Popular Culture Studies

Was, wo und vor allem: wie ‚ist‘ eigentlich das Politische? Mit gutem Grund beschäftigt diese Frage auch den Populärkulturforscher. Er steht zwei  Lesarten gegenüber. Eine befürchtet, kommerzielle Populärkultur liefere jede Menge Instrumente zur Entpolitisierung und Einübung systemkonformer Subjektivität, zur Naturalisierung ungleicher Lebenschancen und zur Festigung bestehender Hegemonie. Als Etikett für diese Sicht bietet sich ‚Kulturindustrie‘ an. Eine andere Tradition sucht in „Rock und Pop und Rumtata“ (Franz Josef Degenhardt) Rebellion, ordnungssprengende Abweichung und alltagsnahe Widerständigkeit. Hier passt das Etikett ‚Resistance‘ aus dem Werkzeugkasten der Cultural Studies.
Im Folgenden soll es darum gehen, was diese Ansätze konkreter unter Populärkultur verstehen und welche Wandlungen im Verständnis des Politischen sich darin niedergeschlagen haben. Dahinter steht die  These, dass a) in den 1970ern die kritische Intelligenz eine problematische Wende zu Kultur als entscheidendem Faktor gesellschaftlicher Macht vollzog; b) dass vor diesem Hintergrund ein weites und ein enges Verständnis von Populärkultur konkurrierten und dass c) das engere sich durchgesetzt hat. Abschließend wird gefragt, warum in der empirischen Kulturforschung das alltagspraktische Verständnis der Durchschnittsbürger*innen vom Politischen und seinen Funktionen so wenig Aufmerksamkeit findet.

[English abstract. Article in swedish]

Music, ice hockey Lions and the construction of a national community

In Finland the men’s Ice Hockey World Championship has evolved into a yearly carnival that unites the Finns like no other sport or musical spectacle. Annually, new music in the form of “fight songs” is dedicated to the Finnish men’s national ice hockey team (“The Lions”), and these songs constitute the main material for this study. The songs have been complemented by interviews, a questionnaire and fieldwork conducted at international ice hockey games. On the basis of this material I argue that the Lions represent an imagined community (Anderson 1992) and the songs are a form of banal nationalism (Billig 1995) that contribute to the construction of “us”, an imagined community that, on a symbolic level, “fights” other nations. By studying the songs used in association with the Lions, I explore how nationalism is constructed through mediated music during ice hockey world championships in Finland. The findings are also related to the cultural consequences of digitalization.

In the course of the research, I have distinguished different categories of processes in which the nation can be imagined musically. These include the use of the national anthem and established patriotic compositions, which are intended to pay national honour to the players. These patriotic songs contrast in function with newly written non-ceremonial songs of a more playful, carnevalesque character. These playful tournament songs have successfully penetrated the media landscape in everyday situations. The non-ceremonial songs can be divided into official songs, which are sanctioned by the national Finnish Ice Hockey Association, and unofficial songs, which have come to represent the Lions through media practice and its preferential right of interpretation. Finally, as a form of participatory culture the members of the community can themselves create and re-recreate the cultural products (in unofficial songs and mash-ups) with which the community can be both imagined and commented upon.

11º volume do projeto coletivo "1968: imagens, contracultura, guerra, revolução" do grupo PET História UFPR, a publicação trata das relações entre a banda inglesa The Beatles, cuja produção durante a década de 1960 foi muito influente, e a contracultura. Pensando a banda como representativa de um novo estilo de vida – intimamente ligado ao pacifismo, ao rock e ao uso de drogas alucinógenas – e de uma nova forma de se fazer música, analisaremos o álbum “The Beatles” (mais conhecido como “O Álbum Branco”), lançado em 1968.

Dieser Aufsatz geht der Debatte über Widerstandspotenziale populärer Kultur nach. Der erste Teil verfolgt ideengeschichtliche Konstellationen, in denen die Fragestellung entstand und bis heute steht. Dann wird vorgeschlagen, die verschiedenen Dimensionen von " resistance " zu systematisieren. Der dritte Abschnitt geht auf die Entwicklung und Kritik des Ansatzes in den Cultural Studies ein. Das führt im vierten Teil zur Frage, welche Rolle in der Diskussion " kultureller Radikalismus " (Winfried Fluck) gespielt hat und. Der fünfte Teil führt das Konzept der Selbst-Bildung ein; der sechste erörtert, wie die politische Relevanz von Populärkultur eingeschätzt wurde und wie der " resistance "-Ansatz fortentwickelt werden kann.

This article follows up on the debate over the resistance potential of popular culture. The first part traces the historical constellation of ideas in which the question arose and remains to this day. The second part attempts to systematize different dimensions of ‘resistance.’ The third part examines the development and criticism of this approach in the field of Cultural Studies. This leads to the fourth part, which investigates the role “cultural radicalism” has played in this discussion. The fifth part introduces the concept of self-formation. The sixth discusses the ways in which the political relevance of popular culture has been evaluated, and how the ‘resistance’ approach can be further developed.

À l’image des carrières d’artistes majeurs de la fin du XXe siècle comme David Bowie, Kate Bush ou Prince, le parcours musical et artistique de Björk (née en 1965) se distingue par un renouvellement constant de sa production, un naturel expérimental souvent inscrit dans un format de chanson aux émotions directes et un désir de l’inconnu, de l’aventure, de la recherche continue. Chanteuse d’exception, Björk occupe également dans sa création des rôles variés et tient à y mêler les outils du passé et du présent en écrivant sur partition tout en expérimentant les dernières applications musicales sur ordinateur et tablette. Les quelques qualités qui viennent d’être rapidement énoncées semblent montrer que son œuvre représente d’ores et déjà une contribution majeure à l’évolution de la musique (tous genres confondus) du début du XXIe siècle.

In Finland, ice hockey is the country’s most popular sport, and the men’s Ice Hockey World Championships have evolved into the culmination of the ice hockey season. The large interest for the Finland’s men’s national team in ice hockey, the so-called Lions, unites a big part of Finland’s population and the team have a unique repertoire of music through which the feeling of national belonging is manifested. By studying the music used in association with the Lions, the construction of a national community through music in a sporting context is explored.

Contents Introduction: Interventions in/denial 1 THINK Google is white bread for the mind 15 Stop crying — start thinking. Putting the punch back into pop 33 Coalition of the guilty 37 The eighth deadly sin 43 When Paris became a celebrity not a city 47 Free wiki (but what is ...

Der Aufsatz fragt: Wie verändert sich Populärkultur im Web 2.0? Genauer: Wie ändern sich die Angebote an populären Künsten und wie die ästhetischen Praktiken und Gewohnheiten ihrer Nutzer? Nach einem Überblick in die deutsche Datenlage wird anhand vorliegender Studien erörtert, inwiefern im Bereich der Unterhaltungsangebote im Netz wirklich von einer "participatory culture" (H. Jenkins) gesprochen werden kann. Bei den Veränderungen im Angebot werden Computerspiele und die neuen Formen des "transmedia storytelling" herausgehoben. Veränderungen in den ästhetischen Erwartungen und Praktiken der Nutzer scheinen besonders mit Wünschen nach "sharing" und "Selbstwirksamkeit" verbunden. Das Sich-Bewegen in den Welten eines transmedial vernetzten Erzähluniversums schält sich als eine neue, hoch attraktive Weise ästhetischen Genießens von Massenkünsten heraus

This paper is based on findings concerning the reception of popular arts, mainly popular reading materials and the cinema, since the middle of the 19th century and covers the German-speaking countries of Europe.
It is built around three theses. First: Research on historical audiences should not be confined to generating knowledge of quantitative dimensions of perception and of intellectual responses like judgements and interpretations only. It should aim at the full range of usage practices connected to the artistic objects and performances; in particular, the study of the recipients’ actions promises to give valuable insight which we may not be able to gather from other sources.
Second: We are not short of relevant sources; what is lacking to date is the efforts to open up and construe these sources.
Third: A historical-ethnographical access to the sources is very well apt to shed light on the qualitative dimensions of perception. Most underrated among these is the aesthetic experience which common people have been drawing from their ways of using the popular arts.

""COLUMBIA JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES: “Fascinatingly original… enthralling and provocative”.

THE GUARDIAN: “a bracing reproof to those who moan about the death of reading or the brain-rotting effects of reading only popular fiction.”

RAY B. BROWNE: “This superb book will make all previous studies in popular culture moot… must be owned by all libraries and cultural studies scholars”.

JOURNAL OF POPULAR CULTURE: “Top five in popular culture studies”.

JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES: “Peter Swirski's excellent From Lowbrow to Nobrow argues for ending of the highbrow vs. lowbrow debate and for a nobrow aesthetic”.

BIRMINGHAM JOURNAL OF LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE: “superb… essential reading and the best study to date”.

INTERNATIONAL FICTION REVIEW: “Original and thought provoking at every step”.

POPULAR CULTURE REVIEW: “spectacular critical achievement”.

POPULAR CULTURE REVIEW (2): “eye-opening must-read about popular literature as art… the best study to date of the rise of that novel literary-cultural formation ‘nobrow’”.

MONTREAL REVIEW OF BOOKS: “Swirski writes intelligently, quotes copiously, and approaches his themes passionately."

REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL AMERICAN STUDIES: “Swirski begins with a series of groundbreaking questions about the nature of popular fiction, vindicating it as an art form that expresses and reflects the aesthetic and social values of its readers. He follows his insightful introduction to the socio-aesthetics of genre literature with a synthesis of the century-long debate on the merits of popular fiction and a study of genre... Examining the aesthetics of 'artertainment,' he sheds new light on the relationship between popular forms and highbrow aesthetics."

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ARTS IN SOCIETY: “extremely relevant to the aesthetic and historical events of the first decade of this century”.

2005 HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES FEDERATION OF CANADA BOOK AWARD; MQUP FEATURED BOOK.

This ground-breaking book analyzes contemporary education discourse in the light of curriculum politics and popular culture, using sources ranging from academic scholarship to popular magazines, music video, film and television game shows. Mathematics is used as an "extreme case,"since it is a discipline so easily accepted as separable from politics, ethics or the social construction of knowledge. Appelbaum's juxtaposition of popular culture, public debate and professional practice enables an examination of the production and mediation of "common sense" distinctions between school mathematics and the world outside of schools. Terrain ordinarily displaced or excluded by traditional education literature becomes the pendulum for a new conversation which merges research and practice while discarding pre-conceived categories of understanding.

The book also serves as an entertaining introduction to emerging theories in cultural studies, progressively illustrating the uses of discourse analysis for comprehending ideology, the implications of power/knowledge links, professional practice as a technology of power, and curriculum as at once commodities and cultural resources.In this way, Appelbaum effectively reveals a direction for teachers, students and researchers to cooperatively form a community attentive to the politics of curriculum and popular culture.

Μια σύντομη ανάλυση της νοτιοκορεάτiκης τηλεοπτικής σειράς Squid Game (2021), μέσα από μια προσωπική οπτική που συνθέτει στοιχεία από τις πολιτισμικές σπουδές και τη σημειωτική, διατηρώντας μια βατή γλώσσα για τον μη-ακαδημαϊκό αναγνώστη. Το άρθρο αρχικά δημοσιεύτηκε, χωρίς βιβλιογραφικές παραπομπές, στην ιστοσελίδα “Avopolis”, με τίτλο “Πρέπει να ξαναμιλήσουμε για το Squid Game”.

A brief analysis of the South Korean TV series Squid Game (2021), through a personal perspective that composes elements of cultural studies and semiotics, in a more simple writing style, also suitable for the non-academic readers. The article was originally published, without bibliographic references, on the "Avopolis" website, entitled "We need to talk about the Squid Game again".

https://www.avopolis.gr/movieworld/cinema-features/74575-squid-game (28/11/2021)