Thursday, April 06, 2006

Sholle & Denski with Stuart Hall

Like Abdullah mentioned in class tonight, I also was interested by the comments about how students have to realize how to "position themselves" when reading media. From the article:

"such a pedagogy must allow students to speak from their own experience at the same time that it encourages them to identify and unravel the codes of popular culture that may work to construct subject relations that serve to silence and disempower them. Popular culture must be viewed as a complex and contradictory sphere in which dominant culture attempts to structure experience through the porduction of meaning, and which at the same time may provide possibilities for more open democratic formations." - p. 307-308

"If we are to educate students to become media literate, we must attend to the multiple references and codes that position them." - p.309

I've been reading an amazing book over the last couple of weeks - Promises to Keep: Cultural Studies, Democratic Education, and Public Life edited by Greg Dimitriadis and Dennis Carlson. It is full of great chapters, mostly from that cultural studies perspective. In a chapter by Norman Denzin called "Screening Race", he makes some interesting statements around a quote by Stuart Hall:

"Popular culture, Stuart Hall reminds us is mythic, a theater of desires, a space of popular fantasies. 'It is where we go to discover who we are'(1996, p.474). And in answering this extistential question, we find that our gendered conceptions of self and Other are grounded always in misplaced notions of racial difference, of whiteness and privilege. We must always be on guard concerning what we learn about ourselves."

This is exactly what the positioning seems to be - students asking themselves - what do I know about myself, about others, and how has the media shaped that knowing? Do I see myself reflected or created by media? Do I challenge the presentation or representation or re/presentation?

I did like this article quite a bit. I reminded me of the reading from Dr. Schwarz' media literacy class. I am interested in theories that allow for us to question the dichotomy of the manipulative producers vs. the mindless masses, and the notion that a revolution in the sense of reversing these roles is the answer. Did I agree with everything - no. But overall, very enjoyable. Here's the citation for that book:

Dimitriadis, G., & Carlson, D. (2003). Promises to Keep: Cultural Studies, Democratic Education, and Public Life. New York: RoutledgeFalmer.

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