This essay examines how witches are portrayed in American produced TV-series in the year 2000 and forward, what elements could have effected that portrayal in the series and also how this portrayal differs itself from witches within Wicca. The material used for this examination are the TV-series Charmed, The Vampire Diaries and Witches of East End and as comparing literature; Living Wicca, The Spiral Dance and Witchcraft Today. The methods used for this process are discourse analysis and content analysis. I used theories of Pierre Wiktorin about religion and popular culture. I used three themes (Characteristics, Practice and mode of thinking) for the processing of the material and to structure the result. The results showed that the witches in the TV-series had a lot in common such as they were all women, they were born with their powers and the human life is sacred in comparison to other creatures that exist in the series. The comparison showed that there are significant differences between the witches in the TV-series and the witches in Wicca. Practicing witches within Wicca is part of a religion where rituals are of high importance and the Goddess and God are worshiped. These are the most important discrepancies that are not a part of witches in TV-series.  The question about why the series are so similar has been analyzed with theories about moral panic and post-feminism to show how social structures can play a part in how TV-series are written. The conclusions that I have reached is that the witches in the series are portrayed very similar. They are all women, they have inherited their abilities as witches and they keep searching for love and are in a constant battle with evil. Elements that could have effected this portrayal are the theories about moral panic, that discusses the fighting against evil, and postfeminism, that discusses the love aspect and the fact that they are all women.  The witches in the series and the witches within wicca are very different. The biggest one is the fact that wicca is a religion that involves rituals for the God and Goddess. This has no part of the portrayal of witches in the TV-series.

This thesis is an ethnographic study in which seven Swedish children from different social and cultural environments were followed over three years. The study began when the children were four years old. The main aim of this thesis is to investigate through what social and cul-tural practices seven children meet literacy events in their families. A second aim is to track informal and everyday literacy events which the children take part in or practice on their own. A further aim is to study the transition be-tween home, preschool, preschool class and primary school in order to de-termine to what extent and in what ways the children are allowed to use their previous experience with and knowledge of literacy. The results show that the children are socialised in practices rich in liter-acy events via their culture, traditions, language and religion. The children practise reading and writing in a number of contexts. This occurs long before the pupils have been exposed to formal education. In the work on this study, it has also become clear that the seven children, regardless of their cultural, language or socioeconomic background, share experiences and knowledge relating to popular culture and the media. The children have a common understanding of texts in the form of words, names, images and icons. The value of this knowledge and experience is often as-signed by the children themselves in their contact with other children. The seven children, in this study, come to preschool and primary school with a wealth of experience in literacies from their family lives. Some chil-dren are allowed to bring their experience to the classroom. For them, there is continuity between literacy practices at home and at school. Others are forced to leave their experience outside the classroom. What is common to all children is that their knowledge about literacy related to popular culture and the media has a low cultural value in instructional settings.

This self-study examines the role that children’s out-of school lives play in the “schooled literacy practices” of the Morning Meeting, a daily meeting in the teacher-researcher’s classroom. Morning Meeting in this Grade 2/3 classroom became a contestable “third space” where several professional tensions intersected for the teacher-researcher. The study explores questions of what “counts as literacy,” what role “popular culture” plays in school, and whose voices are privileged or marginalized in schooled literacy discussions. Data was collected over a 3-week period in the form of immediate and more distanced teacher reflections. A Bourdieusian theoretical framework, critical sociocultural literacy theory, third space theory, and artifactual critical literacy, offered the teacher-researcher lenses through which to analyze the meanings found in the everyday stories and artifacts young children share in the schooled literacy practice of Morning Meeting. The findings of this study inform and create new thinking about the entanglements of children’s out-of-school everyday culture with schooled literacy practices.

The discussion about high culture and popular culture in our society has been going on for decades. In few places is it as loud as within culture journalism and the critics’ society, where the question of what is good taste and what is dumb entertainment constantly gets brought to the surface. Film is a particularly vulnerable area, since it is such a universally appealing and rather young medium. In America and England several studies have been performed of the reviewing society and reveiwers’ use of high and low art-discourse in their writing. The Swedish market is sorely lacking in this area.   This study is an attempt to shed some light on the way Swedish culture journalism works, with the focus being Swedish film reviews. The goal is to explore the use of high culture and popular culture discourse within Swedish reviews by examining the movie reviews published in the two large Swedish newspapers Dagens Nyheter and Aftonbladet in 2013. The reviews were studied using a number of variables, some of which represented the high culture discourse, and some of which represented the popular culture discourse. The study showed that the reviewers of these newspapers tended to use both high art discourse and popular culture discourse within their reviews to almost the same extent. The news papers were also very similar in the way they used the variables for high culture and popular culture discourse.

VPW, a community-access television station in Winnipeg, Manitoba, hosted an array of programming ranging from the pragmatic to the truly bizarre, from 1971 until the station was bought out and dismantled in 2001. Grassroots media does not have the same institutional and archival frameworks as its mainstream counterpart; its losses often go unremarked, or must be reconstituted and memorialized in improvisational, provisional ways. In recent years, several Winnipeg artists have begun a kind of reclamation project around the station. This paper considers the various threads of nostalgia, political economy, and decline narratives at work in VPW's reclamation. It argues that thinking about why certain things are celebrated and others thrown away is itself a problem of aesthetics, politics, and publics. It examines why certain shows are remembered and others not, and the role of unanticipated uses of public infrastructure in such a dynamic.

My dissertation is motivated by two general problems within contemporary North American racial politics. First, the increasing ideological impetus of a “post-racist” society contradicts a spate of events that are symptomatic and constitutive of racial and ethnic essentialisms. Second, the logic of multiculturalism and antiracism has often been expressed in a language of race and identity rooted in a rigid system of immutable differences (Hall, 1997; Ang, 2001). The challenge is to deconstruct race and ethnicity in a language that is critical of new racisms as well as the ways in which racial and ethnic difference is seized and diffused by market multiculturalism. While some theorists have used elements of postmodern theory to develop a “resistance multiculturalism” sensitive to shifting social meanings and floating racial signifiers (see McLaren, 1994), they have rarely explored the political possibilities of “ludic postmodernism” (parody, pastiche, irony) as a critical response to multicultural ideologies. If part of postmodernism as an intellectual movement includes self-reflexivity, self-parody, and the rejection of a foundational “truth,” for example, the various racial and ethnic categories reified under multiculturalism are perhaps open to revision and contestation (Hutcheon, 1989). To develop this particular postmodern critique of multiculturalism, I draw on three case studies concerned with identity and representation in North American popular media. The first case considers vocal impersonation as a disruption to the visual primacy of race by examining the stand-up comedy films of Dave Chappelle, Russell Peters, and Margaret Cho. The second case turns to the postmodern bodies of cyborgs and humanoid robots in the science fiction film I, Robot (2004) as a racial metaphor at the crossroads of whiteness, inhumanity, and redemption. The final case discusses the politics of irony in relation to ethnolinguistic identity and debates surrounding sports mascots. Each case study recycles racial and ethnic stereotypes for a variety of political purposes, drawing out the connections and tensions between postmodernism and multiculturalism. A postmodern critique of multiculturalism may offer antiracist politics an understanding of race and ethnicity rooted in a strategic indeterminacy, which allows for multidimensional political coalitions directed against wider socioeconomic inequalities.

This thesis, The Arab as Spectacle, is about representation. It is about the limits and the contradictions of representation. It is about the burden and the violence of representation. It is about the persistence of Orientalism and how the hierarchies of race and gender intersect with discourses on sexuality to inform and inflect the representation of Arabs in contemporary literary and media spheres of Australian popular culture. This thesis comprises two sections. Part One is a research dissertation that explores the strategies, devices and parameters of the representation of Arabic culture and identities through close readings of specific texts. This theoretical project inaugurates the second part of my study which takes up the question of the contradictions of representation through a collection of ficto-critical writings. Through these satirical narratives, I seek to expose and disrupt the hegemony of Orientalist representations that proliferate in English language literature and news media by bringing into focus the inherent paradox of representation, working within and against Orientalist representational traditions. In so doing, it is not my aim to 'correct' the Orientalist logic and imagery that I theorise in the first part of this thesis, but rather to undermine the spurious truth-value of Orientalist representations by deploying the literary weapons of satire, parody and irony. In this way, my fiction works to engage creatively and critically with the very tropes that I theorise in my research dissertation.

This thesis, The Arab as Spectacle, is about representation. It is about the limits and the contradictions of representation. It is about the burden and the violence of representation. It is about the persistence of Orientalism and how the hierarchies of race and gender intersect with discourses on sexuality to inform and inflect the representation of Arabs in contemporary literary and media spheres of Australian popular culture. This thesis comprises two sections. Part One is a research dissertation that explores the strategies, devices and parameters of the representation of Arabic culture and identities through close readings of specific texts. This theoretical project inaugurates the second part of my study which takes up the question of the contradictions of representation through a collection of ficto-critical writings. Through these satirical narratives, I seek to expose and disrupt the hegemony of Orientalist representations that proliferate in English language literature and news media by bringing into focus the inherent paradox of representation, working within and against Orientalist representational traditions. In so doing, it is not my aim to 'correct' the Orientalist logic and imagery that I theorise in the first part of this thesis, but rather to undermine the spurious truth-value of Orientalist representations by deploying the literary weapons of satire, parody and irony. In this way, my fiction works to engage creatively and critically with the very tropes that I theorise in my research dissertation.

This thesis, The Arab as Spectacle, is about representation. It is about the limits and the contradictions of representation. It is about the burden and the violence of representation. It is about the persistence of Orientalism and how the hierarchies of race and gender intersect with discourses on sexuality to inform and inflect the representation of Arabs in contemporary literary and media spheres of Australian popular culture. This thesis comprises two sections. Part One is a research dissertation that explores the strategies, devices and parameters of the representation of Arabic culture and identities through close readings of specific texts. This theoretical project inaugurates the second part of my study which takes up the question of the contradictions of representation through a collection of ficto-critical writings. Through these satirical narratives, I seek to expose and disrupt the hegemony of Orientalist representations that proliferate in English language literature and news media by bringing into focus the inherent paradox of representation, working within and against Orientalist representational traditions. In so doing, it is not my aim to 'correct' the Orientalist logic and imagery that I theorise in the first part of this thesis, but rather to undermine the spurious truth-value of Orientalist representations by deploying the literary weapons of satire, parody and irony. In this way, my fiction works to engage creatively and critically with the very tropes that I theorise in my research dissertation.

This study investigates the influence of popular culture texts on the subjectivities of young people and argues that critical pedagogical practices need to be further deployed by English teachers in response to the corporate driven nature of popular texts. Three levels of synthesized information are presented, using data analysis born of a quantitative survey and in-depth interviews with a group of secondary English students in Perth, Australia. Firstly, I argue that popular culture texts constitute the predominate form of consumed textual material for young people and that these texts are increasingly defined by corporate ideologies and branding. Secondly, I investigate the influence that these popular culture texts have on the subjectivities and everyday social experiences of young people. I argue that the ideologies and discourses in popular texts position young people to assume subjectivities that are increasingly defined by branding and corporate ideology, and that these texts often have a normalizing effect. Hence, I argue that young people’s social currency is often defined by the extent to which individuals demonstrate an alliance to the ideologies of popular media, and that individuals who deviate from such popular norms often experience subjugation and exclusion within peer and social settings. Constructivist notions of subjectivity and an analytical framework heavily influenced by Foucauldian theory inform this theorization. Thirdly, I finalize my argument by dealing pedagogically with subject English and areas of it that hold relevance in terms of the integration and analysis of ‘the popular’; including critical literacy, multiliteracies and critical pedagogy. I argue that a commitment to critically analyzing popular culture texts in the subject is lacking and that students feel many English teachers are “out of touch” with the everyday realities of young people and their popular culture influences. I argue that such failures risk producing students whose everyday experiences are silenced and who are unaware of the ways they are being positioned to adopt certain corporate driven subjectivities. Methodologically this study is informed by principles of critical theory, cultural studies, discourse analysis and a commitment to position the often-silenced student voice as a prime analytical tool. Aspects of autoethnography are deployed through punctuating personal narratives that feature within this text in order to illuminate the journey of self-realization and fundamental self reevaluation I have traveled throughout the production of this research work.