The Third International Conference on Popular Culture and Education

Popular culture is a cross-disciplinary area that offers considerable potential for research that bridges language, literature and culture as well as new media within the Faculty of Humanities.  The Centre for Popular Culture in the Humanities (CPCH) adopts a broad view of popular culture that covers both the culture of everyday life and its mediation through print, multimodal, and new digital media of various kinds. 

In July 2017, CPCH hosted the third edition of the international conference on ‘Popular Culture and Education,’ after a considerable hiatus since the success of the First and Second Popular Culture and Education conferences hosted by the Centre back in 2008 and 2011 respectively.  The conference was organised as a direct response to the increasingly crucial entanglements between what one consumes and produces in popular culture and how one learns, teaches and changes through these experiences.  Dr Bidisha Banerjee, Dr Kang Jong Hyuk David and Dr Zhou Lulu Egret of the Department of Literature and Cultural Studies and Dr Jae Hyung Park of the Department of International Education and Lifelong Learning co-convened the conference in their roles as core members of the Centre. 

The conference examined the educational dimension of popular culture: from comic books to films to social media platforms, and the ways in which these forms and texts are incorporated into contemporary media literacy education.  These issues were dealt with most extensively in two excellent keynote addresses: ‘Teaching Media in a 'Post-Truth' Age: Fake News, Media Bias and the Challenge for Media Literacy Education’ by Professor David Buckingham of Loughborough University, and ‘The Fannish Classroom’ by Dr Paul Booth of DePaul University.  Conference participants came from several major universities in Asia, as well as from Europe and North America.  The Centre is proud to report on the success of the conference and hope to host it again in two years’ time.

Keynote Speakers of the conference, Professor David Buckingham and Dr. Paul Booth,
debate on the notion of ‘fannish’ at the Third International Conference on Popular Culture and Education.

Professor M.Y. Lin Angel from The University of Hong Kong discusses the importance of reflexiity and critical pedagogy in education.