Popular culture refers to a wide range of cultural practices and genres that shape our daily lives. While often perceived as entertainment and consumption, it is much more: a powerful force that constructs meanings of social class, social inequality, nationalism, race, and gender, with direct implications for gender equality, as well as racial and economic equality. Popular culture also operates as a vast creative economy and significant contributor to GDP, where questions of labor, value, and rights surface in debates over platform work, fan labor, and cultural production—issues directly tied to decent work and economic growth. As a major industry, it is propelled by industry, innovation and infrastructure, from streaming platforms and algorithms to urban cultural districts and global supply chains, which in turn transform contemporary urban formation and connect the local and the global. It underpins youth subcultures, symbolic resistance, and alternative discourses. This course introduces students to sociological and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of popular culture. By revealing its powerful social functions and impacts, these approaches equip and encourage students to critically assess their own daily consumption of popular culture.