Uncommon Threads: Reading and Writing about Contemporary America

This new popular culture reader encourages students to consider alternative and complex perspectives on the contemporary issues and concerns that affect them daily and to make critical connections between cultural events and contexts they might previously have considered unlinked.

Organized around intriguing pairings of topics–fashion and spirituality, learning and lifestyles–that are central to contemporary culture, this provocative reader engages students because it focuses on the issues that most interest and trouble them. Pedagogical apparatus explores the interrelationships between related readings, and writing assignments investigate of the contexts of popular culture via printed texts and the World Wide Web. This critical, but engaging reader invites students to explore how we manufacture personal and group identities and conceptual categories and helps them recognize the part they play in the dynamic dialogue between the way culture frames our explanations about it–and the way our explanations produce the culture.