The real Pennhurst – a hospital name-checked in the latest series of Stranger Things – was a place of segregation and abuse.
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Articles on Popular culture
Displaying 21 - 40 of 85 articles
Sustainable fashion collaborations show that living an eco-friendly life can be fun - here’s how popular shows can help dismantle consumerism altogether.
The producers are recasting the show as a documentary. The original version would have done more harm than good for the causes being showcased, two scholars argue.
By the end of the 19th century, the Devil had become a figure of myth. Ironically, that helped his image proliferate in popular culture.
Where are they now? It’s half a century since Young Talent Times aired on Australian television. It changed its young stars and audiences.
We know we should exercise more and sit on the couch less … but what if television was actually healthy for you?
From oil disasters in Mauritius to street artists in South Africa, the story of rubbish in the media helps shape popular culture and environmental change.
It’s no surprise the unexplained structures have the internet buzzing. But they haven’t entered the ranks of other great conspiracy material — and history helps explain why they probably won’t.
Crowds, albeit smaller ones, will again watch the AFL and NRL grand finals. Crowds can bring people together but, since the time of the Roman republic, they have also expressed political dissent.
The return of actors like Karate Kid Ralph Macchio and Bill & Ted’s Alex Winter sees them older and wiser. Fewer role revivals remind us of character growth related to womanhood.
We asked almost 1500 Australians about the art they liked and disliked. Then we mapped middlebrow culture. We found plenty to enjoy there.
Fan tourists’ loyalty to specific sites and locations may be a valuable asset in kickstarting UK tourism.
The emergence of female-oriented erotica has been portrayed as a sign of women’s liberation, but research indicates that it reinforces cultural scripts of pornography targeting men.
During a pandemic, what would MacGyver do? He’d cobble together masks and ventilators from the things around him. Now health-care workers are doing the same. But there are risks.
In fiction and popular culture, parasitic characters appear as a metaphor for the threat and spread of disease. But they’ve also played for laughs.
Between home and work is a window of time and space where we can choose our distractions. Staring out the train window, scrolling the news or perhaps listening to podcasts. We miss it.
Despite an increasingly positive representation of old people in the media, it is not the reality for the majority whose frailty and vulnerability disturb society to the point of denial.
The persistence of this trope might say something about the barriers women in media continue to face.
A cognitive scientist observes that the words that bother college-age Americans today can cause harm.
Wherever and whenever ghost stories materialise, they tend to tap into the things we fear most.
Top contributors
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Professor of Physics and Astronomy, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
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Senior Lecturer in Popular and Contemporary Music, Newcastle University
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Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Humanities in Africa, University of Cape Town
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Lecturer, Media, University of Tasmania
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Senior Lecturer in Communication, Deakin University
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Director of the Animation Academy, Loughborough University
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Assistant Professor of Sociology, Psychology, and Public Health, University of Nottingham
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Lecturer in Communication, University of Southern Queensland
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Postdoctoral Fellow in Aeromechanics, The University of Texas at Austin
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Senior Lecturer in English Literature, Keele University
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Associate Professor of Languages and Literature, Nelson Mandela University
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Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Oxford Brookes University
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Lecturer, School of Psychology, Deakin University
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Professor of Psychology, Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA)
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Research assistant, University of Southern Queensland
