Four recent movies and broadcasts have brought our attention to historical episodes of racism, anti-semitism, authoritarianism, and murder in the first half of the Twentieth Century. These episodes had been largely forgotten as the history of social progress has been celebrated. New attention to past events as presented in the four works is…

This paper explored the relationship between graffiti arts and civic education among young people in Nigeria. A mixed methods approach was employed to generate and synthesize empirical data. The study was guided by Barbara Rogoff's social constructivism theory. Findings indicated that graffiti arts and artists were present in Nigeria, driven by…

Given the growing interest and representation of superheroes in comics and other media, we are interested in the ways young people read superhero texts and how those readings influence their conceptualisations of gender within and outside educational spaces. In this article we explore students' responses to (re)presentations of gender in superhero…

Parents of gifted children are often faced with challenges as to how to process images, labels, and stereotypes of youth with special abilities. Just as books can provide healing for the troubled soul by reflecting on the stories of people experiencing similar challenges, cinema and video can help examine one's strengths and weaknesses while…

The politics of children's literature and the actors surrounding it have never been more visible than they are now, in the digital age. As one of the first children's series to gain widespread popularity concurrently with the spread of the internet, the Harry Potter septet arrived on the global stage at the perfect moment to develop an avid,…

In this collection, scholars from the United States, Canada, and Australia examine the concepts of villainification and anti-villainification in social studies curriculum and popular culture, as well as within broader sociocultural contexts. Villainification is the process of identifying an individual or a small group of individuals as the sole…

The act of laughing, which is thought to be related with the body rather than the mind and identified with rudeness, has been attributed to outcast segments of society, such as women, children, slaves, or the common-people, while humor requiring supremacy of the mind is believed to be associated with the ruling elite class of society, and mostly…

In the United States, rape culture is a prevalent phenomenon that has contributed to desensitization to scenes in popular media that might have been considered unacceptable in the past. This paper explores the proposal of a model (Rape Culture and Violence Legitimization Model, RCVL) to understand the factors that prompt a society's focus and…

This article is an autoethnographic vignette of a schizoaffective sufferer learning about 'saneness' from slasher films. In this paper, theories from popular culture as pedagogy, Mad Studies, and cultivation theory, are used to confirm that saneness in motion pictures (specifically slasher films) can be conceptualized as a site of critical…

Approximately 2,000 teams in the U.S. utilize Native American mascots, the majority of which are associated with schools. Across the nation there continue to be many intense conflicts over these mascots. Most conflicts focus on differences in opinion, rather than on the effects of these mascots. The purpose of this article is to provide…

Purpose: Following recent scholarship promoting the study of sports-related texts as a vehicle for examining sociopolitical issues, this study aims to identify methods and materials used to facilitate the extended exploration of sociopolitical issues in a secondary sports literature class and to establish how students describe their experiences…

Communication of difficult concepts in the physics classroom can be negatively affected by the absence of a strong link between physics content and the experiences or interests of students. One possible method towards addressing this issue is to motivate physics content with reference to popular culture figures such as superheroes. We find…

As a form of popular culture, magazines provide a lens through which historians can examine the dominant attitudes and values of a society. This article examines the portrayal of young American women in the popular teen magazine, "Seventeen" magazine, during the period 1955-1965. The study documents and analyses the messages conveyed…

The present study investigated the effect of descriptive and injunctive norms of peers, parents, and favorite celebrities on adolescents' negative online behavior toward celebrities. The sample consisted of 1,255 adolescents ([X-bar][subscript age] = 14.17, SD = 0.47). Adolescents indicated what their peers, parents, and favorite celebrities think…

Background: Peer crowds are macro-level, reputation-based subcultures with shared preferences, values, and behavior. The Country peer crowd has been the focus of tobacco industry research and marketing but has yet to be the primary focus of public health research. The current study explores the utility of "Down and Dirty," a "Social…