All Posts

The natural world plays an undeniable role in Suzanne Collins’ 2008 young adult novel The Hunger Games , and yet we seem to only talk about the love triangle, the class divide between the Capitol and the rest of Panem, and how Peeta’s cake decorating skills apparently meant he could create this camouflage in the arena: The Hunger Games trilogy follows Katniss Everdeen, a poor teenager from District 12 in Panem. Every year, Panem hosts The Hunger Games, in which two teenagers

In the hit NBC sitcom Parks and Recreation , Leslie Knope and her team firmly position themselves in opposition to corporate greed and the exploits of big business. However, most of the scholarly and pop research on the show has focused on Leslie as a feminist icon and the show as civics education. Little attention has been paid to this David vs Goliath fight, in which Leslie, and the City of Pawnee, are definitively David. But what is the ideology behind positioning big busi

Organised religion is probably the furthest thing from your mind when you read The Fault in Our Stars , and yet its presence is undeniable. John Green’s 2012 novel engages in an interesting conversation about the role of religion in the modern teenager’s life, by centering the novel’s main events in a Church basement, and in doing so ignores the role of the American healthcare system in the treatment of cancer patients.  It would be remiss not to mention that John Green is no

Although Twilight is most commonly criticised for its depiction of women and its deeply anti-feminist love story between human Bella and century-old vampire Edward, it is hard to ignore the problems it has with the Native American characters in its world. Whilst there has been some scholarly engagement with this issue, it has not reached mainstream discussion of the text. The shape-shifting Quiluete wolves who exist to fight the “cold ones” are characterised as noble savages,