Reflections on Popular Culture and Philosophy

Contributions to the philosophical genre of popular culture and philosophy aim to popularize philosophical ideas with the help of references to the products of popular (mass) culture with TV series like The Simpsons, Hollywood blockbusters like The Matrix and Jurassic Park, or popular music groups like Metallica. While being commercially successful, books in this comparatively new genre are often criticized for lacking scientific rigor, providing a shallow cultural commentary, and having little didactic value to foster philosophical understanding. This paper discusses some of these methodological and didactic objections and seeks to encourage a constructive discussion of concerns with the genre. It shows how the genre similar to previous attempts to foster public understanding of philosophy and that it is a methodologically viable approach to reach a broad range of readers with diverse informational preferences and educational backgrounds. Considering what makes this approach to the popularization of philosophical thinking successful will shed light on some of the criteria for popularization of philosophy in general.

Regeneration status and species diversity of major tree species under scientific forest management in Kapilbastu district, Nepal

In Nepal, scientific forest managementhas been practiced as an effective forest management technique to utilize forest resources sustainably. However, the program has faced many controversies such as intentional logging of only high-valued timber species like Shorearobusta. In addition, few believe this program is severely affecting the regeneration productivity and species diversity in the natural forests. In order to address these issues, we examinedthe regeneration condition and plant species diversity in the stands where scientific forest management operations were carried out. The data related to regeneration status and species diversity were collected using a systematic random sampling of the selected stands. Our results showed good regeneration conditions (Seedling >5000, Sapling>2000) in all the studied stands. The tree species community was dominated by S.robusta(Sal) followed by Schleicheraoleosa (Kusum) and Casia fistula (Rajbriksha). The value of diversity indices of different species varied significantly between felling series. The highest diversity was found in the second year felling series with the Simpsons Index of dominance value 0.6934 and the lowest species diversity was in the first year felling series with a value of 0.8448. It can be recommended that the regeneration felling practice has helped in promoting the regeneration condition and growth.

Understanding The Simpsons

Another book on The Simpsons? you might wonder. Isn’t the yellow cartoon troupe around the eponymous chaotic family somewhat worn-out? Perhaps you even ask yourself whether that nineties’ show is still on the air anyhow. Accolades such as "the best TV show of the twentieth century" or "the longest-running scripted series on American prime-time television" have elevated The Simpsons to the pop culture pantheon, while also suggesting the very vintage character of the program. But the label "The Simpsons" refers not just to a show that seems to belong to a bygone television era, it implies a rich narrative universe, including a set of iconic figures, familiar across continents and generations. Through lens of a transmedia studies, Understanding The Simpsons traces the franchise’s trajectory, from its original conception shaped by alternative media traditions to its astounding, long-lived impact as a cult phenomenon in popular culture. Examining the legacy of online fan forums and bootleg T-shirts from the show’s heyday in the early 1990s, as well as the meaning of The Simpsons in contemporary digital culture, this book demonstrates how one of the most popular comedy series of all time has redefined the intersections between the corporate media and participatory culture – and is alive indeed.

Animaciones musicales: sintonía Los Simpsons, de Danny Elfmann

Se trata de una animación realizada sobre la conocida sintonía inicial de la serie “The Simpsons” compuesta por Danny Elfmann. Se ha optado por una estética visual con elementos figurativos icónicos de la serie en coherencia con la función de esta pieza musical, resaltando especialmente los elementos tímbricos y de paisaje sonoro presentes en la narración, manteniendo la coherencia formal. En el proyecto Animaciones Musicales, a las alumnas y alumnos del grado de Educación Infantil dentro de la asignatura de Didáctica de la Música se pedía elegir libremente una pieza musical instrumental de entre 1 y 4 minutos de duración y, tras su análisis (forma, carácter, parámetros sonoros y elementos más relevantes...), realizar sobre esa base musical una creación visual de animación (empleando el programa PowToon o similar) en la que hubiera coherencia formal entre música e imagen. Se dio plena libertad en la elección de tema, estética visual, parámetros musicales representados, tipo de música... y se fomentó la originalidad en los planteamientos. Los vídeos resultantes se vieron y analizaron colectivamente en clase y también se expusieron públicamente en una pantalla de televisión ubicada en uno de los accesos a la Facultad de Ciencias de la Educación coincidiendo con la Exposición de cotidiáfonos “Se ruega tocar” en la que se mostraban trabajos también realizados por los alumnos de la misma asignatura.

Religiöse Spuren im Alltag

Acronyms, songs, advertisements, movies, television series, comic strips, memes or even sports news: Traces of Christian symbols, sayings, or references can be found in numerous places and contexts. But most children and adolescents exposed to religious education in German schools, only know these contemporary references without being aware of their origins. So one of the most challenging tasks in religious education is enabling learners to decode those references and adaptations. Being able to decode the occurring transformations of religion within these daily life phenomena is the prerequisite for being able to make an informed decision about the underlying concepts and religious ideas. This article provides an example of how to alternatively address the quite abstract teaching of dyophysitism by using snippets of the famous animated sitcom „The Simpsons“.

“Hey! Mr Prime Minister!”: The Simpsons Against the Liberals, Anti-fandom and the “Politics of Against”

Memes and popular culture have become central to our understanding of contemporary politics. Recent fan scholarship has shown how popular culture encourages audiences into discussion, participation, creativity, intervention, and evaluation in politics. In this article, we build on existing scholarship analysing political meme creation and distribution, which to date has primarily focused primarily on American politics. Using a case study of the Facebook group The Simpsons Against the Liberals (the conservative ruling party in Australia), we examine how the anti-fannish behaviors of appropriating and remixing content, affective investment, and community collective identity formation is activated through othering or a “politics of against” (Sandvoss, 2019). The Simpsons Against the Liberals page features memes which insert current Australian political issues, scandals, and controversies into the fictional world of The Simpsons. As we argue, the community is bound by its anti-fandom of the Australian Liberal party, rather than a specific unifying feature. While anti-fandom is driven from hate and dislike, this case study demonstrates that a form of anti-fandom exists in which pleasure is derived from the use of humor to perform acts of citizenship and imagined community. Specifically, this article will examine the flurry of creative production during the 2019/20 Australian bushfire crisis—centered around the controversial behavior of Prime Minister Scott Morrison—as a form of contemporary civic action and activism rooted in anti-fan practices.

Playing with stereotypes: Russia and the Russians in the animated TV series “The Simpsons” (1989-2020)

The subject of this research is the image of the USSR/Russia resembles in the popular animated TV series “The Simpsons” throughout the past 30 years, considering the method of translating information inserted in the media text, as well as the complexity/simplicity of decoding this information by the viewer, ambiguity/unambiguity of interpretations, etc. The TB series touched upon the following topics related to the USSR/Russia: immigration to the United States and life of the immigrants in the new homeland, the Cold War, Communism and anti-Communism, Russian culture, Russia as a rival of the United States. The author traces the dynamics, diversity, and specificity of covering Soviet/Russian theme for over 30 years in the context of the dynamics of relations between the Soviet Union/Russia and the West, including political, social, cultural, and other nuances. The author carries out a cross-disciplinary dedicated to the work of popular culture in the context of political history of the XX – early XX centuries. The novelty consists in revealing the main themes of the “Russian presence” in the TV series (based on the analysis of almost 700 episodes), and the way they are conveyed (leveling the established stereotypes or their debunking for the sake of countering manipulations with public sentiment). Impugning the statement that ideology of “The Simpsons” is purely neoliberal, the author draws a more complex and critical worldview of “The Simpsons” in with regards to American society. Russia holds a special place in this world due to complicated bilateral relations since the Cold War, which consequences are yet to be fully overcome. An ineradicable remnant of the Cold War is the link between Russia and Communism, in which “Communism” is a synonym of any dissenting view. Russia is also associated with a rich, although highbrow culture, unattractive to most of the ordinary citizens. The main satirical idea of “The Simpsons” is to emphasize the cultural dissonance, which intensifies the difficulties of mutual understanding based on political confrontation and remaining ideological prejudices.

The Simpsons did it: Exploring the film trope space and its large scale structure

Creating a story is a challenging task due to the the complex relations between the parts that make it up, which is why many new stories are built on those cohesive elements or patterns, called tropes that have been shown to work in the past. A trope is a recurring storytelling device or pattern, or sometimes a meta-element, used by the authors to express ideas that the audience can recognize or relate to, such as the Hero’s Journey. Discovering tropes and how they cluster in popular works and doing it at scale to generate new plots may benefit writers; in this paper, we analyze them and use a principled procedure to identify trope combinations, or communities, that could possible be successful. The degree of development of these different communities can help us identify areas that are under-developed and, thus, susceptible to such a type of development. To detect these communities, with their associated degree of development and interest, we propose a methodology based on scientometric and complex network analysis techniques. As a secondary objective, we will obtain a general perspective in the trope and films network: the tropesphere. We have used a dataset of 10,766 movies and 25,776 tropes associated with them, together with rating, genres and popularity. Our analysis has shown that not only there are different trope communities associated with specific genres, and that there are significant differences between the rating and popularity of these communities but also there are differences on the level of development between them: emerging/declining, specific, transversal or motor.

Sarcastic Expressions in The Simpsons Movie

This research identifies the sarcastic utterances found in The Simpsons Movie. It allocates the utterances said by the characters into four categories proposed by Camp (2011): propositional, lexical, like-prefixed, and illocutionary sarcasm. After that, the categorized utterances are identified based on their illocutionary functions by using Leech’s theory (1983): collaborative, convivial, competitive, and conflictive function. The result shows that there are 20 sarcastic utterances found in the movie, 85% of which belongs to illocutionary sarcasm, and the 15% belongs to propositional sarcasm. However, the lexical sarcasm and like-prefixed sarcasm are not used by the characters in expressing sarcasm. Meanwhile, there are only three types of functions that are found in this research; collaborative, conflictive, and convivial. This research also displays evidence that sarcasm is used to protect the speaker from the unwanted consequences that might come from the hearer’s reaction. In addition to context and common ground, the hearer’s response is also necessary to detect an utterance as sarcastic expression.