Taylor Swift: Inside Australasia's first university course studying a pop megastar

Taylor Swift: Communications Professional, Australasia’s first university-level course studying global pop icon Taylor Swift through critical media theory, held its first lecture at Auckland’s AUT on Monday morning. The Herald’s Mitchell Hageman was there to see how it unfolded, friendship bracelets and all.

OPINION

Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine my second week as an entertainment reporter would have me head back to uni to attend a summer school paper studying pop sensation Taylor Swift.

It’s the first of its kind in Australasia, with Auckland’s AUT kicking off the paper with the first lecture on November 18, and the Herald was invited to sit in with the students.

With a syllabus spanning the singer’s career achievements, marketing choices and global pop-culture impact, who signs up for Swift Summer School?

Turns out my fears of not fitting in were quickly alleviated as senior lecturer and self-confessed Swiftie Dr Rebecca Trelease warmly welcomed me into her AUT classroom.

The plan for the course, Trelease explained, was to dissect Swift’s media content, fandom, lore and more to gain critical thinking and analytical skills.

Swift is arguably one of the most successful artists of her generation.

She’s got a record 14 Grammy awards, is the highest-grossing female touring act of all time, and has 283 million followers on Instagram, so there’s no shortage of career influence to unpack.

Through understanding the star’s role within the ever-changing media landscape, students would create well-researched analyses and conduct their own fact-based research with “no wrong answers”.

We’ll be kicking off the final leg of The Eras Tour this week, which is hard to comprehend. This tour has been the most wondrous experience and I knew I wanted to commemorate the memories we made together in a special way. Well, two ways actually. Excited to announce that The… pic.twitter.com/kH8cSEy64U

— Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) October 15, 2024

But why study Taylor Swift, and why now?

During Trelease’s seven years teaching at AUT, Swift was constantly brought up in academic discussions of all kinds.

Though the AUT’s Taylor Swift: Communications Professional is a first for Australasia, it’s not without precedent.

There were already other courses based on the pop star around the world, and even an academic “Swiftposium” conference held in Melbourne in February that drew 120 academics to discuss Swift’s impact.

“Knowing that there is this move towards Swift studies in academia, it was about time we had a course in Australasia,” Trelease said.

About nine clearly excited students, many of them wearing merch from her record-breaking Eras concert tour, were busy working on friendship bracelets (an Eras tour staple) upon my arrival.

Although the course was offered by AUT’s School of Communication Studies, some students were taking the course as an elective within a different degree that wasn’t communications.

Others, who weren’t necessarily AUT students studying degrees, were doing a Certificate of Proficiency, which meant they were completing the course on its own and learning critical thinking skills in the process.

Students had the opportunity to make Swift-coded friendship bracelets while they learned about critical media theory relating to their favourite star. Photo / Dean Purcell

I soon met marketing major Lana Shcherbyna, 20, who said while she wouldn’t describe herself as a superfan, she was interested in Swift’s massive impact on pop culture and the way the artist utilised her fame.

“She’s such a big name and so many people know about her. I do think she uses her fame very well, I feel like studying that is really interesting.”

There’s no shortage of research that shares how Swift has promoted and commodified her music and lore, making for a variety of rich marketing case studies no doubt.

Deeper meanings

Natalie Page, a 40-year-old telecom worker, became a Swiftie in part thanks to her 20-year-old daughter and also after falling into a “rabbit hole” as a result of listening to the singer’s album Midnights.

She said taking the paper was more out of her personal connection to the topic and genuine interest in the study.

“It may help with the job, but it’s Taylor Swift, so it’s more for interest’s sake.”

Page found herself wanting to learn more about the deeper meanings behind Swift’s music and enjoyed exploring the different facets of her work.

There was no shortage of Swift-themed reading material on offer during the class. Photo / Dean Purcell

Through her various social media channels and albums, the star is renowned for creating content with wide-spanning lore and thematic connections that, for those who don’t know her musical history, can sometimes get confusing.

Luckily for me, the first lecture was extremely well suited to both diehard Swifties and those with limited knowledge.

We watched Swift’s music video for Anti-Hero (shamefully my first time), discussed boyfriend Travis Kelce’s podcast as an avenue for analysis, and were given a selection of academic readings like A Critical Discourse Analysis of Taylor Swift’s Anti-Hero Music Video and Taylor Swift: the hardest-working, zaniest girl in show business ... to peruse.

Of course, whenever there were group discussions, we had to have the subject of our class playing quietly in the background to help us get into things.

Critical analysis

A large part of the lecture was also based on the concept of “clowning”, something I found quite fascinating.

Simply put, Trelease described it as “people who come up with the theory first and try to find a way to prove it”.

In a sense, kind of like pop culture retrofitting.

The course required the students to get out of the “clowning” mindset and think deeper, with more focus on critical analysis.

“What we’re doing is we’re actually looking at the text first, asking the questions that come from that and then looking for the answers,” Trelease said.

With so much contemporary fandom focused on fictional narratives and conspiratorial thinking, teaching critical thinking and applying it to pop culture is no doubt a good thing to focus on.

AUT's Rebecca Trelease explains the impact of "clowning" and more during the lecture. Photo / Dean Purcell

We then looked at the first assignment, which was to demonstrate the ability to deconstruct and critically analyse the meaning and making of a Taylor Swift text (which could be anything from a music video to a tweet) in the form of a 1500-word textual analysis.

I was thinking maybe, when I had the time, I’d look at the stage design of her Eras tour, something that had always fascinated me when scrolling through TikTok, and the fact it may have been one of the reasons the tour skipped New Zealand.

And before you knew it, two hours had flown by and that was the end of module 1.

I took film as a major at university and whether it be Taylor Swift or A Clockwork Orange, there’s no denying pop culture is a legitimate field of study that reflects society and human behaviour.

You really can learn as much from a deep dive into a fandom as you can from an artist’s work.

I might not be a Swiftie yet, but it’s definitely made me want to jump into the “rabbit hole”.

Modules are held three days a week on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, from 9am to noon at AUT’s City Campus.

Spots are still available should you want to check it out for yourself.

Mitchell Hageman joined the Herald’s entertainment and lifestyle team in 2024. He previously worked as a multimedia journalist for Hawke’s Bay Today.