American pop culture

Discrimination

The outcome of acting on prejudices, leading to inequitable treatment.

Culture (Stuart Hall’s Definition)

Not just a set of things (novels, paintings), but a set of practices concerned with the production and exchange of meanings.

Popular Culture

The aesthetic products created and sold by profit-seeking firms operating in the global entertainment market.

The Subject (in Discourse)

The ideal place or perspective created by discourse that an individual must step into to make sense of the world

Discourse (Michel Foucault)

A system of representation that encompasses the rules and practices that produces meaningful statements and regulate conduct; it produces the objects of our knowledge.

Sociology

The study of social life, social change, and the social causes and consequences of human behavior.

Reflective/Mimetic Approach

The idea that language acts like a mirror, simply reflecting a true meaning that already exists out in the real world.

Intentional Approach

The view that words mean exactly what the speaker or author intends them to mean

Prejudice

Individual attitudes based on inflexible and irrational generalizations about a group

Constructivist/ Constructionist Approach (Stuart Hall)

The view that meaning is constructed in and through language; it is produced through social and cultural conventions.

Hegemony (Antonio Gramsci)

How a ruling class maintains power by winning the consent of other groups, making the dominant ideology feel “natural” or like “common sense.”

Gender

culturally determined and fluid roles, behaviors, and indentities

Art Worlds (Howard Becker)

The idea that culture is produced by networks of people working together (division of labor), challenging the myth of the “lone genius.”

Signified

The mental concept or idea that the signifier represents

Sexuality

sexual attraction, practices, and identity

Meaning

ultimately made by users/audiences/consumers; it is multivocal and socially constructed

Sign (Semiotics)

The basic unit of meaning, composed of a signifier and signified

Racism

A system of racial inequality resting on historical and cultural power structures.

Langue

The underlying, rule-governed structure of language (the social part).

Identity

Who we are; this changes how we interpret meaning and what we see in cultural artifacts.

Representation

The production of meaning through language; how we use signs and symbols to think, speak, and feel.

Produsage

The phenomenon where audiences act as both consumers and creators of content (e.g.., creating mash-ups or memes).

Signifier

The physical form of a sign (the actual word, sound, or visual image)

Semiotics

The study of signs and how meaning is created and communicated.

sex

Biological characteristics used to categorize people as male or female.

Binaries

A simplistic way of establishing difference (e.g., black/white, male/female) that often creates false dichotomies

Sociological imagination (C. Wright Mills)

The ability to grasp the intersection of history and biography; connecting personal troubles to public issues.

Circuit of Culture

A model for understanding how cultural artifacts re produced, distributed, and consumed, involving Representation, identity, production, consumption, and regulation.

Thick Description

A detailed, context-rich description of cultural practices that seeks to uncover the layered meaning behind human behavior.

Parole

The actual act of speaking or writing (the individual utterance)