Using the medical drama Grey's Anatomy as an exemplar, this article discusses findings from a qualitative case study exploring impacts of popular (or pop) culture on Canadian audience members' understanding of social issues, particularly health care policy. Adopting a neo-Gramscian perspective, our fundamental premise is that pop culture operates…

Everyday cultural resources that originate outside school offer possibilities for multimodal creativity and identity play, as children consume, transform and produce multimodal texts. In this study, Kyle, a boy in elementary school, fluidly performed social identities and engaged in playful and parodic rescripting of identities and resources from…

Contrary to Bourdieu's theory ("Distinction: A social critique of the judgment of taste". Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press (1984)) that cultural consumption of so-called "high" versus popular culture is determined by socio-economic class, Peterson ("Poetics" 21:243-258, 1992; "Poetics"…

We focus on the recently emerging "baby culture" that is fostering a curriculum of consumption and consumerism among parents-to-be and infants aged zero-to-three. To gain insight into how the cultural artifacts, practices, and trends emerging from this demographic are shaping the way we think and act in a consumer culture, we investigate…

In this article, the author outlines how she used qualitative research methodologies to translate her research findings into a social-realist narrative film that has engaged multiple audiences. This process raises questions about what translation means when research is represented in the form of an imaginative text and how education researchers…

Traces the development of British and Australian television criticism from the mid-seventies. Suggests a conscious study of the characteristics of television as a cultural agent and as a text within a sociocultural context. (MS)

Defines and operationalizes the concept of media interaction, which implies that the audience member experiences "interaction" with, and in many cases identifies with, persons in the media content. Presents a model of media interaction and the results of surveys conducted to explore hypotheses derived form the model. (JMF)

This paper analyzes the ways in which members of different ethnic groups decode the worldwide hit television program Dallas, and suggests answers to the question of how such a quintessentially American cultural product crosses cultural and linguistics frontiers so easily. The program was studied with the intent of observing the mechanisms through…

The Dynasty Project conducted an empirical analysis of the cross-cultural reception of the program for which it was named. Data were collected via two series of videotaped interviews which were carried out following a viewing of Dynasty episode 105 by a group of subjects together with the researchers. The subjects were 25 American viewers in Los…

This paper identifies and examines a textual practice of female address in music video, and considers its appeal among a social audience of female adolescents. Textual strategies that inflect, appropriate, or bypass the prevailing male adolescence discourse on the American music video channel, MTV, are presented from the standpoint of their…

This paper assesses, by reference to contemporary issues of the "Radio Times" and the London edition of the "TV Times," the way in which Independent Television (ITV) separated itself from the traditional middle class attitudes typified by the British Broadcasting Company programs and, instead, expressed through its programming…