In the final season of the Norwegian drama series "Skam" ("Shame") (2015-2017), the protagonist Sana, navigating in a secular, liberal youth culture, is a practicing Muslim wearing the hijab. The series is analysed as an instance of public religious education focusing on the issue of representation. This approach is informed by…

Using a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) approach, the current study evaluated use of the Adolescent Media Project (AMP) as a pedagogical approach within an undergraduate adolescent development course. The AMP divided students into smaller groups (n = 8) in relation to an adolescent themed TV show. Students viewed the first season (or…

Historically, films and television centered men, but there has recently been a shift toward focusing on women and people of color (and women of color) in leading roles. Films and shows like "Black Panther," "Barbie," and "Ashoka" reflect this trend, offering more complex stories and diverse representation. Despite…

This article examines the latest developments in the corpus language planning interventions in the implementation of the codification (Haugen, E. (1983). The implementation of corpus planning: theory and practice. In J. Cobarrubias & J. A. Fishman (Eds.), "Progress in language planning. International perspectives" (pp. 269-289).…

Since first airing on HBO in 2011, "Game of Thrones" (GOT) has proven to be a fruitful text for teaching and studying politics. In 2022 the prequal to GOT-House of The Dragon (HOTD) debuted on HBO. This paper conducts discourse analysis on the entire first season with two goals in mind. First, we demonstrate how pop culture is impacted…

A Netflix original six-episode series, "The Chair," examines the experiences of a woman faculty of color department chair at the fictional Pembroke College. One of the many stressors she must navigate is a response to an incompetent white male faculty (who is also her love interest) after he makes a Nazi salute during a lecture in class.…

This paper explores comedy as a "queer pedagogical form" that subverts problematic representational tropes of queerness pervading mainstream depictions of queer experience. Articulating 'form' less as a fixed arrangement of characters, images, objects, and ideas, and more as a kind of "formation" that positions these in dynamic…

The paper explores the portrayal of social relations among youth in the popular Norwegian TV-series "Skam" and places this analysis in relation to Anne Imhof's award-winning performance piece "Faust," which received the Golden Lion at the 2017 Venice Biennale for the German Pavilion. As expressions of how today's youth…

This article explores the normative representations of higher education students in seven films and television series from four European countries. Drawing on the concept of the 'independent learner' as an 'ideal construction', I demonstrate how these texts offer complex and at times paradoxical representations of who gets positioned as the…

I here explore the educational potential of cinema and TV-series through the eyes of the French philosopher Alain Badiou. To illustrate, I read the Norwegian web-based TV-series "Skam" (shame), which reached out to millions of Nordic teens by a broad distribution, easy access and speaking a language young people could relate to. The…

Krump, a form of street dance that is often characterized as aggressive and unique in its expression, has received little attention in academic scholarship. Research that has been published has largely focused on the American-made documentary "RIZE" (2005), with critiques emerging regarding its problematic-racialized representations of…

Academic freedom is seriously under threat. Here I will consider how the marketisation of Higher Education has exacerbated the decline of 'academic freedom'. While the effects of a 'cancel culture' on university provision are difficult to ignore, threats to academic freedom raise a number of questions, such as: 'who is allowed to speak on…

HBO's "Lovecraft Country" is a model resource for developing speculative civic literacies, which are forms of meaning making aimed at helping students conceive of a more equitable democratic society. Speculative civic literacies and "Lovecraft Country" both center the tension between Afrofuturism and Afropessimism in the…

The first episode of the critically acclaimed television series, "Band of Brothers," juxtaposes two leaders navigating an environment of uncertainty and high-risk stakes. We review this first episode, titled "Currahee," with the intention of adding to the library of teaching resources that instructors may use to illustrate…

The HBO series, "Westworld," challenges our notions about what might be real. As such, the series provides a provoking platform for exploring an oft-neglected topic in contemporary education-the fetishization of technology and the murder of the real in Jean Baudrillard's sense. Current educational systems in Canada and the United States…