Introduction to the Special Issue: Popular Culture, Social Equity, and Public Administration

Popular culture. It is everywhere—from movies, television, music, and literary works to other vehicles for messaging like social media and celebrity influencers. Popular culture frequently provides messages pertinent to social equity, especially about inequities experienced by historically marginalized groups. This special issue explores pop culture’s social equity messaging in the context of public administration. Despite the ubiquity of popular culture’s artifacts and its messages both about and for public administration, it remains under-examined within public administration scholarship. This special issue is an attempt to bring pop culture topics and applications into the discipline. As a starting point, this collection presents seven manuscripts and two reviews that speak to different forms and analyses of popular culture’s messages about and for social equity in public administration.

First, McCandless and Elias (2020) contextualize pop culture in public administration by offering a foundational definition and providing examples of pop culture’s utility for public administration research and teaching. Then, using critical discourse analysis, they demonstrate the benefit of incorporating popular culture analyses to capture the intersection of power, equity, and ethics in governance.

Second, Borry (2020) explores gender identity in television. She notes how many states and localities have adjusted their policies related to gender identification, yet, many conversations about this topic make people nervous. She uses Gooden’s “Race Talk Strategies” framework to analyze these nervous conversations in two popular television series: Modern Family and Grey’s Anatomy. From this analysis, she highlights the utility of these conversations in popular culture for social equity in practice.

Third, Colvin and Moton (2020) extend the focus on television to include sexual orientation. Conducting exploratory research, they examine the presence and portrayal of lesbian police officers. The first portrayal of a lesbian officer occurred in 1986, and since then, their presence has increased on television. Colvin and Moton examine patterns in these portrayals but also question what these portrayals indicate about societal perceptions of the presence of lesbian police officers in policing.

Fourth, Jensen (2020) continues on with television, by exploring how discourses on celebrity, signified by Kim Kardashian, shape mass media, policy, politics, and administration. Jensen particularly targets Kardashian’s efforts to engage in affecting criminal justice reform and finds that celebrity discourse places importance on the celebrity, not the policy and effects on communities. Someone like Kim Kardashian becomes something less like a policy entrepreneur and more like an “everyday maker,” raising questions about the efficacy of celebrities in raising awareness of issues.

Fifth, Zavattaro (2020) utilizes social media posts to examine the interconnections between social justice and body positivity and fat shaming. Using Sementelli’s map of the individual, Zavattato notes the issues people in larger bodies face in society and how social media, especially Instagram, drive public discourse that obesity is a problem in need of control. Using Sementelli’s map, she maintains that people can use or reclaim their power to alter social justice discourses on body positivity.

Sixth, Love and Fox (2020) move the discussion from social media into popular fiction, namely how power, resistance, and justice manifest in Chaos Walking. The authors note that the world of Chaos Walking represents speculative fiction, which offers spaces to examine many cross-cutting issues faced by societies and that pushes people to critique power structures. Love and Fox analyze what Chaos Walking helps reveal about these issues through concepts of power-over, power-within, power-to, and power-with. They conclude by noting that Chaos Walking reveals socially just outcomes must be sustainable and that power structures need to be changed through reshaping societal and personal interconnections.

Finally, Brainard (2020) provides a practical example of how she utilizes literature in the public administration classroom to examine issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Focusing on her experience teaching “Perspectives on Public Values” in tandem with students’ and her own written reflections on the course, Brainard discusses methods to integrate literary fiction. She covers the pedagogy issues she faced, lessons students learned about DEI, and lessons learned for future iterations of the course. Brainard provides several recommendations for including this model in pedagogy and workplaces to explore how public administrators view DEI issues.

Two reviews appear in this special issue. Smith-Walter and Pannell (2020) review the graphic novels in S.H.I.E.L.D. – The Complete Collection. The authors discuss how the works exhibit skepticism about how well public agencies can advance social equity. Drawing upon classic and modern social equity and representative bureaucracy pieces, the authors address diversity (especially racial representation), equity, and inclusion, and the authors draw parallels between societal dynamics and the field of public administration. Next, Starke and Croft (2020) target how hip hop can serve as political theory with their review J. Cole’s “Brackets.” The authors connect Cole’s work, but also hip hop in general, to music’s power to reveal inequities perpetuated by the administrative state. Key examples include: taxation, policing, gun violence, and even the structure of democracy itself. The authors note that given hip hop’s potential to reflect and internalize administrative shortcomings, it should be viewed as a legitimate source of political theory amongst scholars and practitioners.

The pieces in this special issue demonstrate that pop culture can be a useful tool to inform our understandings of public administration theory and practice, especially on social equity topics. This special issue is intended to serve as a first step in drawing greater attention to pop culture as a source of public administration knowledge. We encourage future work to explore different forms of pop culture with important messaging for and about social equity in public administration. This line of scholarship has the potential to include diverse voices, new knowledge sources, and innovative forms of scholarship for more equitable approaches to public administration theory and practice. And as the global community faces issues of inequities due to the COVID pandemic and police brutality as well as administrative and policy responses to these inequities, as the field continually discusses the need for administrators to be competent in social equity, and as popular culture can and does drive messaging about inequities, the need to understand these intersecting dynamics has never been more needed (McCandless & Ronquillo, 2020; Zavattaro & McCandless, 2020).