Pop culture takes center stage in upcoming semester

Lake Erie

College has announced the creation of a new Pop Culture interdisciplinary minor course beginning with the

Fall 2020 semester.

The minor is being helmed by Jennifer SwartzLevine, the dean of the college’s School of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences.

“We need to understand how our cultural assumptions affect the ways in which we talk with and to each other,” Swartz-Levine stated in an initial news release. “This is vitally important as we navigate issues affecting us locally, nationally, and globally.”

She used prospective environmental science students to highlight the connections pop culture can facilitate.

“Exploring how environmental issues are depicted in films such as ‘WALL-E,’ comics such as ‘Swamp Thing’ or television shows such as ‘Firefly’ will enable students to either use these as accessible cultural touchstones when explaining climate change or will provide insight as to how

flawed messages are being sent to the public about important global issues,” Swartz-Levine said.

“It’s ultimately about how our shared cultural assumptions, as epitomized by pop culture, affects how we interact, whether that site of interaction is with our friends, within our workplaces, or in online settings,” she added. “Knowing more about how we tick, as it were, leads us to being better practitioners of critical thinking skills, as well as more thoughtful, empathetic listeners and consumers.”

In a follow-up interview she went on to draw connections between modern society’s attempts to understand their own world through the lens of pop culture.

“With everything going on with the coronavirus, all of the parodies and related programming

on people’s Netflix queues, we are all trying to understand this very difficult issue facing the entire world, but we’re doing it through the lens of pop culture by what it is we’re choosing to engage with,” SwartzLevine said.

“Everyone has seen a superhero movie,” she said. “It gives us a common discourse that we can talk about. It makes it so that you can bring groups of people together that would not have otherwise had things in common, but everybody has seen the last Avengers movie. It also makes it so that we’re more sensitive and aware of other people’s perspective and points of view.”

The course’s inception came from a class she previously taught at Lake Erie which focused on DC Comics character Superman. Both of Superman’s co-creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, grew up in Cleveland, which allowed her to widen the focus of the class and offer historical and cultural context.

The class proved popular enough among students to encourage Swartz-Levine to develop a full minor course that was dedicated to the wide-ranging and diverse offerings that popular culture held.

“We took some time and looked at the range of things that might be possible to include,” she said. “We have a wealth of resources of people at Lake Erie College that have experience with in pop culture.”

The college has stated that course options from various departments, including art, history, dance, sport studies, sociology, and communication, will be incorporated. Additionally, new courses like the History of Rock and Roll, the History of Comics, and Gender and Comics will be introduced.

Swartz-Levine first received her master’s degree from Kent State University before obtaining her PhD at Case Western Reserve University. She’s taught at Lake Erie since 2008 and became dean in 2016.

Swartz-Levine