MUTA1234 Popular Culture and Identity Construction in the US and Finland (4 cr)
Description
Content
This course will help students scrutinize popular culture from a social constructionist perspective, and examine the ways popular culture affects both Americans’ and Finns’ lives on micro- and macro-levels. In addition, discourse analysis will be applied to specific forms of popular culture, including social media, TV shows, movies, print advertising, commercials, music, and literature/fiction to identify mechanisms for raising consciousness and influencing behavior within psychological, social, political, and environmental spheres. The coursework will combine theory and background readings with experiential learning. Topics include:
• Understanding social constructionism as a theoretical and practice framework of analyzing identity construction
• Analyzing discourses within Popular Culture
•Negotiation/representation of (ethnic) otherness in Finnish hip hop
•How rap artists with a migrant background construct ‘new’ ethnicities and (non)belonging in online and offline contexts
• How Nordic crime fiction (or Nordic Noir) television uses affective representations of violence in order to engage in discussions concerning migration, social inequality, and climate change
Completion methods
Lectures, group discussions, a learning journal, and a written assignment to be completed after the course. This course relies heavily on experiential learning and students are expected to contribute to the lectures actively through discussions.
Assessment details
The course is evaluated with a grading scale from 0 to 5 (0=fail, 1=poor, 2=satisfactory, 3=good, 4=very good, 5=excellent). The criteria will be discussed in more detail during the first lecture.
Learning outcomes
1. Increase their understanding of how popular culture is socially constructed.
2. Develop a heightened awareness of the role of popular culture in constructing identities and shaping the lives of individuals within the US and Finland.
3. Develop competency and skill in discourse analysis to analyze popular cultural activities and identity construction within the US and Finland.
4. Acquire greater understanding of the intersection of gender, race, ethnicity, and other dimensions of identity and how they shape the mainstream cultural landscape and present day society within the US and Finland.
5. Explore their personal attitudes and beliefs about popular culture and be more knowledgeable of the impact of popular culture on their own and other’s lives.
6. Increase their sensitivity to men and women’s lived experiences, personal functioning and well-being within US and Finnish society.