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K-pop as Popular Music

K-pop is a form of popular music whose significance goes beyond its financial success. In January 2021, Esquire published Emma Carey‘s article, “The Best Pop Bands of All Time Prove the Universal Power of Music,” which acknowledged the slippery nature of the label of “pop,” but also declared: “In simple terms, pop music is literally….

Modeling Black Womanhood in K-pop

Given the influence of black popular culture on K-pop, it is not surprising that female K-pop artists also draw on images of black womanhood, especially those associated with hip-hop. While some scholars focus on prominent, sexualized images of black women as the defining model, other scholars point to the more complicated nature of representations of…

Writing about K-pop: Choose Your Disciplinary Adventure

In my previous article, I talked about how taking a historian’s approach to K-pop considers the past in making sense of the present. In this article, I’ll discuss how this informs my approach to K-pop in my book Soul in Seoul: African American Popular Music and K-pop. In making sense of K-pop, I choose several…

Writing About K-pop: History and Context

One of the first things I wanted to do with my book, Soul in Seoul: African American Popular Music and K-pop, is to recognize K-pop’s history and development. Placing K-pop within a historical context is crucial to the way we ultimately understand it. K-pop is often seen in present-day terms. It is described and treated…

Teaching K-pop, Part 3: Content, or Look Ma! No Books!

In Part 2, I talked about how to help students develop knowledge and skills (assignments) and how to evaluate what they know and are able to do (assessments). Finally, in Part 3, we get to what many of us consider to be the fun part: deciding what material to cover and activities to do in…

Teaching K-pop, Part 2: Assignments and Assessments (ew!)

In Part 1, I considered student learning outcomes, the foundation of good course design, and how they relate to my learning goals in teaching Korean popular culture. In Part 2, I cover how I determine to how to evaluate what students know or can do by the end of the course (assessments) as well as…

Teaching K-pop, Part 1: The Most Important Thing

Before deciding on all the cool content to include in my course, KORE 320: Korean Popular Culture, there is one thing that I had to do, something that forms the foundation of the course. Figuring out this one thing made designing the course easier and will make for more effective learning for students. It was…

Engaging Engagement in Online Courses

In discussions about remote learning and future online teaching that many educators may face in the fall, concerns about engagement dominate. They often include the unchallenged claim that online instruction cannot replicate the engagement found in face-to-face teaching. But is that true? Many erroneously equate the emergency online teaching that most institutions relied on this…

Mission Impossible: Curating the History of K-pop

Some of us are using this unprecedented time to work on projects that have gotten away from us. My latest project, KPOPCULTURE, a never ending quest to create a history of K-pop, is one such project! From KPOPIANA to the Kpop Collaboration Project, I have been working on projects that seek to document and describe…

How to Grade Faster and Foster Student Learning

Grading is an age-old source of frustration for instructors, with many feeling torn between evaluating student performance and fostering student learning, as they struggle with less time to do either. However, one does not have to forgo student learning to attain more efficiency in grading. In her piece “How to Grade Faster in 2020,” Deborah J….

Disciplines and Active Learning

Active learning represents a significant set of strategies that can increase student engagement with course material. However, how does disciplinary context factor into the way we use these strategies? Active learning remains a major trend in higher education. Several of the most-read topics for The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s Teaching Newsletter revolved around active learning…

Who’s Better, Who’s Best: Competition and Manipulation in K-pop (from KPK: Kpop Kollective)

Labor from Below: What Neoliberal Capitalism Overlooks in K-pop (from KPK: Kpop Kollective)

If Not Now, When?: Students and Difficult Reading

The Role of Implementation in High Impact Practices

Not Just Pretty Faces: K-pop Idols and Quiet Storm Masculinity

Digital Humanities for the Rest of Us