pop-culture for everyone.

in my internet-snooping, i found a few other organizations that i am jealous i don't work for:

americana: the journal of american pop culture is my new favorite thing. the present issue gives the academic treatment to csi and finding nemo, among others. i can't lie, i long to attend a large university perhaps only for the opportunity to enroll in classes like "philosophy and star trek" or "the simpsons: sitcom as political and social satire," so this journal had my loyalty almost immediately. it's only published semi-annually, but you can peruse their past issues on their site back ten-plus years, so there's plenty of material.

popmatters is a similar online pop culture journal, with more emphasis on the 'pop' and less on the 'culture.' they have features that hold their own against the more academic "americana" journal, but they exist alongside reviews, regular columns, and a section called "moving citations" that keeps an eye on relevant articles/links floating around on the internet as they are published.

the national association of comics art educators (who go by NACAE and pronounce it 'nay-say', apparently) are a group of, well, teachers that really dig teaching about making comics. there website requires some rooting around and a discerning eye, but there are quite a few solid ideas on their site that can be adjusted for use in a variety of contexts. i am wary of mentioning the available prompts, exercises, and lesson plans due to their propensity for misuse, but the site actually contains some interesting ideas to digest and incorporate in teaching practice (rather than simply regurgitating mindlessly). ultimately, a lot of the content boils down to strategies for teaching students to communicate in various visual/non-traditional ways.

THANKS KATIE.

i was alerted (by the effervescent katie morris) to this article by christine marme thompson, collected in the book "when we were young: new perspectives on the art of the child" by jonathan fineberg. i found a .pdf online, you can read the full text by clicking the link below! that is neat.

in "the ket aesthetic: visual culture in childhood," thompson discusses the allure of visual culture for children being more about accessibility (visually stimulating content outside of reading/interpretation skills that young kids may not be equipped with) and more interestingly, about adopting a culture outside that of the adult world. thompson points out that "ket," originally a term for "an assortment of useless articles" and now a british slang term adopted by the nation's youth for small candies bought with weekly allowance, serves as a nice metaphor for children's culture that is separate but dependent on adult practice. the creation of this culture is appealing to youth because it is their own: the appeal of saccharine sweets or outlandish television shows can be traced to their independence from adult culture.

also interesting to me was the idea that adult resistance to visual culture content, particularly i schools where it is often deemed inappropriate or devoid of educational value may be from the simultaneous desire of children to establish their own reality outside the adult world and the adult effort to self-validate by seeing our children/students doing worthwhile, relevant things.

she goes on to discuss the value of toys/characters as a springboard for children to create/observe with hyper-specificity as they attempt to differentiate between multiple characters within a single universe (her example were the carefully noted minute differences in character design when children render the homogeneous teenage mutant ninja turtles). she also acknowledges, with a sort of "whether you like it or not" tone, that no matter how much the education world insists that visual culture is worthless, distracting, etc., etc., it is a HUGE force in the lives of children, and that by trying to ignore/marginalize its presence in schools is foolish.

i like this woman.

the one alarming statistic that she did throw into the mix was that 3/4 of all toys sold in the united states are "licensed" to a particular media character/program. it's a little strange to me that the appreciation and integration of visual culture excites me, but the thought of pedantic derivative toys (nothing handmade, nothing original, nothing imaginative) flooding the collective childhood of america makes me cringe. but man, does it.

no turning back now.

so i am terrible at making decisions. that said, i am putting in writing so i can never take it back the topic i wish to research from now until forever ad nauseum!

okay, it's visual/material/media culture, or whatever you want to call the by-products of our super-visual society.


it's a pretty all encompassing topic, but for whatever reason, the phrase 'visual culture' or the like causes instant polarization. semantics aside, i'm really interested in visual culture as this huge untapped resource for learning about... everything ever. this enormous part of everyone's collective existence, one near-universal frame of reference, has been marginalized and denounced as somehow less valid than 'not visual culture' (a tough thing to pinpoint, by the way). it's important! it's exciting!