedagogies in Popular Media.

Anna CohenMiller
Editor in Chief

References

Crozier, G., Burke, P. J., & Archer, L. (2016). Peer relations in higher education: Raced, classed and gendered constructions and Othering. Whiteness and Education, 1(1), 39–53. https://doi.org/10.1080/23793406.2016.1164746

Guizzo, F., Cadinu, M., Galdi, S., Maass, A., & Latrofa, M. (2017). Objecting to Objectification: Women’s Collective Action against Sexual Objectification on Television. Sex Roles, 77(5–6), 352–365. 

Marsick, V. J., & Watkins, K. E. (2001). Informal and incidental learning. In S. B. Merriam (Ed.), The new update on adult learning theory: New directions for adult and continuing education (pp. 25–34). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Tate, S. A. (2015). Black Women’s Bodies and The Nation: Race, Gender and Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 

Suggested Citation

APA
CohenMiller, A. S. (2019). From the news to zombies: Teaching and learning about Otherness in popular culture. Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy. 6(3). http://journaldialogue.org/issues/v6-issue-3/from-the-news-to-zombies-teaching-and-learning-about-otherness-in-popular-culture/

MLA
CohenMiller, Anna S. “From the News to Zombies: Teaching and Learning about Otherness in Popular Culture.” Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, vol. 6, no, 3, 2019, http://journaldialogue.org/issues/v6-issue-3/from-the-news-to-zombies-teaching-and-learning-about-otherness-in-popular-culture/

We are happy to present our special issue, “Criminals as Heroes: Problems and Pedagogy in Popular Culture,” guest edited by Kate Lane and Roxie James. In this issue we explore the unique role that the anti-hero has taken in recent years.  The changing nature of how criminals are portrayed in popular culture brings us a new understanding of how society has shaped this cultural form, and how popular culture has, in turn, shaped society.

Popular culture arms us with an exciting and powerful pedagogical tool and continues to offer a lens through which to grapple with serious societal issues. In the 1960s and 1970s in the United States, for example, popular culture provided an outlet for viewers to consider important changes occurring in society. Television programs such as All in the Family, Maud, and The Jeffersons helped us think about, and discuss, issues of race and gender equity during a historic period of social change. Today, television series such as Modern Family and Speechless provides society with a fictional world with which to consider how we define ourselves individually and exist as a families, presenting us with a far more inclusive portrayal of how we live our lives today through characters who may not look like us, behave like us, or perhaps even think like us. Through such fictional portrayals that address important issues, we can critically evaluate the changes taking place in our society.

While the articles are described in detail within Lane and James’s guest editorial, “What Hot Criminals, Anti-Heroes, and Bob Dylan Can Teach Us,” as a brief introduction here, the five articles in this issue reflect on the increasingly important, and changing, role and portrayal of the anti-hero in popular culture. First, Amanda DiPaolo helps us ponder the concerns that may emerge due to the continuing development of artificial intelligence. Max Romanowski then explores how good and evil are defined and portrayed in popular culture. Later in this issue, James Tregonning critically evaluates what it means to follow societal rules when they clash with personal ethics. Lastly, the final two articles by Courtney Watson and Melissa Vosen Callens, respectively, take on an analysis of the more recent incarnations of the female anti-hero.

Each of the articles in this issue provide ways that we can contemplate society today, using popular culture to address issues of equity, morality, and personal ethics. We are now seeing heroes, and in the case of this special issue, anti-heroes, coming from a varied cross-section of society. Today, we see an increasing variety of characters, such as individuals identifying as men, women, cisgender, transgender, as well as a range across ethnic and cultural identities, and representing various forms of ability and disability. Each variance portrays life, demonstrating a growing acceptance and portrayal of diverse variations within popular culture.

In addition to the full-length articles, the diversity in representation can be demonstrated to a greater extent in the online book review of Ghettos, Tramps, and Welfare Queens (Pimpare, 2017). In the review, Debbie Olson highlights Pimpare’s (2017) discussion of the “marginalized and maligned” while also noting how the book could be enhanced by further demonstrating the intersection between race, gender, and poverty.

The five articles in this special issue can inform the ways we may choose to consider how the antihero is portrayed, providing insight into why individuals may have selected their path in life, even if at first, this path may push against societal assumptions of what is expected and normal. With the inclusion of the book review, we are shown how future essays and studies could delve into the ways in which sociocultural factors, positionality, and societal expectations and pressures can be examined further. The authors present new ways to use a fictional world to discuss important societal issues, and perhaps question and consider our own personal biases. We hope you enjoy this special edition of Dialogue.

Kelli Bippert
Managing Editor

Anna CohenMiller
Editor

A note from the Editor in Chief:

Since 2011, when Dialogue was first discussed and brought to life, I have been fortunate to work hand-in-hand with amazing editorial team members. With Lynnea Chapman-King, Kurt Depner, and Rob Galin, we have developed strong and varied sets of issues addressing important and fascinating topics in popular culture and pedagogy. Today, I am pleased to introduce, or re-introduce in this case, our evolving editorial team for the next phase of Dialogue.

Kelli Bippert and Karina Vado have been active members with SWPACA and the Dialogue editorial board over the last few years. They have taken on the roles of Educational Resource Editor and Book Review Editor, respectively, and facilitated the development of our online short articles and musings. I have the honor to announce that Kelli will be moving into the position of Managing Editor and Karina has accepted a new position as Production Editor. With their keen awareness of contemporary issues in popular culture and pedagogical practices, and their exceptional insight and ability, I am excited to have them aboard and know the Dialogue community will benefit from these new developments.

Lastly, I would like to introduce our new copy editors to the team, Miriam Sciala and Robert Gordyn. For this issue, I would like to thank them along with all those that contributed to the production of this issue: Kelli Bippert (Managing Editor and Educational Resources Editor), Karina Vado (Production Editor and Book Review Editor), Kate Lane and Roxie James (guest editors), all authors who submitted articles for consideration, our peer reviewers, and Douglas CohenMiller (Creative Director). As always, we look forward to hearing your thoughts about the issue and innovative ideas for future development.

Anna CohenMiller
Editor in Chief