Abstract

Rarely do professors have the opportunity to branch out and create a course that is literally shaped by the day’s news. The mediated unveiling of sexual predators in the summer of 2018 provided  an opportunity to teach an honors seminar that wrote itself over the course of five weeks. Professors from the communication and history disciplines drew on theory commonly used in the communication discipline and used historical readings to frame a discussion of popular culture and its relation to current events. Each week, a film was incorporated  for discussion and student projects were drawn from examples of popular culture, creating a course that allowed a historical and modern popular culture to collide. Students articulated the significance of both the historical context and rhetorical relevance in a fractured society. The course and its content continued to be discussed  well after it ended.

Keywords: sexual harassment, Orwellian, LGBTQ+, #MeToo, framing, terministic screens

Author Bio

Bryan Vizzini, PhD (University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill) is a professor of history at West Texas A&M University where he has taught since 2001. Cold War pop culture, representations of Latin America in film, and inter-american relations form the basis of his research agenda.

Kristina Drumheller, PhD (University of Missouri-Columbia) is a professor of communication at West Texas A&M University where she has taught since 2006. Organizational crisis communication, emotional labor and intelligence, and leadership have been at the forefront of Dr. Drumheller’s research, particularly as these concepts intersect with popular culture, gender, and queer studies.

Suggested Citation

AP

Vizzini, B. & Drumheller, K. (2020). Sexual harassment effects on bodies of work: Engaging students through the application of historical context and communication theory to pop culture and social media. Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, 7(2). http://journaldialogue.org/v7-issue-2/sexual-harassment-effects-on-bodies-of-work-engaging-students-through-the-application-of-historical-context-and-communication-theory-to-pop-culture-and-social-media/

MLA

Vizzini, Bryan and Kris Drumheller. Sexual Harassment Effects on Bodies of Work: Engaging Students Through the Application of Historical Context and Communication Theory to Pop Culture and Social Media. Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, vol. 7, no. 2, 2020. http://journaldialogue.org/v7-issue-2/sexual-harassment-effects-on-bodies-of-work-engaging-students-through-the-application-of-historical-context-and-communication-theory-to-pop-culture-and-social-media/