Pop Culture Social Science

Find an episode or example of contemporary popular culture (film, tv, music, sports, culture, arts, etc.) that has a clear and easy-to-understand connection to your chosen social science field. View or experience the event or media and report back on what this popular culture artifact owes to social scientists or what they could stand to learn from it.

Pop Culture Social Science Paper Disciplinary Areas: You have the option to write paper on any of these disciplinary areas. — Psychology — Cognitive Psychology — Sociology — Anthropology — Economics — Political Science Summary: Find an episode or example of contemporary popular culture (film, tv, music, sports, culture, arts, etc.) that has a clear and easy-to-understand connection to your chosen social science field. View or experience the event or media and report back on what this popular culture artifact owes to social scientists or what they could stand to learn from it. Specific Tasks and Questions: Task: You will need to spend some time selecting a specific example of contemporary media. It will work best if this media can either be referenced easily (such as by including an image of an important painting), or can be described succinctly and quickly in a few sentences (so, the plot of a film or single episode rather than the run of an entire series spanning hundreds of episodes). If you have not read or viewed the work recently, you must revisit it before attempting to write your investigation paper. The reason is that I would like you to focus on the connection to one of the social science fields, and you will make better connections if you are thinking about this while viewing/experiencing the media or event. So, for example, you might choose to write about and analyze the film I, Robot or Chappie from the standpoint of Cognitive Science. Specific Questions: — Describe the contemporary media or event. Give a sense of its general importance or relevance, but then focus on the connection to the field you selected. — Explain the connection to the field. In doing so, it will be more interesting if you take a stance in regard to the item you chose to write about. Have an opinion, make a case. For example, rather than just noting some similarities between the film "Chappie" and cognitive science, you might opt to write about the realism or lack there of in the film's representation of AI (at the time). This will allow you to make a claim and support it with examples from the media/event and from the field you selected. — Talk about the impacts on the field, the impact the field might have had in shaping the media or event, and the broader reception of the event by folks within and beyond the field. — If you can find contemporary examples of researchers in the field you chose responding to, reacting to, or otherwise writing about the media instance you chose, summarize some of these reactions. Otherwise, speculate or predict the sorts of reactions you might expect to see from experts in the field to watching or experiencing the media/event you chose. — Note that this investigation paper is a bit more involved than some of the others. In order to undertake this assignment and do well, you will need to have more than a superficial familiarity with the subject field you choose to write about. This would be a great option for students who have already taken a deep interest in a field and would like a fun way to apply what they have learned through their own individual study or higher-division courses. General Reflection: All individual investigation papers should conclude with a paragraph that addresses the following three questions. These are to be answered after you have completed the rest of the tasks for a given prompt. Please do not include the questions in your paper - just answer them and connect the answers together in writing. — Why did you choose the prompt and the field that you did for this investigation? — What surprised you the most as you attempted to complete the short investigation? — How have your attitudes and opinions toward the specific discipline you researched changed as a result of carrying out this further investigation?