Representing Agency in Popular Culture addresses the intersection of child and youth agency and popular culture. Here, scholars expand understandings of agency, power, and voice in children’s lives, identifying popular culture as an important source of inspiration and inquiry within the future of childhood studies.

This is a book about popular culture and the role it plays in people's lives and in American society. The first section of the book, on theoretical concerns, deals with the meanings of the terms popular and culture, with how cultures vary, and with the impact popular culture has on our personalities. It discusses a number of ways of analyzing popular culture texts and then considers the relationship between popular culture and political cultures and other social groups. The second section of the book contains analyses of topics such as the Superbowl, the sitcom Frasier, Bloopers, and everyday rites and rituals. The title of the book comes from a chapter which offers an extended ethnography the author made of two advertising agencies - one in London in 1973 and one in San Francisco 25 years later. The book also contains a discussion of the author's travalls in writing his dissertation on the comic strip Li'l Abner and concludes with some thoughts about surviving Survivor and other popular culture crazes.

This collection merges representations of children and youth in various science fiction texts with childhood studies theories and debates. Set in the past, present, and future, science fiction landscapes and technologies sometimes constrain, but often expand, agentic expression, movement, and collaboration.

Joining the emergent interdisciplinary investment in bridging the social sciences and the humanities, Childhood, Agency, and Fantasy: Walking in Other Worlds explores linkages between children’s agency and fantasy. Fantasy as an integral aspect of childhood and as a genre allows for children’s spectacular dreams and hopeful realities. Friendship, family, identity, loyalty, belongingness, citizenry, and emotionality are central concepts explored in chapters that are anchored by humanities texts of television, film, and literature, but also by social science qualitative methods of participant observation and interviews. Fantasy has the capacity to be a revolutionary change agent that in its modernity can creatively reflect, critique, or reimagine the social, political, and cultural norms of our world. Such promise is also found to be true of children’s agency, wherein children’s beings and becomings, rooted in childhood’s freedoms and constraints, result in a range of outcomes. In the endeavor to broaden theory and research on children’s agency, fantasy becomes a point of possibility with its expanding subjectivities, far-reaching terrain, and spirit of adventure.

Specifically designed for use in a range of undergraduate and graduate courses, while reaching specialists and general readers, this second edition of Introducing Japanese Popular Culture is a comprehensive textbook offering an up-to-date overview of a wide variety of media forms. It uses particular case studies as a way into examining the broader themes in Japanese culture and provides a thorough analysis of the historical and contemporary trends that have shaped artistic production, as well as politics, society, and economics. As a result, more than being a time capsule of influential trends, this book teaches enduring lessons about how popular culture reflects the societies that produce and consume it. With contributions from an international team of scholars, representing a range of disciplines from history and anthropology to art history and media studies, the book covers: Characters Television Videogames Fan media and technology Music Popular cinema Anime Manga Spectacles and competitions Sites of popular culture Fashion Contemporary art. Written in an accessible style with ample description and analysis, this textbook is essential reading for students of Japanese culture and society, Asian media and popular culture, globalization, and Asian Studies in general. It is a go-to handbook for interested readers and a compendium for scholars.

Prologue: an agent at work -- Introduction -- The invention of agenting -- Filling a lacuna in the sociology of Hollywood -- Facing stereotypes -- In the field with Hollywood agents -- What this book unveils: agents and (e)valuation communities -- Mapping Hollywood -- Agenting in big versus little Hollywood -- "The other side": interdependent transformations of studios and agencies -- The new reality of agenting in big Hollywood -- The making of professionals in talent agencies -- "Fulfilling somebody else's dreams"--An agent's initiatory path -- Under the wing of a mentor -- Forming "generations" in Hollywood -- Agenting as relationship work -- The meaning of relationships -- The definition of an agent's style -- "Trust" between agents and production professionals -- Agents and artists: enchanted bonds and power relations -- Agents' emotional competence -- Controlling talent? -- Embedded identities and hierarchies -- Naming quality and pricing talent -- Agents in Hollywood's evaluation communities -- "What it takes to get a movie made?" -- Pricing the unique -- Agents of change: the formation of new evaluation communities

This unique and timely collection examines childhood and the child character throughout Stephen King’s works, from his early novels and short stories, through film adaptations, to his most recent publications. King’s use of child characters within the framework of horror (or of horrific childhood) raises questions about adult expectations of children, childhood, the American family, child agency, and the nature of fear and terror for (or by) children. The ways in which King presents, complicates, challenges, or terrorizes children and notions of childhood provide a unique lens through which to examine American culture, including both adult and social anxieties about children and childhood across the decades of King’s works.