By Laura Cummings
Pop culture is everywhere – Entertainment Tonight is still top in the ratings, People sells millions of subscriptions a year, and even the makers of Trivial Pursuit have released a pop culture version of their game.
Percy Walton, an English professor at Carleton University, is exploring how the realms of pop culture, fashion and celebrity affect the rest of our lives.
Walton received a Research Achievement Award from the school in 2004, to fund her study of the fashion system and its discourses. The project examined how fashion – both in regards to clothing and beauty fads – has evolved over the 19th and 20th centuries.
It also looked at fashion in cinema and television, including events like the Oscars, and how those fashions have influenced and become an integral part of discourses in the public domain.
Walton was given a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grant to fund a research project that culminated to a book published in 2012 entitled Dialing 911: American Culture Post 9/11. Written along with Windsor University professor Bruce Tucker, it explores how 9/11 affected pop culture personalities, either that have changed or appeared since the tragedy.
“These people are interesting because of the way they provide commentary on American society,” Walton said in an interview. “They’re reflecting the panic-driven nature of American lives now, in a way that hasn’t happened before.”
Walton examined American figures in particular, like U.S. soldiers Lynndie England and Jessica Lynch, the former who pled guilty to torturing Iraqi prisoners, and the latter who was rescued from an Iraqi hospital on television.
“Cultural forces act on us in many unseen ways,” she said. “They govern and manipulate us, but it’s sometimes difficult to see when we’re in the middle of everything.”
Other pop culture icons under the microscope include homemaking guru and convicted felon Martha Stewart, and pacifist filmmaker Michael Moore.
“There really are very few periods that are denoted as clearly as 9/11,” Walton said. “In terms of affecting American culture, you would have to go all the way back to Pearl Harbor for a similar comparison.”