Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies recent issues

Introduction: The Evidence of Experience, Cultural Studies, and Personal(ized) Scholarship

Warren, J. T., Berry, K. — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:56:28 PDT

Cultural Studies and the Politics of Representation: Experience {leftrightarrow} Subjectivity {leftrightarrow} Research

Berry, K., Warren, J. T. — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:56:28 PDT

This essay examines Joan W. Scott’s (1991) essay "The Evidence of Experience" in light of cultural studies scholarship that uses personal, experiential evidence, and/or innovative/critical methodologies. The authors argue that the situated, (inter)subjective, and complex nature of this inquiry conscientiously has brought to life Scott’s call for historicizing experience, rather than blindly using it as foundational, and enthusiastically continues doing so to date. In this way, these critical methods already seek to problematize and complicate experience, even as it is used to talk toward and/ or against cultural norms.

Crimes Against Experience

Jones, S. H. — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:56:28 PDT

Scott proposes that literary approaches offer us one way to read how identities are discursively constituted and understood as and of experience. She encourages us to read for and write how histories (personal, political, and social) are constructed and constructive. This article focuses on how difference, knowledge production, and witnessing produce identities as "not something that was always already there simply waiting to be expressed, not something that will always exist in the form it was given." In particular, the author considers her experience as a mother alongside Julia Kristeva’s essay "Stabat Mater," which contrasts Catholic understandings of motherhood and femininity with her own experience of maternity, and Minne Bruce Pratt’s poetry collection Crime Against Nature, which confronts the loss of Pratt’s children following her coming out as a lesbian.

Mothers, Faggots, and Witnessing (Un)Contestable Experience

Adams, T. E. — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:56:28 PDT

In this essay, I make two suggestions about personal experience represented in writing. First, I suggest that this experience can be contested when the conditions and the representation of experience are critiqued rather than the experience itself. Second, I suggest that personal experience represented in writing, for example, an autoethnography, can also be "uncontestable" (Scott, 1991, p. 777). An autoethnography is not a disembodied text. A body, a subject, a vulnerable body and subject, is intertwined with and constituted by this text. As such, it becomes difficult to disentangle an autoethnographic representation from its corresponding, constituted-via-this-representation body and subject, thus making a critique of the text a critique of the life.

Reflecting on the Experience of Injury at Virginia Tech

Brower, J. — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:56:28 PDT

In the aftermath of the killing at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007, a vast amount of media coverage has been dedicated to the personal accounts of those affected by the disaster. Guided by the presumption that a subject’s account of what he or she observes and feels faithfully reflects reality, the uncritical elevation of experience naturalizes accounts of injury produced by the event itself. Framed by Joan W. Scott’s examination of the evidence of experience, I consider how foundational treatments of experience are used to narrate the disaster, effectively leading to its dehistoricization. In response, I propose a reading of the event that considers the question, "What does it means to be injured?" as a starting point for historicizing experience.

Beyond Experience

Pollock, D. — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:56:28 PDT

In response to the essays by Brower, Adams, and Jones in this volume, this essay argues against the ocular-empiricism of eyewitness by which sight authenticates experience and experience authenticates the seeing-self. The logics that tie experiential fundamentalism to identity politics are inherently faulty and potentially regressive. They lock the "I" in a representational chain connecting that‘s what I saw; that‘s what happened; that‘s how things are; that‘s my/the story; that‘s who I am. Following Scott, the essay favors a critical/creative approach that immerses "experience" in political intervention and self-making.

Unspeakable Transgressions: Indigenous Epistemologies, Ethics, and Decolonizing Academy/Inquiry

Moreira, C. — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:56:28 PDT

What does happen, when "history" and "heritage" is nowhere to be found or claimed and granted? Drawing in his own mestiço heritage, the author tells the story of Geraldo in relation to his own one. Who was Geraldo? The intention is to challenge categories of knowledge that also relay in "knowledges" and social constructions, created by mechanisms of colonization even when they are created for the empowerment of the oppressed in many circumstances. The author offers visceral knowledge of growing up as and working with the poor in Brazil, to advance decolonizing discourse that may lead to more inclusive notions of social justice questioning the uncontrolled desire to categorize and control the Other. Through a layered text with a blurred aesthetic format, which mixes life stories and academic scholarship, the author asks: Can these borders, legacies, and injustices be transgressed? Can my body be transgressive as a form of scholarship?

Checking the Box: A Journey Through My Hybrid Identity

Ceisel, C. M. — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:56:29 PDT

"Checking the Box: A Journey Through My Hybrid Identity" is a performance piece, examining the social construction of ethnic identity and the sociopolitical processes that are brought to bear on self-definition and group identification. Deploying autoethnography, this multivocal text explores the historical conditions and political and economic exigencies that have shaped my experience of hybridity—as a multiethnic individual, negotiating my identity in contemporary U.S. society. I map my journey, through competing discourses, histories, and media-generated memories, arriving back at the beginning. Ultimately, the piece seeks to highlight the strategic logic employed by those caught "between" dominant representations and capture the experience of navigating that terrain.

Democracy's Nemesis: The Rise of the Corporate University

Giroux, H. A. — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:56:29 PDT

This essay focuses on how higher education has been reshaped under the influence of a market rationality, however devalued recently, that continues to license out the university as a storefront, reconfigure governance on the model of a discredited business model, reduce faculty to contract labor, and position students largely as customers. Against the increasing corporatization of higher education, the essay calls for reclaiming education as crucial to the project of democratization, educating students to be willing and able to engage the relationship between equality and social justice as fundamental to public life, and provide the conditions for educators to connect their teaching to broader social issues.

The Usual Suspect: Negotiating White Student Resistance and Teacher Authority in a Predominantly White Classroom

Rodriguez, D. — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 01:19:37 PDT

Both feminist and critical pedagogues have addressed how students can critically analyze social structures and have complicated teacher students interaction, as well as issues of subjectivity and multiculturalism. Despite the many contributions by such scholars, most studies have failed to address the professor's racial/ethnic identity. More specifically, liberatory pedagogues do not consider the racialized and gendered teacher, failing to problematize issues of power and authority when dealing with teachers of color. In this article, the author uses autoethnography and critical race theory as frameworks to understand her experiences as a Latina professor when "being held suspect" and dealing with White student resistance. Being held suspect for being the Other, she addresses how to negotiate power and authority as a female faculty of color, offering strategies in dealing with color-blind ideology, White privilege, and White racism in the academy.

Othering the Self: Dissonant Visual Culture and Quotidian Trauma in United States Suburbia

Gournelos, T. — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 01:19:37 PDT

At a time when American politics has reached an almost uncanny level of absurdity in its self-contradictions, nationalistic appeals, and stunning disregard for large majorities of the population, it becomes increasingly necessary to look for clues as to why various public spheres speak and exist and how those interested in change can locate and infiltrate nodes of instability or change. Rhetoric surrounding the suburbs in high and popular culture provides such a framework, as it maps out areas of creation and consumption that have great appeal but are either logically incoherent or dangerously fragmented. This article enters the discussion through Gregory Crewdson's famous staged photographs before turning to traumatic identity in the films Pleasantville, American Beauty, and True Lies. The resulting dissonant political ambiguity in daily life suggests a new, flexible line of postmodern discourse in the post-9/11 public spheres.

Politics, Performativity, Autopoiesis: Toward a Discourse Systems Theory of Political Culture

Kidwell, K. S. — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 01:19:37 PDT

As a field of critical inquiry, cultural studies has engaged with the political primarily at the level of cultural politics—the politics of culture—and has all too often neglected political culture—the culture of politics. Although the emergence of cultural policy studies since the late 1980s has remedied this deficiency to some degree, cultural studies approaches politics and governmental policy primarily insofar as they impinge on a cultural domain bounded by the aesthetic and the intellectual. This essay addresses this lacuna in the cultural studies gaze by elaborating a discourse systems theory of political culture based on Michel Foucault's theory of discourse in The Archaeology of Knowledge, speech act theory, and autopoietic systems theory. The essay argues that political culture is an autopoietic, performative discourse system that regulates the production of political knowledge and the performance of political action.

Faking It: The Necessary Blind Spots of Understanding

Kolcio, K., Gerdes, E. — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 01:19:37 PDT

Scholarly research in the field of dance begins with the methodological premise that some things are only effectively known through their enactment. This article utilizes movement practice as a site for cultural research. The imminent, fluctuating and heightened physicality of movement research, reconstructed here in writing, contributes a different perspective toward the understanding of authenticity in relation to the construction of knowledge. The article is written in the present tense from the perspective of the protagonist to convey the ethnographic site in progress, and to highlight the visceral aspect of the issues at hand.

(Re)Mediatizing HIV/AIDS in South Africa

Tomaselli, K. G. — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 01:19:37 PDT

Written from a partly autoethnographic perspective, this article investigates current and past South African government stances on HIV/AIDS, grounding them in their larger political and ideological contexts, and examining the broader repercussions. A comparative analysis of South Africa's loveLife and STEPS interventions problematizes the self-branding used by loveLife in favor of the uplifting and humanizing message of STEPS. The author highlights the dangers of favoring AIDS solutions seeped in racial and cultural discourse over scientific ones and calls for the country's current HIV/AIDS strategy to be (re)mediatized in terms of its local and global representations. The idea of sham reasoning is discussed in relation to the generation of pseudoscientific discourses.

Introduction: Daily Sacrifices From Plato to Carey

Christians, C. G. — Fri, 15 May 2009 14:04:36 PDT

Critical Pedagogy and Democratic Life or a Radical Democratic Pedagogy

Denzin, N. K. — Fri, 15 May 2009 14:04:36 PDT

James Carey, the American University, and the General Moral and Intellectual Point of View

Adam, G. S. — Fri, 15 May 2009 14:04:36 PDT

The author describes how James Carey viewed and then judged the American university, its curriculum, and the forms of scholarship it rewards. Carey believed that the university had ceased to be an autonomous institution and, following the lead of the Canadian theorist Harold Innis, argued that its culture had been penetrated by interests representing the state, corporate commitments, and the professions. He said the modern curriculum fosters the formation of experts rather than citizens. The essay concludes with an analysis of how Carey sought to reconnect university education to democratic life and to what he called the "general moral and intellectual point of view."

Cultural Studies Legacies: Visiting James Carey's Border Country

Chakravarty, S. S. — Fri, 15 May 2009 14:04:36 PDT

A generally forgotten figure in the proliferating discursive spaces of an international cultural studies, James Carey was nevertheless one of the first to explore actively the interstices and to show the overt connections between media, culture, politics, and society. He integrated the study of media (and media as technology) into the broader processes of cultural and educational politics, a kind of convergence that is increasingly being called for today.

A New Sun: Democracy, the Public, and Journalism Education

Shenton, S. G-M. — Fri, 15 May 2009 14:04:36 PDT

Professor James W. Carey, former dean emeritus of the College of Communications at the University of Illinois at Urbana—Champaign, encouraged his students to study the ideas of Professor John Dewey, one of America's leading philosophers, teachers, and communications scholars. Dewey's work is not easily accessible, however. The manifold questions he asked in the process of reaching answers to his key concerns and hundreds of related questions fill (at least) 36 books and 815 articles, in which one writer insists there is not one eminently quotable line. Nonetheless, Carey maintained that studying Dewey's conversation was a key to understanding both democracy and journalism, which he maintained are synonymous.

How to Study Communication: Notes on a Method

Waite, C. — Fri, 15 May 2009 14:04:36 PDT

Carey's call for a uniquely American form of cultural studies challenged the dominant paradigm of media effects research in the late 1970s. Even today, his work cannot be easily categorized. How then can we replicate his method in order to teach his way of doing scholarship? The discipline of communication has the potential to reveal how the structures of cities, of print, of voice, of digital media, as well as the structure of our ideas all privilege certain experiences over others. His configured style was a methodological choice that indicated by implication what had been relatively invisible within our discipline. What we can know through the progression of a linear argument and what one can discern through an emergent configural pattern will differ. These two approaches illustrate different ways of knowing. The challenge is to learn to recognize this crucial difference, as it relates to our choice of methodologies.

A Global University for a Global Village

Umpleby, S. A., Mekhonoshin, K., Vladimirov, Z. — Fri, 15 May 2009 14:04:36 PDT

The Internet and educational reform efforts are creating a global network of universities. The ability of faculty members and students to communicate with each other independent of location has dramatically improved. In terms of administration, universities still function as separate entities. However, efforts to share information and to collaborate on research and teaching now encounter few barriers once personal computers and networks are available. This article reviews the technical, political, and administrative changes that have created this global system for learning. It suggests some implications for research and teaching, for individuals, institutions, and societies. The article also describes what universities and other organizations can do to strengthen and expand the global academic community. From a theoretical point of view, the "global academic community" is compared with discussions of a "global brain."

Toward a Technography of Everyday Life: The Methodological Legacy of James W. Carey's Ecology of Technoculture as Communication

Vannini, P., Hodson, J., Vannini, A. — Fri, 15 May 2009 14:04:36 PDT

This article identifies Carey's contributions to the concept of technoculture and attempts to systematize his writings on communication, culture, and technology in order to craft a methodological strategy for the study of technoculture based on participant observation and contemporary ethnographic practices of representation. After introducing a definition of technoculture, we outline how technography—the study of technoculture in everyday life—builds upon two sensitizing metaphors: technoculture as ecology and as semiosis. The discussion of technography shows the potential of this research strategy for the study of the symbolic interaction among technics, technological practices, social agents, and the natural environment.

Obituary: James W. Carey (September 7,1934-May 23, 2006)

Fri, 15 May 2009 14:04:36 PDT

Citation of James W. Carey for the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters by the University of Illinois

Aiken, M., Stukel, J. — Fri, 15 May 2009 14:04:36 PDT

Nurturing Racism: Taking Race and Kids (Popular) Culture Seriously

King, C. R. — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:30:17 PDT

Home on the Range: Kids, Visual Culture, and Cognitive Equity

Roth, L. — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:30:17 PDT

This essay focuses on Binney and Smith's creation and marketing of Crayola fleshtone art products from the late 1950s until the mid-1990s, analyzing the company's shifting nomenclature--from "flesh" to "peach" to its multicultural collection. After reflecting on the significance of Crayola's color adjustment for children's sociocultural and aesthetic development and for teacher's pedagogical repertoires around diversity issues, I introduce an original notion--cognitive equity. I propose this as a refined way of understanding racial and cultural equity issues that don't just revolve around statistics and access to institutions, but also inscribes a new normative vision of skin color equity directly into technologies, products, and body representations in a range of visual media. At the very early stage of children's cognitive development when stereotypes and racisms are being formed, this would be a particularly intelligent design strategy in which to reinforce multiculturalism and multiracialism in all aspects of their visual culture and the commodities that are available to them.

"They Are?!": Latino Difference vis-a-vis Dragon Tales

Serrato, P. — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:30:17 PDT

This article examines the ways that the animated children's program Dragon Tales wavers between deracinating its lead characters, Emmy and Max, and exoticizing the racialized difference that Enrique, a recent addition to the program, embodies. The analysis begins with the contention that the effacement of Latinos' physical, cultural, and linguistic differences vis-à-vis the representation of Emmy and Max constitutes an understandable strategy for neutralizing the otherness of Latinos but actually undermines multiculturalism because it fails to nurture children's ability to live fearlessly with and within difference. The program is further problematized through the argument that the crafting of Enrique only reinscribes the otherness of Latinos. With the effacement of Latino difference on one hand and the exoticization of Latino difference on the other, Dragon Tales ends up an example of a program unable to model and nurture a healthy accommodation of difference.

"Look Out New World, Here We Come"?: Race, Racialization, and Sexuality in Four Children's Animated Films by Disney, Pixar, and DreamWorks

Lugo-Lugo, C. R., Bloodsworth-Lugo, M. K. — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:30:17 PDT

In this essay, the authors argue that, as suggested by Giroux, animated films offer children intricate teachings about race and sexuality, guiding children through the complexities of highly racialized and sexualized scenarios. Moreover, the authors explain how animated films for children teach children how to maneuver within the general terrain of "race" and "sexuality," and they highlight quite specific differences. Thus, in their role as agents of socialization and "portable professors," these films provide children with the necessary tools to reinforce expectations about normalized racial and sexual dynamics.

My First Black Barbie: Transforming the Image

Raynor, S. — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:30:17 PDT

This essay addresses issues about how the image of Black Barbie dolls can transform the standards of beauty for little Black girls. This image may help the construction or even the re-construction of self and identity. Exploring and perhaps embracing the Barbie image can serve as a form of resistance for Black girls/woman, or it may even help address issues of domination, racism, sexism, and class exploitation that oppress and threaten the survival of young girls.

Can the Subaltern Shop? The Commodification of Difference in the Bratz Dolls

Guerrero, L. — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:30:17 PDT

This essay examines the recent shift in children's market popularity away from Barbie towards the hip alterity of the Bratz doll line. Tracing how race, class, and notions of "the other" have transformed the manner in which American girls are reimagining what it means to be stylish, empowered, and womanly, the essay focuses on four spaces of critical inquiry. It first considers the paradoxical investment in racial identities on which the line of Bratz dolls rely. Secondly, it interrogates the gender and sexual politics of the line. The third point of examination is the influence of materialism and commodity culture on the look, feel, and appeal of the line. Finally, it discusses the exoticization within the doll line. The "streetcred" culture with which the line exploits creates a tourist opportunity of the urban imaginary space, as well as racial identities within that space, without the messiness of the urban reality.

Cultural Appropriation and the Crafting of Racialized Selves in American Youth Organizations: Toward an Ethnographic Approach

Strong, P. T. — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:30:17 PDT

This article considers three moments in the history of Camp Fire, the first American multiracial organization for girls: (1) the foundation of the organization in the 1910s through the 1930s by progressive reformers heavily influenced by ethnological scholarship on Native American rituals and symbolism; (2) the transformation of the organization into a coeducational organization in the 1970s; and (3) current efforts in the organization, now known as Camp Fire USA, to bring its activities more in line with contemporary multiculturalism while retaining its "Indian" traditions as the organization's heritage. These three historical moments are explored through a combination of archival research, interviews, and participant-observation. As a case study, the history of Camp Fire offers the opportunity to (1) deepen our knowledge of the American tradition of "playing Indian" and (2) track changes and continuities in the relationship among race, culture, gender, and sexuality in U.S. informal education.

Alter/native Heroes: Native Americans, Comic Books, and the Struggle for Self-Definition

King, C. R. — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:30:17 PDT

This article offers a critical interpretation of Native Americans as objects and authors of comic books, an often maligned and neglected domain of kids' popular culture. The discussion begins with a brief overview of the misappropriation of Indianness in North America. Against this background, it elaborates a three-fold analysis. First, it details the prominence of anti-Indianism in comic books, particularly as means through which Euro-American authors and audiences have made claims on and through Indianness. Second, it unpacks the use of comic books to challenge and question dominant misappropriations and misunderstandings. Third, it examines the recent emergence of indigenous comics intent to use the medium to reclaim Indianness. In conclusion, it proposes that the alternative uses of comic books should be read as an excellent example of a larger movement for visual sovereignty in native North America.

Suburban Tranquility, Interrupted?: "Youth" Sporting Culture in the Shadows of American Vertigo

Giardina, M. D. — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:30:17 PDT

This article meditates on the intersection of youth culture and sport under a post-9/11 regime of neoliberal capitalism in the United States. Focusing on diverse sites ranging from Major League Baseball and the Super Bowl to Nike and adidas advertising campaigns and embodied representations of "Native American" mascots, the author draws to the fore inter/connections, dis/continuities, and cultural performances and mis/translations ongoing in the post/modern world, troubling in the process the stability of terms such as "race," "identity," "culture," and "sexuality."

Young, Black (& Brown) and Don't Give a Fuck: Virtual Gangstas in the Era of State Violence

Leonard, D. — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:30:17 PDT

The popularity and visibility of video games within American popular culture is prompted debates within from a spectrum of institutions, ranging from the media and the academy to Main Street and the political sphere. Erasing the complexity, much of the discourse focuses instead on questions of violence and the impact of gaming culture on (White) American youth. While focusing on Grand Theft: San Andreas specifically, this essay explores the culture wars surrounding American video game culture, arguing that the moral panics directed at video games and the defenses/celebrations of virtual reality operate through dominant discourses and hegemonic ideologies of race. Erasing their racial content and textual support for state violence directed at communities of color, the dominant discourse concerning youth and video games rationalizes the fear and policing of Black and Brown communities.

Ethics and the Broader Rethinking/Reconceptualization of Research as Construct

Lincoln, Y. S., Cannella, G. S. — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:30:17 PDT

The focus of this article is the conceptualization of a critical anticolonial social science that places ethics and concern for others at the forefront, while at the same time challenges the will to know others that so dominates social science research as construct. The authors propose that research examine and challenge social systems, support struggles for social justice, and construct a nonviolent revolutionary ethical consciousness.

Dreams of Control at a Distance: Gender, Surveillance, and Social Control

Monahan, T. — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:30:17 PDT

Modern surveillance systems operate upon masculine logics of disembodied control at a distance. As such, they artificially abstract bodies, identities, and interactions from social contexts in ways that both obscure and aggravate gender and other social inequalities. This article explores the gender dimensions of surveillance systems in several public domains: welfare, healthcare, and transportation. By exposing the dominant rationalities of such systems and critiquing the discourses that support them, one can challenge the supposed neutrality of such technologies and question the power relations to which they give rise. The goal of this article, therefore, is to introduce a new line of inquiry into gender and surveillance, one that perceives surveillance as operating on the level of abstraction but with embodied effects for women and men.

On the Impossibility of (Some) Critical Pedagogies: Critical Positionalities within a Binary

Warren, J. T., Davis, A. M. — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:30:17 PDT

In teaching, our teacherly bodies are always available for the interpretation and evaluation of others. Indeed, it was a first lesson for many: entering the classroom the first time and feeling those eyes reading your performance of self, deciding what kind of class (and what kind of teacher) this experience was going to offer. However, our students' reading are never theirs alone— they are produced and made possible by larger ideological struggles that produce the possibilities and impossibilities of what they (and we) can conceive. These struggles, these systemic reiterated forms work to generate binaries that often deny the complicated identities that occupy our shared spaces. In this article, we chart out and enflesh the teacher's body, asking about the invisible bodies that these binaries exclude. In particular, we ask about sexualized bodies and the binaries that erase real opportunity for critically informed democratic pedagogy.

Inventado: Between Transnational Consumption and the Gardening State in Havana's Urban Spectacle

Binkley, S. — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:30:17 PDT

This article presents a theoretically oriented photographic essay on consumer practices and urban spectacle, gathered from a visit to Havana in June of 2006. Employing Zygmunt Bauman's conception of the modern state as a "gardening state," and other widely theorized depictions of global consumer culture as a force of imaginary investment and ephemerality, the article considers the imbrication of state and market as illustrated in an impressionistic photographic study of everyday urban spectacle in the streets of Havana. The article concludes with a consideration of the plight of everyday Havanans in their effort to improvise survival strategies between the forces of a highly controlling state and a nascent culture in transnational consumerism.

"A Lot of Us Look at Life Differently": Homeless Youths and Art on the Outside

Kidd, S. A. — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:30:17 PDT

This article presents a qualitative analysis of the artistic expression of homeless youths, accompanied by examples of drawings and poetry gathered from youths in New York City and Toronto. The impacts of various forms of marginalization and the meanings youths give their work are examined. These meanings include art as being transformative, self-exploratory, communicative, and a redirection of emotional energy into an artistic medium and expressive process. Parallels are drawn between the art and the marginalization of homeless youths and forms and expressions subsumed under the L'Art Brut and Outsider Art movements.