ABSTRACT
Popular culture plays a considerable role in daily life in the United States: it reaches into our homes, cars, and classrooms, and it influences what we buy, wear, listen to, watch, and think about.1 In many instances, it is tricky to draw a line between popular culture and the rest of our lives, so embedded is it in our daily patterns. Popular culture is the conversation starter at school, at work, and at social occasions. It often serves as both a social “glue” and a social divider: friendships solidify around a shared love for a particular band, video game, or television show, and being outside of the currents of the popular can lead to social isolation. Popular culture is also integral to the public sphere: politicians campaign on late-night talk shows; popular TV shows produce episodes that address terrorism and themes related to September 11; and movie stars use their film personas to run for public office. Popular culture is not simply fluff that can be dismissed as irrelevant and insignificant; on the contrary, it has the capacity to intervene in the most critical civic issues, and is a fundamental component of citizenship. As I have written elsewhere, “Citizenship thus is an active process that involves the core of people’s daily existence, including the ways in which they interact with and use popular culture” (Dolby, 2006, p. 35). Of central concern to this essay is how popular culture functions as a pedagogical site in contemporary society and is the location for the production of the most dynamic, important democratic practices at the beginning of the 21st Century.
