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Acting Out Culture by James S. Miller - Fourth Edition, 2018 from Macmillan Student Store
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Acting Out Culture

Readings for Critical InquiryFourth Edition| ©2018 James S. Miller

Critically interpret those cultural messages that permeate society today while learning to use your writing to speak back to question the rules as Acting Out Culture empowers you to challenge and resist those forces.

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Acting Out Culture by James S. Miller - Fourth Edition, 2018 from Macmillan Student Store

Expose and Challenge Cultural Rules

Critically interpret those cultural messages that permeate society today while learning to use your writing to speak back to question the rules as Acting Out Culture empowers you to challenge and resist those forces.

Features

Presents vivid and relevant readings. This fully updated and revised collection of 56 readings, including a brand-new chapter on identity and a new section on listening, encourages students to challenge societal norms by asking questions and investigating why our culture is the way it is. Diverse authors, including cultural critics, academics, and journalists, illustrate how writers engage with assumptions in a range of contexts.

Casts writing as action. Acting Out Culture motivates students to develop critical thinking, reading, and writing skills as they question the norms, rules, roles, and scripts imposed by society. Writing prompts and discussion questions after each selection ask students to analyze the push-and-pull of cultural norms and to take a stand on topics they care about. "Acting Like a Citizen" interactive assignments at the end of each chapter suggest opportunities for students to observe, evaluate, and question rules at work in their own lives. They are then able to transfer these key skills to future college courses and the world outside the classroom.

Exposes cultural rules with robust visual and textual examples. Cultural artifacts woven into each chapter ask students to question their assumptions. "Then and Now," a pair of visuals with questions for analysis, revisits traditional ways of thinking and links them to the present. "Scenes and Un-Scenes," a portfolio of images followed by questions for analysis, demonstrates how images promote certain ideas while hiding others. The brief selections in "Rewriting the Script" introduce students to current cultural debates, asking them to consider how they should react to or interpret these messages. 

New to This Edition

31 new readings about issues that matter to students, including the effects of racism on social media, gender and environmentalism, and what we eat when we’re alone. Up-and-coming and established voices demonstrate the importance of thinking critically about the world that surrounds us, motivating students to question the status quo. New selections include:

  • Ta-Nehisi Coates pulling back the curtain on the experience of life in black America today;
  • Lindy West exploring what our society demands of women and their bodies; and
  • Matthew Desmond investigating how eviction affects our communities.

A new chapter, "How We Identify," investigates questions of identity through the lens of gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic class, and race. Authors include J.D. Vance, David Brooks, and Rebecca Traister.

Paired readings approach topics from different perspectives, giving students the tools they need to think more deeply and critically about concepts such as privacy in the digital age, the marketing of social movements, and climate change. Each reading is followed by questions asking students to think about these readings in relation to one another, rather than in isolation, allowing them to make connections between differing viewpoints and experiences.

"So many of my past students, for so many years, have said that the book has changed their life… I think that this book really does what it has set out to do."

— Krista Callahan-Caudill, University of Kentucky

"This text… is willing to explore how existing power structures may result in alienation and marginalization of populations. Acting Out Culture offers insightful essays which consider the benefits of, and alternative perspectives to, the American social status quo."

— Paul Nagy, Clovis Community College

"It's a book that offers a lot of leeway in terms of personalizing a curriculum - I could imagine a variety of different teachers using the text differently in different curricula, all to good ends."

— Cornelius FitzPatrick, Colorado State University

Acting Out Culture by James S. Miller - Fourth Edition, 2018 from Macmillan Student Store

Acting Out Culture

Fourth Edition| ©2018

James S. Miller

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Acting Out Culture by James S. Miller - Fourth Edition, 2018 from Macmillan Student Store

Acting Out Culture

Fourth Edition| 2018

James S. Miller

Table of Contents

Preface for Instructors

Introduction: How We Read and Write About Culture (and How We Ought To)

These Are the Rules

Norms, Scripts, Roles, Rules: Analyzing Popular Culture

How Culture Shapes Us: Rules of the Road

The World in Words

Guided Reading: Anne Trubek’s "Stop Teaching Handwriting" [annotated essay]

A Student’s Response to Trubek: Jordan Radziecki, "Don’t Erase Handwriting" [student essay]

Reading Multimodal Texts

Make Yourself Heard

1   How We Believe:

In what ways does what we know shape our daily actions?

Michael Sandel, Markets and Morals

*Andi Zeisler, The Corridors of Empower

Rewriting the Script: Buy Nothing Christmas

Michael Eric Dyson, Understanding Black Patriotism

Debra J. Dickerson, The Great White Way

Then and Now: Feeling (In)Secure

Amitava Kumar, The Restoration of Faith

*Naomi Klein, One Way or Another, Everything Changes

*Tom Jacobs, It’s Not Easy Being Green—and Manly

Scenes and Un-scenes: Political Protest

Acting Like a Citizen: Re-Scripting Belief

2   How We Watch and Listen:

Does what we see and hear depend on how we’re looking and listening?

Harriet Mcbryde Johnson, Unspeakable Conversations

*Lindy West, Bones

Rewriting the Script: Reality Television

Heather Havrilesky, Some "Girls" Are Better Than Others

*Steve Almond, Is It Immoral to Watch the Super Bowl?

*Amanda Hess, Why Old Men Find Young Women’s Voices So Annoying

*Tiffanie Wen, Inside the Podcast Brain:Why Do Audio Stories Captivate?

Then and Now: Wearing Your Identity on Your Sleeve

*Tom Vanderbilt, How Predictable Is Our Taste?

*Kevin Fallon, Why We Binge-Watch Television

Scenes and Un-scenes: Picturing Climate Change

Acting Like a Citizen: Keeping an Eye Out

3   How We Eat:

Which rules dictate the foods we put in our bodies?

*Kim Bosch, The Things We Eat Alone

*Sophie Egan, Having It Our Way

Rewriting the Script: Organic Food

Nicholas Kristof, Prudence or Cruelty?

*Nathaniel Johnson, Is There a Moral Case for Eating Meat?

Francine Prose, The Wages of Sin

*Harriet Brown, How My Life Changed In One Sentence

Then and Now: How to Make Meatloaf

*Lily Wong, Eating the Hyphen

Brendan Buhler, On Eating Roadkill

Scenes and Un-scenes: Giving Thanks

Acting Like a Citizen: Consumer Profiling


4   How We Learn:

What are our perceptions of knowledge and the ways we should acquire that knowledge?

Alfie Kohn, From Degrading to De-Grading

Kristina Rizga, Everything You’ve Heard About Failing Schools Is Wrong

Then and Now: Encyclopedic Knowledge

bell hooks, Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class

Jonathan Kozol, Preparing Minds for Markets

*Frank Bruni, Why College Rankings Are a Joke

*Ben Casselman, Shut Up About Harvard

Rewriting the Script: Job Skills in the Classroom

*Aaron Hanlon, The Trigger Warning Myth

* Ferentz Lafargue, Welcome to the "Real World"

Scenes and Un-scenes: Looking at Learning

Acting like a Citizen: Educational Scripts


5   How We Work:

What do our jobs say about us?

Matthew B. Crawford, The Case for Working With Your Hands

Mac McClelland, I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave

Rewriting the Script: Working at Wal-Mart

Barbara Ehrenreich, How the Poor Are Made to Pay for Their Poverty

*Linda Tirado, You Get What You Pay For

*Emily Badger, What Happens When We All Become Our Own Bosses

Catherine Rampell, A Generation of Slackers? Not So Much

Then and Now: Dressing for Success

*Maddie Oatman, The Racist, Twisted History of Tipping

Mike Rose, Blue-Collar Brilliance

Scenes and Un-scenes: A Woman’s Work

Acting Like a Citizen: Working Hard or Hardly Working?


6   How We Connect:

What forces help—and hinder—our relationships with others?

*Navneet Alang, The Comfort of a Digital Confidante

*Mae Wiskin, Can’t Quit the Clicks: The Rise of Social Media Rehab

Rewriting the Script: Political Gridlock

*Bijan Stephen, Get Up, Stand Up: Social Media Helps Black Lives Matter Fight the Power

*Caroline O’Donovan, Nextdoor Rolls Out Product Fix It Hopes Will Stem Racial Profiling

Then and Now: Personal Shopping

*Sherry Turkle, The Public Square

Charles Duhigg, How Companies Learn Your Secrets

Scenes and Un-scenes: "Hello, Neighbor"

Peter Lovenheim, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

*Matthew Desmond, Home and Hope

Acting Like a Citizen: Bridging the Divide

7   How We Identify:

Do the roles we play reflect who we truly are?

*Sarah Mirk, Tuning In: How a Generation is Schooling Itself on Sexuality

*Thomas Page McBee, The Truck Stop

Rewriting the Script: Gender as Choice

*Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies

*Jodi Kantor, Historic Day for Gays, But Twinge for Loss of Outsider Culture

Then and Now: Saying "I Do"

David Brooks, People Like Us

*J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy

Scenes and Un-scenes: Class Dismissed?

*Garnette Cadogan, Black and Blue

*Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

Acting Like a Citizen: Checking I.D.

Index of Authors and Titles

Acting Out Culture by James S. Miller - Fourth Edition, 2018 from Macmillan Student Store

Acting Out Culture

Fourth Edition| 2018

James S. Miller

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James S. Miller

James S. Miller is a professor of American Studies and American Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, where he teaches a range of courses on twentieth-century popular and literary culture. His scholarship focuses on issues of public memory and middle-class identity in twentieth-century America, as well as the role of commodity culture in shaping historical consciousness. His essays exploring these topics have appeared in such journals as American Studies, the Journal of American Folklore and The Public Historian. The University of Michigan Press published his book, Managerial Memory: History, Heritage and the Invention of White-Collar Roots, in 2008.

Acting Out Culture by James S. Miller - Fourth Edition, 2018 from Macmillan Student Store

Acting Out Culture

Fourth Edition| 2018

James S. Miller

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Acting Out Culture by James S. Miller - Fourth Edition, 2018 from Macmillan Student Store

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Fourth Edition| 2018

James S. Miller

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