AMST

Cultural Mainstreams and Margins

Dominant cultural norms, values, and practices are the mainstream; groups, ideas, or practices outside the center of power are the margins. Connect to Alison Huber and “mainstream as metaphor.”

Critical Thinking

Questioning assumptions, power structures, and dominant narratives instead of accepting them as natural or neutral. Connect to course theme: asking who benefits and whose perspective is centered.

America and Americanness

The contested idea of what counts as “American,” often shaped through race, nationalism, exclusion, and belonging. Connect to Rashawn Ray, Gabriel Sanchez, Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, and Eric Schmitt.

Fascism

Authoritarian political ideology involving nationalism, suppression of opposition, repetition of propaganda, and normalization of extreme actions. Connect to Jeff Tulis, “Normalizing Trump.”

Super Bowl

A mainstream cultural event that reveals nationalism, race, celebrity, capitalism, and the tension between mainstream and alternative culture. Connect to course discussion of Bad Bunny and mainstream spectacle.

Christopher Columbus

A symbolic American figure often celebrated as heroic while hiding settler colonialism, violence, and Indigenous displacement. Connect to settler colonialism and American myth-making.

Martin Luther King Jr.

A civil rights icon often mainstreamed as peaceful and unifying while his radical critiques of racism, capitalism, and militarism are minimized. Connect to mainstream memory and American icons.

Stigma

An attribute that socially discredits a person and marks them as different or lesser. Connect to Erving Goffman, “Stigma and Social Identity.”

Bodily/Physical Stigma

Stigma attached to the body, physical difference, disability, or appearance. Connect to Erving Goffman.

Character Stigma

Stigma attached to perceived flaws in personality or morality, such as addiction, mental illness, unemployment, imprisonment, or sexuality. Connect to Erving Goffman.

Tribal Stigma

Stigma attached to race, nation, religion, ethnicity, or group identity. Connect to Erving Goffman.

Deviance

Not an inherent quality of behavior, but a label created by social groups when they define rules and mark people as outsiders. Connect to Howard Becker, “Outsiders.”

Bullying

Repeated harm involving power imbalance; course emphasized false equivalency when victims are treated as equally responsible as aggressors. Connect to “The Bully Effect.”

Mythical Norm

The imagined standard of power in society, usually white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure. Connect to Audre Lorde.

Hegemony

Domination that works through culture, norms, values, and consent rather than only direct force. Connect to Antonio Gramsci, Stuart Hall, and course use of mainstream culture.

Interlocking Oppressions

Systems like racism, sexism, classism, and heterosexism operate together rather than separately. Connect to the Combahee River Collective.

Intersectionality

A framework for understanding how multiple identities and systems of power intersect to shape unique experiences of oppression or privilege. Connect to Kimberlé Crenshaw.

Structural Oppression

Oppression built into institutions, laws, policies, and systems rather than only individual prejudice. Connect to New Deal exclusions, housing, labor, and welfare policy.

Whiteness / Possessive Investment

Whiteness is not just identity but a system of material advantages protected through law, housing, labor, and citizenship. Connect to George Lipsitz.

White Supremacism

An ideology, discourse, and set of policies that center whiteness and maintain white dominance, not only extremist hate-group violence. Connect to Eric Schmitt and Simon Clark.

Anti-Blackness

A specific system of oppression that devalues Black life, denies Black humanity, and structures violence against Black people. Connect to slavery, Jim Crow, policing, and BLM.

Jim Crow

The system of racial segregation laws and customs that enforced anti-Black racial hierarchy after Reconstruction. Connect to anti-Blackness and civil rights struggles.

Redlining

The denial of housing loans and services to neighborhoods based on racial composition, creating racial segregation and wealth gaps. Connect to Federal Housing Act and George Lipsitz.

Representation

The process by which media and language create meaning rather than simply reflecting reality. Connect to Stuart Hall.

Mainstream Media

Dominant, widely distributed media often aligned with corporate power and status quo perspectives. Connect to Linda Jean Kenix.

Independent Media

Media produced outside major corporate ownership or dominant institutions. Connect to Linda Jean Kenix.

New Media

Digital and internet-based media forms that change how information circulates. Connect to social media and public participation.

Alternative Media

Media associated with marginalized groups, protests, social movements, and critiques of dominant power. Connect to Linda Jean Kenix.

Social Media

User-generated digital platforms where publics create, circulate, and respond to media. Connect to celebrity culture, BLM, and civic participation.

Media Frames

Patterns used by media to organize stories and shape how audiences understand events. Connect to media studies and Stuart Hall.

Conflict Frame

A media frame that presents an issue as a struggle between opposing sides.

Morality Frame

A media frame that presents an issue through right/wrong or moral/immoral language.

Human Interest Frame

A media frame that personalizes an issue through emotional stories or individual experiences.

Responsibility Frame

A media frame that focuses on who caused a problem or who should solve it.

Civic Participation

Public engagement in political or social issues, including protest, voting, organizing, and responding to media. Connect to BLM protests and media.

Oppositional Gaze

A resistant way of looking where Black women critically interpret media that excludes or stereotypes them. Connect to bell hooks.

Gender

A social performance produced through repeated actions, norms, and expectations rather than a fixed natural essence. Connect to Judith Butler.

Trans*

An open-ended term for gender variance; the asterisk resists fixed categories and lets people define themselves. Connect to Jack Halberstam.

Heteronormativity

The assumption that heterosexuality is normal, natural, and default. Connect to Kristen Cochrane.

Homophobia

Fear, hatred, discrimination, or prejudice against gay, lesbian, or same-sex attracted people. Connect to heteronormativity.

Transphobia

Fear, hatred, discrimination, or prejudice against transgender or gender-nonconforming people. Connect to Jack Halberstam and heteronormativity.

Medical Model of Disability

A model that locates disability in the individual body and treats it as something to cure, fix, or correct. Connect to disability studies.

Social Model of Disability

A model that argues society disables people through barriers, exclusion, and inaccessible norms. Connect to UPIAS and Lennard Davis.

Eugenics

A racist, ableist, and classist pseudoscience focused on increasing “desirable” traits and eliminating “undesirable” ones through reproduction control. Connect to Douglas Baynton and disability history.

Monstrous vs. Natural

A binary where some bodies or identities are constructed as abnormal or monstrous while dominant norms appear natural. Connect to disability, gender, race, and normalcy.

Capitalism

An economic system based on private ownership, profit, markets, and competition. Connect to consumerism and neoliberalism.

Consumerism

A cultural system where identity, happiness, and value are tied to buying, branding, and consumption. Connect to Black Mirror “Nosedive” and Kerryn Higgs.

Socialism

An economic and political system emphasizing collective or public ownership and more equal distribution of resources. Connect as contrast to capitalism.

Commodity Activism

When corporations turn social justice or activism into a marketable product. Connect to Sarah Banet-Weiser and Dove/body positivity advertising.

Celebrity Culture

The system where media, publics, and stars interact to produce fame and cultural influence. Connect to Sharon Marcus.

Teenyboppers

Young pop music fans, often girls, dismissed as unserious despite shaping mainstream music culture. Connect to Sarah Baker.

Parasocial Attachments

One-sided emotional relationships where fans feel intimacy with celebrities or media figures who do not know them. Connect to Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl.

Avant-Garde Art

Experimental or political art that challenges dominant norms, power, capitalism, racism, sexism, or consumerism. Connect to Adrian Piper, Krzysztof Wodiczko, and Cosey Fanni Tutti.

Mainstream/Pop Music

Widely popular commercial music associated with dominant culture, though it can also challenge norms from within. Connect to Alison Huber and Sarah Baker.

Hip Hop Authentic

Hip hop understood as connected to its origins in marginalized Black communities, resistance, and countercultural expression. Connect to Imani Perry.

Hip Hop Crossover

Hip hop that moves into broader audiences and mainstream markets while retaining some original features. Connect to RUN-DMC and Aerosmith, “Walk This Way.”

Hip Hop Pop

Hip hop fully absorbed into mainstream commercial pop culture. Connect to Imani Perry, Amy Coddington, and mainstreaming.

Liberalism

Political philosophy emphasizing individual rights, equality before law, liberty, and consent of the governed.

Neoliberalism

Political-economic ideology emphasizing markets, privatization, deregulation, individual responsibility, and turning life into competition. Connect to Black Mirror “Nosedive.”

#BlackLivesMatter

A movement asserting the value of Black life against anti-Black violence, especially police killings. Connect to Alicia Garza, Trayvon Martin, George Floyd, and mainstream/margins.

Palestine

A land and people central to discussions of occupation, displacement, settler colonialism, and contested sovereignty. Connect to Palestine/Israel unit.

Israel

A nation-state established in 1948 and discussed in relation to Zionism, Jewish self-determination, Palestinian displacement, and settler colonialism.

Zionism

A movement supporting Jewish self-determination and statehood in the land of Israel. Connect to ADL definition and Palestine/Israel debates.

Anti-Zionism

Opposition to Zionism as a political ideology or state project; distinct from anti-Semitism though often debated or conflated. Connect to Jewish Voice for Peace and Palestine unit.

Anti-Semitism

Prejudice, hatred, or discrimination against Jewish people. Connect to Pamela Nadell, Charlottesville, and Tree of Life synagogue attack.

Islamophobia

Prejudice, hatred, or discrimination against Muslims or people perceived as Muslim. Connect to post-9/11 politics and immigration rhetoric.

Settler Colonialism

A system where outsiders seize land, claim control, and seek to replace or dominate Indigenous populations while minimizing harm. Connect to Indian Removal Act, Columbus, Palestine/Israel.

Fifth Amendment / Due Process

Constitutional protection that no person can be deprived of life, liberty, or property without legal process. Connect to immigration detention and ICE.

Thirteenth Amendment

Abolished slavery except as punishment for crime, leaving a prison-labor exception. Connect to mass incarceration and anti-Blackness.

Alien Enemies Act

A law allowing detention or deportation of nationals from enemy countries during wartime. Connect to executive power and immigration enforcement.

Indian Removal Act

1830 law authorizing forced removal of Native peoples from their lands, leading to the Trail of Tears. Connect to settler colonialism.

Chinese Exclusion Act

1882 law banning Chinese immigration; first major U.S. immigration law based on race/nationality. Connect to racialized immigration.

Federal Housing Act / Federal Housing Policy

New Deal housing policy that expanded homeownership for whites while reinforcing segregation and redlining. Connect to Lipsitz and possessive investment in whiteness.

Social Security Act

1935 law creating social insurance, but many domestic and agricultural workers, often workers of color, were excluded. Connect to structural oppression.

Wagner Act / National Labor Relations Act

1935 law protecting union organizing, but unions often excluded workers of color. Connect to racialized labor benefits.

Civil Rights Act

1964 law prohibiting discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Connect to Jim Crow and civil rights struggle.

Habeas Corpus

Legal principle requiring the government to justify detention before a court. Connect to due process, immigration detention, and state power.

U.S. Aggression Against Iran

U.S. intervention and hostility toward Iran, including 1953 coup, 1979 crisis context, and 2026 course discussion. Connect to empire, oil, and foreign policy.

Attack on Venezuela / Arrest of Maduro

2026 course example of U.S. aggression toward Venezuela, tied to oil, regime change, and imperial power. Connect to U.S. empire.

Attempted Friendly Takeover of Cuba

2026 course example of U.S. imperial language masking domination or control. Connect to empire and Latin America.

ICE Aggression in Minnesota and Los Angeles

2025–2026 immigration enforcement actions discussed as examples of authoritarianism, due process violations, and state violence. Connect to Heidi Altman.

Normalizing Trump

The process by which extreme actions become seen as normal through repetition, proliferation, and projection. Connect to Jeff Tulis.

Repetition

A propaganda/normalization strategy where claims are repeated until they feel believable. Connect to Jeff Tulis.

Proliferation

A normalization strategy where many outrageous actions occur at once so each one seems less significant. Connect to Jeff Tulis.

Projection

A normalization strategy where someone attributes their own flaws or vices to opponents. Connect to Jeff Tulis.

False Equivalency

Treating two unequal actions as morally or materially the same. Connect to “The Bully Effect.”

Drapetomania

A racist false diagnosis claiming enslaved people’s desire for freedom was a disease. Connect to anti-Blackness, medicalization, and deviance.

Normalcy

The social construction of what counts as normal, often used to mark others as abnormal. Connect to Lennard Davis.

Impairment

A physical or cognitive limitation or difference; in the social model, impairment is distinct from disability. Connect to UPIAS.

Disability

In the social model, disability is produced by social barriers and exclusion imposed on impairment. Connect to UPIAS and Lennard Davis.

Self-Naming

The power of marginalized people to define their own identities rather than being named by doctors, institutions, or dominant culture. Connect to Jack Halberstam.

Male Gaze

A patriarchal way of looking that objectifies women, especially in visual culture. Connect to Laura Mulvey, Lauren Michele Jackson, and bell hooks.

Alternative Culture

Cultural forms outside the dominant mainstream, often tied to marginalized groups or critique of power. Connect to margins and Kenix.

Mainstream as Metaphor

The idea that “mainstream” is not just popularity but a metaphor for dominant culture and hegemony. Connect to Alison Huber.

Authenticity

The idea that a cultural form remains true to its origins, community, or politics. Connect to hip hop and Imani Perry.

Crossover

The movement of a cultural form from a marginal or specific audience into a broader mainstream audience. Connect to hip hop and pop music.

Pop

The fully commercial, widely accessible version of a cultural form. Connect to mainstream music and hip hop.

Brand Culture

A culture where people, identities, and social causes become brands to be consumed. Connect to Sarah Banet-Weiser and Black Mirror “Nosedive.”

Consumer Citizen

A person whose political or social identity is expressed through consumption choices. Connect to commodity activism.

Settler Colonial Memory

The way dominant societies erase, minimize, or justify the violence of land seizure. Connect to Columbus and Indian Removal Act.