This week, I think that our readings were perfectly paired. In the piece by Dr.Bezio, she discusses the relevance of popular culture to critical analysis of leadership and society as a whole. Although popular culture is commonly referred to as shallow entertainment, I think that it was very important to note that it’s essentially the study of a social history through storytelling. With this definition, it was easier to imagine popular culture as something that could be related to leadership. Using the questions listed in the Harvey reading, it becomes more and more clear that the role of popular culture should be more relevant to the discipling of leadership than it is. Even more, the “newfound skepticism” surrounding leadership that Harvey mentions could be aided by applying popular culture, something so extremely relevant by definition, to the study of leadership. Another important aspect of this week’s reading was understanding basic criteria for identifying an example of leadership. Besides occurring within groups, leadership has many faces, and looks different in almost every single context.

I think that moving forward, it might be beneficial for more professors to include pop culture in the classroom. Not only would this bridge the age gap between professor and student, but I think it would be helpful to understand leadership in the context of now. Studying history (and historiography!), scientific studies and things like that can be beneficial, but as the saying goes, there’s no better time than the present. If you think about the Jan. 6 riot at the Capital, the latest meme on Twitter, who has the most followers in Instagram, the latest New York Times bestseller and on and on and on, it would be super interesting to see conversations about these implemented in the classroom. From a leadership prospective, there’s a lot that we could learn as students being that this is the world we will be graduating and joining soon.