Rupedagogies Of Realness

Pencils down--graphite and eyebrow--and eyes to front of the room for this one-of-a-kind lesson. Since debuting over a decade ago, the world of RuPaul's Drag Race has steadily collected both popular and academic interests. This collection of original essays presents insightful analyses and a range of critical perspectives on Drag Race from across the globe. Topics covered include language and linguistics, cultural appropriation, racism, health, wealth, the realities of reality television, digital drag and naked bodies. Though varied in topical focus, each essay centers public pedagogy to examine what and how Drag Race teaches its audience. The goal of this book is to frame Drag Race as a classroom, one that is helpful for both teachers and students alike. With an academic-yet-accessible tone and an interdisciplinary approach, essays celebrate and examine the show and its spin-offs from the earliest seasons to the very start of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.

Visual Pedagogies: Concepts, Cases and Practices takes readers on a journey through practico-theoretical experiments in thought, research and practice. Across disciplines, these authors navigate visuality to enhance pedagogical sensibility to how we observe, analyze, criticize and reflect on through visual processes.

Dance and film have shared a dynamic relationship since the advent of cinema--a natural interplay that developed into the genre known as screendance. Charting the history of screendance festivals, this book examines important shifts in practice and theory, distinct festival eras and communities, and the process of selecting and programming works.

This collection of scholarly essays examines reality television. The first show, Survivor, inspired a national craze when it aired in the summer of 2000. Ever since, successors and copycats have been on each of the four largest networks. The basics stay the same: put a group of people into situations bound to cause conflict, and watch them squirm. Rather than criticize the series' voyeuristic appeal, this work evaluates what goes on within the text of such shows and how they reflect or affect our larger culture. Contributors include researchers from communications, sociology, political science, and psychology. The contributions cover such topics as reality television's relationships with cultural identity, publicity rights, historical perspectives, trust, decision-making strategies, political rationality, office politics, and primitivism. Each chapter includes a bibliography. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

What role did America's newspaper advice columnists play in shaping and forming societal attitudes toward LGBTQ people throughout the 20th century? They served the dual function of offering advice and satisfying the curious. They also often provided the first mention of homosexuality outside of newspaper crime blotters. More than 100 million readers regularly read the columns. This book chronicles some of the most popular and widely circulated newspaper columns between the 1930s and 2000, including Ann Landers, Dear Abby, Helen Help Us!, Dr. Joyce Brothers, The Worry Clinic, Dear Meg, Ask Beth, and Savage Love. It examines the function of these columns regarding the place of LGBTQ people in America and what role they played in forming a public opinion. From these columns, we learn not only the framework of how straight Americans understood their homosexual brethren, but also how attitudes and feelings continued to evolve.

Russia's surprising return to the world stage since 2000 has aroused the curiosity--if not the fear--of the West. Gradually, the Kremlin went from a policy of deference to foreign powers to acting with independence. The driver of this transformation was President Vladimir Putin, who with skillful caution navigated Russia back into the ranks of global powers. In theaters of conflict such as Georgia, Syria and Ukraine, the Kremlin won significant victories at little cost to consolidate its decisive position. Following a chronological approach from the fall of the Soviet Union to the present, this book draws on new documents to describe how Russia regained its former global prominence. Clear accounts of key decisions and foreign policy events--many presented for the first time--provide important insights into the major confrontations with the West.

The author of the acclaimed Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them) brings “her singular sensibility, her genius for language, her love of our deeply imperfect world” (Karen Karbo, author of In Praise of Difficult Women) to this insightful exploration of reality TV and the shifting definitions of truth in America. What is the truth? In a world of fake news and rampant conspiracy theories, the nature of truth has increasingly blurry borders. In this clever and timely cultural commentary, award-winning author Sallie Tisdale tackles this issue by framing it in a familiar way—reality TV, particularly the long-running CBS show Survivor. With humor and in-depth superfan analysis, Tisdale explores the distinction between suspended disbelief and true authenticity both in how we watch shows like Survivor, and in how we perceive the world around us. With her “bold and wise, galvanizing and grounding” (Chloe Caldwell, author of I’ll Tell You in Person) writing, Tisdale has created an unputdownable, thoroughly entertaining, and groundbreaking book that we will be talking about for years to come.

It is preparation for life.--Rachel A. Heath "Reflective Teaching"