I absolutely love how Dr. Bezio was able to draw a throughline from peasant’s songs, various iterations of the Robin Hood story, the peasant revolts, the pressure from dukes to have the king sign the Magna Carta, and then the eventual creation of our modern democratic sociology. I’ve heard many different claims of similar relations between major historical events and examples of popular culture. I am very drawn to the connection between popular culture and social change and find myself working closely with various popular culture ‘texts’ from science fiction to hip hop, and every time I find wild influences 

In my sociology class, Power, Control, and Resistance, we talked about plays like the Marriage of Figaro that blurred the lines of high brow and low brow, and how it influenced/lead to/contributed to the French Revolution, arguably one of the most influential historical time periods of the modern era. My favorite domino effect of history (that does work in the opposite direction of major events to pop culture instead of pop culture to major event) is the connection between 9/11 and 50 Shades of Grey. I picked up this piece of trivia years ago through some random tumblr or reddit post, I’m not sure where, but for some reason, it stuck with me. Here’s the through-line: On the day the twin towers fell on September 11th, 2001, there was a young man watching. His name was Gerard Way. This tragic event leads him to start the emo band My Chemical Romance. Stephanie Meyer was a fan of the band and went on to write her series Twilight using the band’s music and aesthetics and music as inspiration. And E.L. James wrote fanfiction of the series, which later became the basis for her book 50 Shades of Grey. Now, I have not actually read Twilight or 50 Shades of Grey, nor do I plan to, but I always found the connections interesting in our hyper-connected world.

I really value diversity in my media, mainly because I see no reason that there shouldn’t be diversity. We live in a diverse world, and there is no reason that our fictional worlds should be any different. However, Harry Potter is a poor example of racial diversity. There might be POC characters, but they are not necessarily great representations, as Rowling has a history of running aground on racial stereotypes and sometimes using caricature-like names for POC characters. Example: Cho Chang is a Korean last name and a Chinese last name, making a vaguely ‘Asian’ name. It would be extremely uncommon to find a person who is Chinese or has Chinese ancestry who had this name, considering both Cho and Chang are last names, and the naming format has been treated as anglicized, with the given name first then family name.