teaching: March 2006 Archives
"... Argentineans have overwhelmingly rejected violence and demonstrated a commitment to peaceful solutions."
A student in my Mass Media class at UNH, Kirk will be presenting on alternative media in class soon. The excerpt above comes from Left Turn: Notes from the Global Intifada.
I'm curious about the history of the press's name, when, why and how did they choose intifada?
Here's a cogently argued critique of the conservative bias that seems to permeate the film.
Also posted (as a comment) are excerpts from UNH-Manchester students' quality reflections on the film.
Here's another item I'm sure I've posted before but obviously didn't catalog or code correctly for later retrieval. At any rate, I saw this short video on the powers of ten when I interpreted a science class some years back for upper elementary school students (possibly fifth-graders). I find it a useful metaphor for this notion of social metonymy that I keep trying to articulate as a means of linking the microsocial with the macrosocial and vice-versa.
Muslim women challenging conservative Islam by engaging in activities traditionally reserved for men; and simultaneously challenging conservative North American ethnocentrism by wearing the veil.
Is the hajib only/always about ideology?
Themes: freedom (what to wear, when, how), gender, and identity. The feeling isn't against 'the West', but it is about cultural imperialism: when the West tries to assert that it is a 'neutral' culture.
Wouldn't you know that Wikipedia has a link on discourse? :-) I followed some of the debate on the Association of Internet Researchers Listserv (last fall). There was a strong bias to traditional sources. Not because they're traditional (which doesn't hurt) but because of the peer review process (which has plenty of its own problems, eh?). I came down on the side of allowing students to use online sources for data and as a beginning for research, but that "facts" should be verified through an academic library.
Then I read the Wired 14.03 ping by Joi Ito, who said:
Which side will you be on? Since the successes of the New Deal - when all of the US safety nets were put in place to protect people from abject poverty and unions secured benefits for workers - management, owners, and stockholders have worked to dismantle the laws that structure these mechanisms which enable the vaunted individual "pursuit of happiness".
The assault on worker's rights has gathered momentum since the 1980s. When will the tide turn? Now, according to the NY Times, labor leaders are being equated to some of the worst political characters in history through the commercial battleground of advertising.
Viewing (again) the MEF video on Stuart Hall, Race: The Floating Signifier, in the intro to mass media course. Hall says the only way to move out of racism (and, by implication, other "isms") is to enact right practices, because outcomes can never be guaranteed (no matter how much we might wish such could be the case).
from Kathang Pinay's blog:
"Stuart Hall is famous for saying that we must practice a “politics without guarantee” because we can and must not rely on the guarantees formerly provided by religion, science, and anthropology to secure our sense of comfort in the world; that these are the very same ideologies that cemented the racial, ethnic, sex and gender, and class divisions in the modern world. But a “politics without guarantee” must always be a politics of critique of hegemony and injustice. Part of the injustice in U.S. culture is the invisibility of the privileges of race, ethnicity (white), sex and gender (straight), and class (elite) – they are invisible because they remain unmarked, and I suspect, not usually a part of the discussion of aesthetics or poetics from the postmodern perspective. When a postcolonial person calls attention to this invisibility, one may be instantly accused of politicizing poetry and therein the machinations of power begin the work of silencing."
Hall elaborates upon W.E.B. DuBois' statement about "the grosser physical differences of color, hair and bone". Here is a powerful presentation defending affirmative action.
Second lesson today. Ten degree improvement in 20 minutes. Supposedly (!), this means my "psychological system is very elastic". With practice, I ought to be able to warm my hands at will, regardless of external (or internal) stressors: this is known as field independence. This paper by Musser places field independence/dependence firmly within cognitive studies and examines its affects on learning.
These definitions seem limited - bounded by the assumptions of cognitive science. They are useful, in context. My first association of the term, field independence, is with Gestalt theory and group relations, particularly the ability to self-authorize.
"Beliefs that do not stand on our best reasons and evidence simply dangle in thin air, signifying nothing except our transient feelings or personal preferences" (3). How to Think About Weird Things (except I've got the Third Edition).
Magic
What the heck is CHEA? Which got added to the chalkboard today. Or chea chea, as it has appeared in the writing class's wiki?
The wiki is not quite ready for a full public unveiling, but perhaps by the end of next week...?
Meanwhile, some students clearly have not laughed enough, or hard enough, having apparently never snorted a drink out of their nose. I wonder if any of them have the rarer talent of blowing a beverage out of their eye? [No demonstrations, thanks.]
Now we're starting to get somewhere! Amanda and Chantel gave me a boatload of grief for taking so long to learn their names. Rich and I mudwrestled our way through a series of generalizations and imprecise language to a driving metaphor (his) about politics: the right and left wings are like the right and left tires keeping a car going in one direction. What was Adam's quip about the motorcycle? :-)
I want to clarify the concept of canalization, which is a broader term that can be used in many situations, not only technically in advertising (as I said in class): in general, it is management through specified channels of communication. My second thoughts on Rich's driving metaphor are still that "canalization" is not exactly what the political extremes "do" (their large scale function)in their interaction with each other. If my own thinking is clear, canalization refers to situations where communication (language, media) is used to deepen values or attitudes, whereas the notion of tires bounding or directing the "steering" is more a matter (function) of containment.
Meanwhile, Kirk has Carey's definition of communication down. :-) This essay compares and contrasts Carey's definition with that of Stuart Hall.
