In an age where film stars become presidents and politicians appear in pop videos, politics and popular culture have become inextricably interlinked. In this exciting new book, John Street provides a broad survey and analysis of this relationship.

Hop on Pop showcases the work of a new generation of scholars—from fields such as media studies, literature, cinema, and cultural studies—whose writing has been informed by their ongoing involvement with popular culture and who draw insight from their lived experiences as critics, fans, and consumers. Proceeding from their deep political commitment to a new kind of populist grassroots politics, these writers challenge old modes of studying the everyday. As they rework traditional scholarly language, they search for new ways to write about our complex and compelling engagements with the politics and pleasures of popular culture and sketch a new and lively vocabulary for the field of cultural studies. The essays cover a wide and colorful array of subjects including pro wrestling, the computer games Myst and Doom, soap operas, baseball card collecting, the Tour de France, karaoke, lesbian desire in the Wizard of Oz, Internet fandom for the series Babylon 5, and the stress-management industry. Broader themes examined include the origins of popular culture, the aesthetics and politics of performance, and the social and cultural processes by which objects and practices are deemed tasteful or tasteless. The commitment that binds the contributors is to an emergent perspective in cultural studies, one that engages with popular culture as the culture that "sticks to the skin," that becomes so much a part of us that it becomes increasingly difficult to examine it from a distance. By refusing to deny or rationalize their own often contradictory identifications with popular culture, the contributors ensure that the volume as a whole reflects the immediacy and vibrancy of its objects of study. Hop on Pop will appeal to those engaged in the study of popular culture, American studies, cultural studies, cinema and visual studies, as well as to the general educated reader. Contributors. John Bloom, Gerry Bloustein, Aniko Bodroghkozy, Diane Brooks, Peter Chvany, Elana Crane, Alexander Doty, Rob Drew, Stephen Duncombe, Nick Evans, Eric Freedman, Joy Fuqua, Tony Grajeda, Katherine Green, John Hartley, Heather Hendershot, Henry Jenkins, Eithne Johnson, Louis Kaplan, Maria Koundoura, Sharon Mazer, Anna McCarthy, Tara McPherson, Angela Ndalianis, Edward O’Neill, Catherine Palmer, Roberta Pearson, Elayne Rapping, Eric Schaefer, Jane Shattuc, Greg Smith, Ellen Strain, Matthew Tinkhom, William Uricchio, Amy Villarego, Robyn Warhol, Charles Weigl, Alan Wexelblat, Pamela Robertson Wojcik, Nabeel Zuberi

This edited collection brings together cutting edge insights from a range of key thinkers working in the area of popular culture and world politics (PCWP). Offering a holistic approach to this exciting field of research, it contributes to the establishment of PCWP as a sub-discipline of International Relations. Canvassing issues such as geopolitics, political identities, the War on Terror and political communication - and drawing from sources such as film, videogames, art and music - this collection is an invaluable reader for anyone interested in popular culture and world politics. Contributors include: Jutta Weldes, Christina Rowley, Constance Duncombe, Roland Bleiker, Jason Dittmer, Klaus Dodds, Linda Ahall, Nicholas J. Kiersey, Iver B. Neumann, Michael J. Shapiro, Nick Robinson, Daniel Bos, Saara Sarma, Matt Davies, M.I. Franklin, Robert A. Saunders, Kyle Grayson, and William Clapton."

This book is a collection of essays dealing with the ways in which specific popular entertainment media, mass consumer products, and popular movements affect politics and political culture in the United States. It seeks to present a range of possibilities that reflect the dimensions of the current debate and practice in the field. Some of the contributions to this volume place popular culture media such as films, music, and books in a broad social context, and several articles deal with the historical roots of twentieth-century American popular culture. Popular culture is treated as categorically neither good nor bad, in either political or aesthetic terms. Instead, the essays reflect the editors' convictions that popular culture is simply too important to be ignored by those academics who treat politics and its history seriously. The collection also shows that studying popular or mass culture in a historical way illuminates a variety of possible relationships between popular culture and politics.

Now in its second edition, Entertainment & Politics is an essential text for understanding how young people acquire and hold political beliefs over time. In this updated and expanded edition, the author reaches beyond the U.S., including research on Canada, Great Britain, and Ireland to investigate a broader international picture of the effect the entertainment media has on the socio-political beliefs of young people. The book examines the many ways that the entertainment media influence young people, and the extent to which young people's beliefs differ from those of their parents, teachers, and peers. Findings indicate that media's influence does not fit into neat «conservative» and «left/liberal» patterns, but interacts with parental and peer influence in heretofore unexamined ways. This up-to-date text is designed for undergraduates, graduate students, professors, and interested lay readers.

This important volume rethinks the conventional parameters of Middle East studies through attention to popular cultural forms, producers, and communities of consumers. The volume has a broad historical scope, ranging from the late Ottoman period to the second Palestinian uprising, with a focus on cultural forms and processes in Israel, Palestine, and the refugee camps of the Arab Middle East. The contributors consider how Palestinian and Israeli popular culture influences and is influenced by political, economic, social, and historical processes in the region. At the same time, they follow the circulation of Palestinian and Israeli cultural commodities and imaginations across borders and checkpoints and within the global marketplace. The volume is interdisciplinary, including the work of anthropologists, historians, sociologists, political scientists, ethnomusicologists, and Americanist and literary studies scholars. Contributors examine popular music of the Palestinian resistance, ethno-racial “passing” in Israeli cinema, Arab-Jewish rock, Euro-Israeli tourism to the Arab Middle East, Internet communities in the Palestinian diaspora, café culture in early-twentieth-century Jerusalem, and more. Together, they suggest new ways of conceptualizing Palestinian and Israeli political culture. Contributors. Livia Alexander, Carol Bardenstein, Elliott Colla, Amy Horowitz, Laleh Khalili, Mary Layoun, Mark LeVine, Joseph Massad, Melani McAlister, Ilan Pappé, Rebecca L. Stein, Ted Swedenburg, Salim Tamari

Why popular culture matters to political science - and vice versa.