Pop Culture Yoga: A Communication Remix was born out of a series of questions about the paradoxical nature of yoga: How do individuals and groups define yoga? What does it mean to “practice yoga,” and what does this practice involve? What are some of the most important principles, guidelines, or philosophical tenets of yoga that shape people’s definitions and practices? Who has the power and authority to define yoga? What are the limits, if any, of shared definitions of yoga? Kristen C. Blinne explores the myriad ways “yoga” is communicatively constructed and defined in and through popular culture in the United States. In doing so, Blinne offers insight into the many identity work processes in play in the construction of yoga categories, illuminating how individuals’ and groups’ words and actions represent practices of claiming—part of a complex communicative process centered around membership categorization—based on a range of authenticity discourses. Employing popular culture writing styles, Blinne ultimately contends that the majority of yoga styles practiced in the United States are remixes that can be classified as pop culture yoga, a distinct way of understanding this complex phenomenon.

Selling Yoga looks at how modern yoga developed into the self-developmental products and services that are widely consumed across the world today.

This book is about war and popular culture, and war in popular culture. Tara Brabazon summons, probes, questions and reclaims popular culture, challenging the assumptions of war, whiteness, Christianity, modernity and progress that have dominated our lives since September 11. It is essential reading for any scholar of cultural studies and popular culture, media and journalism, creative writing and terrorism studies.

This ready reference is a comprehensive guide to pop culture in Asia and Oceania, including topics such as top Korean singers, Thailand's sports heroes, and Japanese fashion. This entertaining introduction to Asian pop culture covers the global superstars, music idols, blockbuster films, and current trends—from the eclectic to the underground—of East Asia and South Asia, including China, Japan, Korea, India, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, and Pakistan, as well as Oceania. The rich content features an exploration of the politics and personalities of Bollywood, a look at how baseball became a huge phenomenon in Taiwan and Japan, the ways in which censorship affects social media use in these regions, and the influence of the United States on the movies, music, and Internet in Asia. Topics include contemporary literature, movies, television and radio, the Internet, sports, video games, and fashion. Brief overviews of each topic precede entries featuring key musicians, songs, published works, actors and actresses, popular websites, top athletes, video games, and clothing fads and designers. The book also contains top-ten lists, a chronology of pop culture events, and a bibliography. Sidebars throughout the text provide additional anecdotal information.

The connection between popular culture and religion is an enduring part of American life. With seventy-five percent new content, the third edition of this multifaceted and popular collection has been revised and updated throughout to provide greater religious diversity in its topics and address critical developments in the study of religion and popular culture. Ideal for classroom use, this expanded volume gives increased attention to the implications of digital culture and the increasingly interactive quality of popular culture provides a framework to help students understand and appreciate the work in diverse fields, methods, and perspectives contains an updated introduction, discussion questions, and other instructional tools

Religion and popular culture is a fast-growing field that spans a variety of disciplines. This volume offers the first real survey of the field to date and provides a guide for the work of future scholars. It explores: key issues of definition and of methodology religious encounters with popular culture across media, material culture and space, ranging from videogames and social networks to cooking and kitsch, architecture and national monuments representations of religious traditions in the media and popular culture, including important non-Western spheres such as Bollywood This Companion will serve as an enjoyable and informative resource for students and a stimulus to future scholarly work.

The Routledge Handbook of Health Communication and Popular Culture offers rich insights into the ways in which communication about health through popular culture can become a part of healing, wellness, and health-related decisions. This Handbook allows readers to understand and consider messages that inform and influence health-related choices through pop culture in the public sphere. Written in an accessible narrative style and including interdisciplinary, global, and diverse perspectives, a vast team of contributing authors from the field explores the intersections between health communication and popular culture. The Handbook is divided into five parts: Framing of Health-Related Issues in Popular Culture; Exploring Popular Culture Influences on Health Behaviors and Beliefs; Considering Pro-Social Public Health Interventions in Popular Culture; Understanding Health Issues in Popular Culture from Diverse Perspectives; and Pop Culture and Health Communication: Looks to the Future. The Handbook will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of Communication Studies, Health Communication, Public Health Policy, Media Literacy, and Cultural Studies.

Love, Language, Place, and Identity in Popular Culture: Romancing the Other explores the varied representations of Otherness in romance novels and other fiction with strong romantic plots. Contributors’ approaches range from sociolinguistics to cultural studies, and the texts analyzed are set on four continents, with particular emphasis on Caribbean and Atlantic islands. What all the essays have in common is the exploration of representations of the Other, be it in an inter-racial or inter-cultural relationship. Chapters are divided into two parts; the first examines place, travel, history, and language in 20th-century texts; while the second explores tensions and transformations in the depiction of Otherness, mainly in texts published in the early 21st century. This book reveals that even at the end of the 20th century, these texts display neocolonialist attitudes towards the Other. While more recent texts show noticeable changes in attitudes, these changes can often fall short, as stereotypes and prejudices are often still present, just below the surface, in popular novels. The understudied field of popular romance, in which the Other is frequently present as a love interest, proves to be a fruitful area in which to explore the potential and the realities of the treatment of Otherness in popular culture. Scholars of literature, communication, romance, and rhetoric will find this book particularly useful.

Drawing on examples from across the continent, this volume examines socially significant aspects of contemporary African popular culture—including music cultures, fandoms, and community, mass, and digital media—to demonstrate how neoliberal politics and market forces shape the cultural landscape and vice versa. Contributors investigate the role that the media, politicians, and corporate interests play in shaping that landscape, highlight the crucial role of the African people in the production and circulation of popular culture more broadly, and, furthermore, demonstrate how popular culture can be used as a tool to resist oppressive regimes and challenge power structures in the African context. Scholars of political communication, cultural studies, and African studies will find this book particularly useful.

This book offers insight into the many identity work processes in play in the construction of yoga categories, inviting readers to consider pop culture yoga, a distinct way of understanding this complex phenomenon.