In this semester’s transdisciplinary University Studies Course (USC) on “War and Culture” war movies were among the most frequently analyzed cultural texts. The class was held by communication scientist Prof. Dr. Clemens Schwender and historian Prof. Dr. Brendan Dooley at Jacobs University Bremen.

Ever since my participation in the summer university program Deutsche SchülerAkademie, where I attended a cultural studies class in 2002, the scientific exploration of popular texts, such as movies has been one of my key interests.

Social scientific research on popular texts, it appears to me, is curiously scarce, in contrast to a wide and methodologically well developed body of mass communication research, focusing largely on news media.

I have consequently decided to write my course assignment on the 2001 Disney pictures movie “Pearl Harbor”.

While I have discussed some of the methodological complications of empirical research on popular texts, the essay remains a largely critical, even journalistic exploration of the movie only hinting at a framework for a more systematic inquiry.

Working on the topic has further incited my interest in the analysis of popular texts. I am hoping to learn much more about possibilities for well-developed empirical research in popular culture and about the perspectives of the cultural studies in my graduate studies. An attempt to integrate these two things – the cultural studies perspective and sound empirical tests – is something I could imagine to be a very rewarding and fruitful enterprise.

Please find below the complete essay available for download.