Study Of Popular Culture

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How would you convince a sceptical friend that popular culture was a valid object for academic study?

Apprehension around studying popular culture can be attributed to an understanding of popular culture as meaning ‘low culture’, and therefore having little worthiness of study. However, the conceptual division between high and low culture, is now understood to be of no relevance to aesthetic worth, but more to political and social distinctions. Remove the word popular from the question, and the consideration of studying all culture is made, there is little to be dubious of. Williams defined popular culture as the “everyday ordinariness” of life (1958: 93), and this widespread nature makes exclusion of the academic study of popular culture …show more content…
This illustrates how class stratification reinforces the status of those with greater access to power, which is why popular culture needs analysis, to address the accuracy of negative stereotypes. The political framing applied by a critical study of popular culture, enables working class identity to assert claims to legitimacy, despite limited access to power. Scepticism around the legitimacy of academic study of popular culture, is middle class insecurity of the destabilisation of claims to power and …show more content…
Without this platform for critique and analysis, dominant culture continues to reproduce inequalities and govern critical discourse. Furthermore, without this, the intellectual has no voice within public discussion and understanding of popular culture, contemporary or historical. The university education would be failing if it produced academics and scholars proficient in narrow fields (excluding popular culture), this is of restricted practical use in a society saturated with popular culture. The theoretical issues covered in studying popular culture include class, gender, ethnicity and identity, as well as issues of identity and lifestyle in relation to social status. Therefore, the study of popular culture is political and necessary because it uncovers how items of cultural consumption are created, selected, consumed and interpreted: in relation to dominant and resistant notions of identity, and

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