Pop Culture 2.0: A Political Curriculum in the Age of Trump

Abstract

This chapter posits the concept of Pop Culture 2.0 as a means to mark important changes in popular culture of which scholars and teachers should contend. We propose a revised agenda in the study of popular culture and education, sitting in a position that is within the transdisciplinary configurations, concerns, and approaches of cultural studies, a field that is experiencing its own changes amidst a renewed sense of urgency and relevance in recent years. One issue is the shifting landscape of popular culture itself, which we approach from our researcher positions in the United States, and how the very conceptualization of what constitutes culture and the popular has radically changed in the wake of President Trump’s election to the office of President of the United States in 2016. A second issue, in some ways inextricable from the first, is accumulated effects of the recent postcritical turn in the humanities and social sciences. Scholars from various fields and areas of inquiry have taken up this turn in a spectrum of differing directions we consider in this chapter. We identify Pop Culture 2.0 as a movement of post-postmodern, post-twentieth-century popular culture forms that began to emerge during the US presidency of Barack Obama in 2008 and have been given a more recognizable shape and form of its content during the US presidency of Donald Trump in 2016.