Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

An Introduction

Welcome to the Student Resources area of Cultural Theory and Popular Culture (tenth edition) – a theoretically grounded textbook for the study of culturally informed approaches to popular culture read and taught worldwide.

It has been designed and updated to support your reading of the book’s chapters and systematically revisit the book’s insights. You will find here useful resources related to each chapter of the textbook aimed at helping you revise the book’s instructive and astute content.

You can access these resources by selecting the appropriate chapter from the drop-down list above. There are quizzes in each section by which you can assess your knowledge and comprehension of the content discussed, including important terms, names, problems and trajectories of cultural development in relation to popular culture.

There is also a glossary of important and frequently used words and definitions which you may find beneficial in your reading of the textbook and in understanding problems explained in relation to a broad range of cultural issues. Links to extra materials, which you can find in a dedicated tab and which support the timeliness of Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, will help you deepen that understanding as they echo the book’s approaches and allow for better navigation of the academic study of the popular.

They include up-to-date web links to contemporary examples of popular culture texts and practices. It is advisable that you follow these to facilitate your understanding of the theoretical material presented in the textbook. These will help ground the academic debates in twenty-first-century cultural practices. At the end of each chapter, as well, there are extensions and further considerations for you to engage in. This also tests your understanding of theory as you apply what you have learned to other examples in everyday life.

There is also the opportunity to develop your understanding of Cultural Theory using additional reading material in Professor Storey’s companion book, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture (tenth edition). It is recommended that you engage with this title, so you can fully understand the key debates and issues explored here.

Here begins your journey as a student of Cultural Theory and Popular Culture! It’s both fascinating and at times, provocative. Enjoy it! Learn it. Live it!

Professor Ania Malinowska

Dr Karen Atkinson

About the Authors

Author of Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction

John Storey is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies at the Centre for Research in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Sunderland, UK, and Chair Professor of the Changjiang Scholar Programme at the Comparative Cultural Studies Centre, Shaanxi Normal University, China. He has published widely in cultural studies, including twenty-six books. The most recent is Radical Utopianism and Cultural Studies (2019).

Website author

Ania Malinowska is a cultural theorist and author of Love in Contemporary Technoculture (CUP 2022). She is a Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Silesia in Katowice (Institute of Culture Studies and Centre for Critical Technology Studies), and a former Senior Fulbright Fellow at The New School in New York. She has published extensively on a variety of topics regarding cultural theory, especially on the semiotics of feelings, aesthetics of the norm, and robot cultures.

Karen Atkinson lectures in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Sunderland and is an Associate Lecturer on the MA in Mass Communications at the University of Leicester. She has published research papers in this area, as well as in the field of critical discourse analysis and sociolinguistics. She is co-author of Language and Power in the Modern World (2003).

Thanks go to John-Paul Green and Dr Tony Purvis for supplying materials for earlier versions of this website and to Allan Verth for help with contemporary examples of popular culture. Special thanks is also given to the many students on the ‘Cultural Theory and Popular Culture’ module, co-taught by Dr Karen Atkinson and Professor John Storey, for their insightful feedback and useful discussion of twenty-first-century popular culture texts and practices.