Popular Culture: Berlin and Beyond (Online) at Freie Universität Berlin

About

Please visit our website www.fubis.org for any organisational changes that might affect the course programme. John Story has correctly pointed out that "popular culture" is essentially "an empty conceptual category." That does not mean, however, that the many things and practices the term potentially signifies are not real or meaningful. Popular culture, as it is understood in cultural studies, surrounds us in our daily lives; it informs our values, our habits, and our desires. Popular culture provides us with ever-changing visions of the good life, and it entertains us and moves us. Popular culture simultaneously mirrors and generates cultural imperatives and, in doing so, not only provides us with a variety of pleasures but also holds decisive powers over the lives of people. From a cultural studies perspective, popular culture constitutes a rich and important field, one in which we can study and try to understand how societies create, negotiate, and strengthen or undermine values, identities, and behaviours. A city like Berlin lends itself as the perfect context in which to experience first-hand the phenomena we talk about in class. In each session, we will approach the heterogeneous cultural landscape subsumed under the moniker "popular" by focusing on a specific form or mode of popular culture -Â for instance, art, music, or food - and using examples from the contemporary (mostly) American context to discuss the manifold ways in which the things, practices, and discourses acquire meaning for the people engaging with them. We will address politics and economics as well as aesthetics and form. We will discuss the pleasures we derive from popular culture as well as the destructive potentials it may hold. And we will engage with the practical side of this topic by going on a number of field trips to explore the pop cultural landscape of Berlin.