Excerpt: Life in the academy is characterized by what can feel at times like a flexible , self-determined schedule, with its long breaks and short days at the office, and with the academic’s ability to break up the day to accommodate appointments and family demands, relative to the workaday grind of much full-time, on-site employment.

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Book Summary: Popular culture helps construct, define, and impact our everyday realities and must be taken seriously because popular culture is, simply, popular. Communication Perspectives on Popular Culture brings together communication experts with diverse backgrounds, from interpersonal communication, business and organizational communication, mass communication, media studies, narrative, rhetoric, gender studies, autoethnography, popular culture studies, and journalism. The contributors tackle such topics as music, broadcast and Netflix television shows, movies, the Internet, video games, and more, as they connect popular culture to personal concerns as well as larger political and societal issues. The variety of approaches in these chapters are simultaneously situated in the present while building a foundation for the future, as contributors explore new and emerging ways to approach popular culture. From case studies to emerging theories, the contributors examine how popular culture, media, and communication influence our everyday lives.

Polymedia, transmedia, and spreadable media are all relatively new foundational theories of mediated communication in need of further interrogation and examination. The panelists examine various aspects of these theories, through differing case studies within popular culture. The examinations in this panel include what it means to “own” players in fantasy football, the language based critical comedy of George Carlin, the flows and “traces” in the Whedonverse, and the phenomenon of Sharknado.

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Patients with dementia, especially Alzheimer’s disease and particularly those in early stages, are susceptible to become victims of predators: Their agnosia (see Case 1) prevents them from detecting and accurately interpreting subtle signals that otherwise would have alerted them that they are about to fall for a scam. Furthermore, their judgment is impaired very early in the disease process, often before other symptoms manifest themselves and usually before a diagnosis is made. Patients with early stages of dementia are therefore prime targets for unscrupulous predators, and it behooves caregivers and health care professionals to ensure the integrity of these patients. In this case study, we discuss how a man with mild Alzheimer’s disease was about to fall for a scam were it not for his vigilant wife. We discuss what went wrong in the patient/caregiver interaction and how the catastrophic ending could have been avoided or averted.

Part of the session A Feminist, a Provost, and a Parakeet Walk into a Bar…: Laughing with, at, and by Ourselves as Feminist Academics.

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In this piece the author takes a journey into the meaning of quests through the philosophical terrain of existential phenomenology and authenticity. Unlike quest narratives in literature and popular culture, our life narratives are not yet finished, but ongoing. Comparing the idea of existential homelessness with its undeniable and constant change to that of autoethnographic writing, he examines narrative and memory and how current life events change our understandings of past narratives and our sense of identity. Our life narratives are made up of fragmented thoughts and ideas, the stories others told before we were born—and will tell about us after we are gone.