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This class provides students with unique insight into domestic politics and foreign policy through the lens of popular culture. Engaging a range of various forms of expression as entertainment commodity, we consider pop culture as a nontraditional data course, as an empirical window onto heated debates to which we otherwise wouldn't have access. During the course we consider perspectives on societal tensions, economic inequality, governmental repression, and foreign military operations but through the vernacular forum of films, novels, and music rather than political science articles and history textbooks. We examine how regimes use pop culture as a means not just of placating and distracting the masses as did the Romans with bread and circus, but as a social engineering tool for creating, shaping, and policing the ideal citizen. To counter this, we also investigate opposition actors' creative uses of pop culture to subvert the authority of repressive regimes, to mobilize individuals (particularly youth) around catchy themes - think Game of Thrones "Winter is Coming" protest memes - and to imbue their movements with spirit and a collective identity of resistance. In first half of the course the professor will present students with research tools for "reading" politics through pop culture to capture and analyze these relationships. The political content of the course we will "read" through forms as varied as cooking shows and soccer matches draws heavily from the professor's expertise on Turkey - delving into issues such as the Kurdish and Armenian questions, military coups, the contested role of Islam in the public sphere, and Turkey's forays in its multiple neighborhoods - but will include multiple other European case examples as well with guest lecture experts. In the second half of the course, students develop, present, and refine their own research project on the intersection of pop culture and politics in a case of their choice in Turkey or elsewhere in Europe.