Professor Gillian Harkins
English 307 Spring 2025
T/Th 10:30-12:20 / SAV 264
Office Hours T/Th 1:30-2:30 or by appointment
In-Person Office Hours at 504-A Padelford Hall or via Zoom
Paying Attention:
Popular Cultural Studies
Popular culture is one of the sites where this struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged: it is also the stake to be won or lost in that struggle. It is the arena of consent and resistance.
-- Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing the Popular” (1981)
Whether we're talking about race or gender or class, popular culture is where the pedagogy is, it's where the learning is.
-- bell hooks, “Cultural Criticism and Transformation” (1997)
We are not the cultural consumers we used to be. Data, streaming, and Web 2.0 have remade how we read and how we watch. Platforms are the new publishers. But although we consume culture differently now, much of how we talk about and study it remains lodged in the analog world of the 20th century. It’s time for our methods to catch up with our objects.
-- Laura B. McGrath, Dan Sinykin, and Richard Jean So, “Hacking the Culture Industries” (2023)
The study of attention in a postdigital, post-truth world is an urgent and political act for which cultural studies remains uniquely suited … [Cultural studies] are concerned with the careful or careless nature of how attention is built, targeted, managed, re-directed, or co-opted … In my cultural studies, then, the objective is old and need not change: to critique power as relations of attention, and to identify these relations embedded within culture as a way of life.
-- Sarah Murray, “Postdigital Cultural Studies” (2020)
Course Description: This course asks us to consider “attention” as a specific kind of cultural artefact and critical practice. Cultural Studies has long been interested in the who, what, where, when, how and why of “popular” materials, those works or images that circulate widely enough to connect with various audiences who adapt its meaning to their own specific contexts. In this class, we will ask how recent proclamations about broader shifts in popular culture, such as the phrase “attention economy,” relate to older cultural studies paradigms of encoding and decoding or more traditional literary approaches to interpretation. As we explore key cultural studies and literary methodologies, we will pay careful attention to a few specific cultural works — with an emphasis on how literary works respond to changing media ecologies — to come up with our own strategies of encountering and engaging popular media.
The animating questions of the course are fundamentally: what happens when cultural media change dramatically, in ways that expose or challenge many people’s frameworks of meaning-making? How do people make sense of cultural materials during such changes, and what kinds of transformative possibilities emerge or disappear in the process? What is the role or response of more traditionally “literary” works in such changing media ecologies? Finally, what kinds of tools or critical methods might help us answer these questions? These are questions posed by early Cultural Studies practitioners about their own era’s new mass media and its impact on popular culture, common sense, and populist politics. We will review some of these historical approaches (along with sample texts) before turning to more recent paradigms and literary examples. Here is a .pdf of the full course syllabus and schedule.
Course Format: The Course is planned as an in-person course to be held on UW Seattle Campus. If we need to move the course on-line, I will adapt our course for delivery through the UW Canvas course platform.
Course Readings: There are two novels assigned for this class available through the University Bookstore: Colson Whitehead, Zone One (2011) and Samantha Harvey, Orbital (2023). All other readings and videos for this course will be accessed through the Canvas website. Please let me know if you have problems accessing course materials.
Course Objectives:
- Grapple with popular cultural studies
- Hone popular cultural decoding skills
- Engage critical frameworks
- Encounter contemporary debates
- Practice critical interventions
- Produce two cultural studies analyses
Course Requirements:
- Active Learning: You will be expected to participate actively in your own learning process by contributing to regular discussion activities. You will contribute to discussion in class as well as through an on-line board. Please offer 1 post via the on-line board for each class session. If you miss a class, you must get permission from the Professor to submit make-up posts to the discussion board. Your Self-Introduction assignment will be included in this score. Course Grade: 20%
- Critical Decoding Analysis: You will produce a popular cultural studies analysis for the midterm. The expectations for this analysis will be outlined clearly in the Assignment link. Course Grade: 40%
- Literary Work Analysis: You will analyze a literary work through a cultural studies framework for the final. The expectations for this analysis will be outlined clearly in the Assignment link. Course Grade: 40%
All percentages convert to points out of a 100 point scale. Here is the conversion chart from 100 points to 4.0 grade scale.
Course Policies:
- Academic Conduct: We all share responsibility for creating a positive shared learning community. Everyone is invited to raise questions and offer additional perspectives about any materials discussed in class. Everyone is also expected to contribute their ideas in a manner that is thoughtful and respectful of the ideas expressed by others. Please review these guidelines for class discussions. Here are some additional guidelines for online discussions.
- Academic Integrity: The University takes academic integrity very seriously. Behaving with integrity is part of our responsibility to our shared learning community. Please review this University of Washington website for a definition and explanation of academic misconduct. If you are confused or have any questions about a specific instance, please feel free to see me in advance of the due date.
- Academic Accommodations: It is the policy and practice of the University of Washington to create inclusive and accessible learning environments consistent with federal and state law. If you have already established accommodations with Disability Resources for Students (DRS), please activate your accommodations via myDRS so we can discuss how they will be implemented in this course. If you have not yet established services through DRS, but have a temporary health condition or permanent disability that requires accommodations (conditions include but not limited to; mental health, attention-related, learning, vision, hearing, physical or health impacts), contact DRS directly to set up an Access Plan. DRS facilitates the interactive process that establishes reasonable accommodations.
- Religious Accommodations: Washington state law requires that UW develop a policy for accommodation of student absences or significant hardship due to reasons of faith or conscience, or for organized religious activities. The UW’s policy, including more information about how to request an accommodation, is available at Religious Accommodations Policy, Accommodations must be requested within the first two weeks of this course using the Religious Accommodations Request form.
Additional Resources:
- Additional support for technology access, writing and research support, financial and health needs, food, parenting, and legal resources and have been gathered at this link: https://english.washington.edu/resources-times-need
- Provost website updating federal policy information as it impacts UW students and campus: https://www.washington.edu/provost/federal-policy-updates
- Know Your Rights! Cards in multiple languages: https://www.ilrc.org/red-cards-tarjetas-rojas#item-4477
- Advising appointments with the Humanities Advising Center can be scheduled here: https://hasc.washington.edu/