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Foreword
Welcome to the sixth volume of Culture Shock! This lively webzine has appeared almost every year since its launch in 2000. During the fall semester, a group of students in my introductory writing course, 21W.731: Writing and Experience, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has read, talked, and written about popular culture, learning that we inevitably both shape and are shaped by the many forms of popular culture that surround us, and learning too how to view aspects of everyday experience with a critical eye. Each year, the students design the website, submit their work for publication, decide which essays are to be published, edit the submissions, and post them on the site. It is a labor, if not of love, then at least of persistence, as a magazine takes shape in the flurry of a semester’s end at MIT. And voila!—here it is once again. This year, the student writers read and thought and wrote about music, fashion, the marketing of “cool,” the fluidity of gender and sexual identities, the complexities of the immigration experience, the export of American culture to other parts of the globe, the elusive nature of time, the impact of technology on culture and on us. We hope you will enjoy reading the essays included in this volume. And now, once more: Culture Shock! Rebecca Blevins Faery, Ph.D. |
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