Dolly Parton’s America and the Sociology of Popular Culture

After hearing the podcast Dolly Parton’s America in Fall 2019, I decided to try to incorporate it into my Sociology of Popular Culture course. I was already wanting the remove the bulk of the text readings by moving the key concepts and research findings into my lecture and making the course readings a set of media texts. So I designed a set of homework assignments around the five key lenses from the class—gender, class, sexuality, race, and disability—associating each in order with a set of episodes from the podcast and a range of additional media texts, including ones chosen by the student. You can see the results in the pages linked below. At least one link, for the documentary Quest, is internal to Temple and won’t work for most viewers, but you may be able to find the documentary through your library, streaming or otherwise.