India, Aug. 8 -- How do we solve the problem of Urvashi Rautela? She claims to be the "first Indian woman to win Miss India Universe twice" and "the first Indian actress to be complimented by Leonardo DiCaprio". Both dodgy claims. But the breeze with which Rautela brags is what fuels the memes and keeps her in the limelight. And it's surprisingly what keeps Prerna Subramanian's academic juices flowing. Subramanian is assistant professor at OP Jindal Global University, where she teaches interdisciplinary courses on mobility justice, feminist media and urban studies, and writing. On Insta as @DoctorOfPopCulture, she explains Rautela's appeal: She's a "folk devil". This term, coined by South African-British sociologist Stanley Cohen, refers to the person we collectively turn on, when everything is spinning out of control. Her Reels weave in philosopher Michel Foucault's theories about a neoliberal individualistic society when she demonstrates that poor Rautela, desperate to stand out, is simply echoing the fantasies of our society. Class is not dismissed. Stay back. If Subramanian's analysis seems both cerebral and slightly unhinged, consider how popular she is: 62K followers on Instagram, over 400 comments on a recent video about how Bollywood actors reacted to last month's student protests on social media. She is part of an Instagram cohort of academics that's dragging Hegel, semiotics and dialectics out of the dusty library and into the same universe as Kim Kardashian. But how did pop culture end up with a PhD syllabus? Nerds saw this coming. In the mid-2010s, fans were writing dissertations on Harry Potter and The Hunger Games on Tumblr, dissecting everything from queer subtext to class politics. YouTube was already the place for video essays about the feminist subtext in The Devil Wears Prada (2006). TikTok shrank those ideas into 60-second explainers before Instagram gave them an algorithm-friendly makeover. Actual academics signed on to show that the internet isn't a distraction from culture, it is culture. Fall into the rabbithole that is @KardashianKolloquium. American author and psychotherapist MJ Corey dissects the world through the Kardashians. Corey brings in the theories of French philosopher Jean Baudrillard and German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel to explain how the family came to dominate popular culture by tapping into our "fundamental human anxieties around race, sex and death". Subramanian turns the same analytical lens on Netflix's Desi Bling. She argues that the way Satish Sanpal and Dyuti Parruck treat their wives mirrors the tired sexism of WhatsApp jokes - nagging wife; trapped husband. She assigns viewers extra reading: Philosopher Cornel West's works, in which he argues that "justice is what love looks like in public". In the comments, one follower, @Nandini_1978, says we need to remind ourselves of what "real love" looks like, and how women should heed how men treat them. Deep thoughts, garnished with Likes. Maalvika Bhat (@MaalvikaBhat) who's working towards a PhD in Computer Science and Communication at Northwestern University in the US, has been making other geeky connections. "Pop culture is often dismissed as frivolous, but it can be very revealing of our moral preoccupations," Bhat says. In her Reels, she talks race, feminist theory and Diljit Dosanjh. She looks at how White women temper their appreciation of the conventionally attractive man with a tinge of embarassment. That, Bhat says, is "so revealing of their anxieties about who they might be attracted to." It's the kind of racism that casual observers would miss. In one Reel, Bhat brings in Pull and Demand Inflation to explain why you might be crushing on someone: During inflation, "things aren't getting better, but their price keeps increasing". Similarly, at moments of personal flux, your "flood of unspent attention" is likely to be poured into the nearest person, not necessarily the best one. It's the kind of relationship advice that makes more sense than Mercury being in retrograde. The academics keep busy - there's enough happening in politics and pop culture every day to fuel 30-second Reels. Last month's protests calling for the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan gave Padmakshi Sharma, a former legal journalist and independent researcher, a great opportunity for a tutorial (@Padmakshi.Sh). Her video, How to Read Like an Arts Student, helped viewers see the undercurrents of how the protests were playing out in the media: "Focus on the adjectives," she told her 93.6K followers. "Is it a legal protest or an illegal protest? Is it a moving speech or an anti-national speech? Is there any evidence to back the adjective?" The comments are filled with viewers thanking her for giving them tools to read the news critically. Other academics merely decode what you didn't notice in mass-market shows. Nihal Singh Majithia's (@NihalSinghMajithia) reviews of the 2024 fantasy drama Suhagan Chudail is one of Instagram's unlikely hits. The show has dodgy CGI and a witch who hunts husbands to stay young. But Majithia, who studied art and history, approaches it the way he would a classic by Nolan or Kurosawa. When the chudail's black cat is neutralised by a cloud of vermillion, he points out that the sindoor is a symbol of marital power. He picks up on the show's redeemable qualities. "Even the chudail has agency to make decisions, to progress in her life and her career as a witch," he says. Some Reels have 1.8 million views. Sanjana Manaktala, national initiatives and policy lead at the ed-tech non-profit Rocket Learning, follows a bunch of geeky pop culture accounts. She says that academics like Bhat and Subramanian "make cultural theory visible to people who otherwise might never encounter it" and "refuse to believe that what's happening around us is 'not that deep'." The lessons are useful. "If we apply the same critical thinking we use to solve a maths or physics problem to the way human beings relate to one another, that's essentially what pop-culture analysis is. It helps us understand ourselves. It will only become more important as AI becomes a bigger part of our lives."...