New Media Literacies and Participatory Popular Culture Across Borders

How do students’ online literacy practices intersect with online popular culture? In this book scholars from a range of countries including Australia, Lebanon, Nepal, Qatar, South Africa, Turkey, and the United States illustrate and analyze how literacy practices that are mediated through and influenced by popular culture create both opportunities and tensions for secondary and university students. The authors examine issues of theory, identity, and pedagogy as they address participatory popular culture sites such as fan forums, video, blogs, social networking sites, anime, memes, and comics and graphic novels. Uniquely bringing together scholarship about online literacy practices and the growing body of work on participatory popular culture, New Media Literacies and Participatory Popular Culture across Borders makes distinctive contributions to an emerging field of study, pushing forward scholarship about literacy and identity in cross-cultural situations and advancing important conversations about issues of global flows and local responses to popular culture.

Bronwyn T. Williams is Professor of English, University of Louisville, USA.
Amy A. Zenger is Associate Professor of English, American University of Beirut, Lebanon.

Preface 1. Introduction: Popular Culture and Literacy in a Networked World Bronwyn T. Williams and Amy A. Zenger Part I: New Media Literacies Across Cultures 2. The World on Your Screen: New Media, Remix, and the Politics of Cross-Cultural Contact Bronwyn T. Williams 3. Constructing "Local Context" in Beirut: Students’ Literacy Practices Outside of Class Amy A. Zenger 4. Uncovering the Multimodal Literacy Practices in Reading Manga and the Implications for Pedagogy Cheng-Wen Huang and Arlene Archer 5. Adolescent Literacy Practices in Online Social Spaces Jessica Schreyer 6. The "Popular" Turkish Academy Tüge T. Gülsen 7. Digital Worlds and Shifting Borders: Popular Culture, Perception, and Pedagogy Sandra S. Abrams, Hannah R. Gerber, and Melissa Burgess 8. The Participatory Meme Chronotope: Fixity of Space/Rapture of Time Lynn C. Lewis Part II: Constructing Identity in an Online, Cross-Cultural World 9. Faceless Facebook: Female Qatari Users Choosing Wisely Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar 10. Russell T. Davies, ‘Nine Hysterical Women’, and the Death of Ianto Jones Laurie Cubbison 11. Leapfrogging in the Global Periphery: Popular Literacy Practices of Nepalese Youth Online Ghanashyam Sharma and Bal Krishna Sharma 12. Queering the Text: Online Literacy Practices, Identities, and Popular Culture Mark Vicars 13. Creating a fandom via YouTube: Verbotene Liebe and fansubbing Karen Hellekson 14. Virtual Places in the Physical World: Geographies of Literacy and (National) Identity Richard Carpenter