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Moskowitz, Scott, Xi She und Chunwen Xiong. „Learning to Labour in China“. Ethnography 19, Nr. 4 (19.06.2018): 512–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1466138118784052.

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This article offers analysis of the Chinese reception and adoption of Paul Willis’s landmark book, Learning to Labour. Specifically, we recount the early introduction and translation of the book to Chinese readers and catalogue the ways in which Learning to Labour has been fruitfully applied in China, while highlighting some shortcomings in terms of the generalized Chinese interpretation of the text in translation. Despite these potential shortcomings and gaps in translation, we note the influence of Learning to Labour and its author Paul Willis on the growing interest in and commitment to ethnographic work in China and discuss its potential for increased application and relevance moving forward.
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Zhuang, Yiyang. „Ethnography and the Fate of Informal Culture: Rereading Paul Willis’ Learning to Labour“. China Nonprofit Review 11, Nr. 1 (05.11.2019): 172–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18765149-12341360.

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Abstract As the increasing discussion over social stratification and mobility indicates, the idea of “education changes destiny” has progressively been brought into question. In his classic study of British working-class boys from 1975, which is widely read in the fields of sociology, anthropology, and education, Paul Willis uncompromisingly revealed that liberal ideology about equal opportunity was only an empty promise and, more importantly, how the counter-cultural cognition and expression adopted the constraints of the structural conditions and at the same time leads to the reproduction of them. Despite the tragic mechanism behind the contradictory counter-culture, Willis remained optimistic about the radical potential in the symbolic works against dominant discourse. His in-depth ethnographic description didn’t only contribute to the endless theoretical debate about Structure and Process, but also provided a methodological approach encouraging extensive fieldwork, in which he believed the “theoretical uncertainty” lies. Ethnography can really “become the intellectual education of those who are governed,” if the scholars are willing to understand and communicate with the informal cultural groups and believe that their fate can be changed.
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Trondman, Mats, und Anna Lund. „Light, mind and spirit: Paul Willis’s Learning to Labour revisited on and beyond its 40th anniversary“. Ethnography 19, Nr. 4 (19.06.2018): 433–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1466138118783439.

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This article is an introduction to a Special Issue dedicated to Paul Willis’s classic Learning to Labour at its 40th anniversary, and beyond. His theoretically informed and theorizing ethnographic study is read, explored, and utilized all around the globe. Its use also stretches across the borders of social, cultural and educational sciences and to manifold research areas and settings. Besides laying out its main content, that is, the answers to the question of how working-class kids let themselves get working-class jobs, this article argues that the most significant contribution of Willis’s study is the way it illuminates, both theoretically and empirically, the meaning of cultural production and cultural autonomy in the midst of ongoing social reproduction of class. This introduction ends by presenting the eight contributions to the actual Special Issue, and with an invitation to Paul Willis himself to take issue with cultural production and cultural autonomy.
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Kitili, Ike M. „Learning to Labor: How Working-Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs Book Review“. International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science VII, Nr. V (2023): 1660–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.47772/ijriss.2023.70628.

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British author Paul Willis is well-known for his work in sociology and cultural studies. His writings, which place an emphasis on consumerism, socialization, and popular culture, are particularly well-liked in the fields of sociology, anthropology, and education. Currently a lecturer at Princeton University’s sociology department, he also founded and serves as editor of the worldwide magazine ethnography of stage publication. His best-selling books include the ethnographic imagination, Profane Culture, and Learning to Labor: How Working-Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs.
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Birrell, Susan. „The Loneliness of Learning to Labor“. Journal of Sport History 41, Nr. 1 (01.04.2014): 5–14. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/jsporthistory.41.1.5.

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Abstract This paper presents a case for reading sport films like The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1961) within an intertextual framework. To that end, Tony Richardson’s classic film is read alongside Paul Willis’ equally classic cultural studies text Learning to Labor (1977). Both reflect critical responses to a particular historical and cultural moment in post-World War II Great Britain. For deeper insight into the character of Colin Smith, these texts are also read next to the Alan Sillitoe (1959) novella on which the film is based. The compelling focus of each is on acts of resistance, yet in the end, each recounts an ironic tale of the reproductive power of rebellion. Taken together they explore in different ways the troubling suggestion that, satisfying as these acts might be, they can operate as a form of entrapment.
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Tarlau, Rebecca Senn. „The Social(ist) Pedagogies of the MST: Towards New Relations of Production in the Brazilian Countryside“. education policy analysis archives 21 (30.04.2013): 41. http://dx.doi.org/10.14507/epaa.v21n41.2013.

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This article explores the social(ist) pedagogies of the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST), a large agrarian social movement that fights for socialism in the Brazilian countryside, meaning that workers own their own means of production and collectively produce the food and other products necessary for their communities’ survival. Over the past three decades, activists in the movement have developed an alternative educational proposal for rural schooling that supports these new social relations of production. Drawing on major theories of reproduction, cultural production, and resistance in the field of education, I argue that three theorists—Paul Willis, Paulo Freire, and Antonio Gramsci—are critical in assessing the role of schools in processes of social reproduction. I examine four components of the MST’s social(ist) pedagogy: the incorporation of manual labor into public schools; the promotion of collective learning; counter-cultural production; and linking schools to concrete political struggles. Drawing on Willis, Freire, and Gramsci, I argue that the MST’s educational proposal is a limited but real attempt to interrupt dominant social relations of production in the Brazilian countryside, thus representing a unique example of social pedagogy in the 21 century.
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Sernhede, Ove. „From learning to labour to custody for the precariat“. Ethnography 19, Nr. 4 (19.11.2018): 531–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1466138118780134.

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The globally reported riots in the poor high-rise suburbs of Sweden’s metropolitan districts in 2013 were stark manifestations of the increased social and economic inequality of the past 30 years. Large groups of young adults acted out their unarticulated claims for social justice. In the light of the riots, it is relevant to ask whether any trace of resistance or protest can be found in the compulsory school where the young people from these neighbourhoods spend their days. The ethnography sampled for the article comes from two public schools in two poor, multi-ethnic, high-rise neighbourhoods on the outskirts of Gothenburg. The article argues that the theoretical and methodological concepts and perspectives developed by Willis still is of crucial importance to any investigation aimed at understanding the presence or absence of resistance in contemporary Swedish schools.
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Krange, Olve, und Ketil Skogen. „When the lads go hunting: The ‘Hammertown mechanism’ and the conflict over wolves in Norway“. Ethnography 12, Nr. 4 (25.11.2011): 466–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1466138110397227.

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Rural communities are changing. Depopulation and unemployment is accompanied by the advance of new perspectives on nature, where protection trumps resource extraction. These developments are perceived as threatening by rural working-class people with close ties to traditional land use – a situation they often meet with cultural resistance. Cultural resistance is not necessarily launched against institutionalized power, nor does it necessarily imply a desire for fundamental social change. It should rather be seen as a struggle for autonomy. However, autonomy does not entail influence outside the cultural realm. Struggles to uphold traditional rural lifestyles – for example by denouncing the current nature conservation regime – could be understood in much the same conceptual framework as Willis employed in ‘Learning to labour’. Based on an ethnographic study of the conflicts over wolf protection, we demonstrate that ‘the Hammertown mechanism’ is of a more general nature than often implied in the discussion of Willis’ work.
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Savira, Siti Ina. „MAKING SENSE OF ETHNOGRAPHY: FROM AN OUTSIDER PERSPECTIVE“. Jurnal Psikologi Teori dan Terapan 1, Nr. 2 (19.02.2011): 82. http://dx.doi.org/10.26740/jptt.v1n2.p82-87.

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his paper is aimed to compare two ethnographic works Learning to Labour (Willis, 1977), and Masculinity Beyond the Metropolis (Kenway, Kraack, & Hickey-Moody, 2004). The comparison is expected to illustrate how to make sense ethnographic work as a research methodology with its various types of epistemology and approach. The review will begin with a brief outline of the studies as described in each book and follow with further elaboration directed by several headings that covers Crotty (1998) four elements, namely epistemology, theoretical perspective, methodology, and method. It will also discuss the knowledge and values, and the theory of culture of each study.
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Trondman, Mats. „Educating Mats: Encountering Finnish ‘lads’ and Paul Willis's Learning to Labour in Sweden“. Ethnography 19, Nr. 4 (19.06.2018): 446–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1466138118782551.

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In this paper the author himself tells an auto-ethnographical tale about how he came to read and understand Paul Willis's Learning to Labour (1977) in the late 1970s as a 22-year-old non-qualified junior high school teacher of Finnish ‘lads’ whose parents had come to Sweden as industrial workers in the late 1960s and early1970s. While most of these ‘lads’ came to reproduce class, the author himself continued to higher education to become a ‘class traveller’. Hence, cultural production and cultural autonomy can work in more than one way, even at the very same time.
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Lund, Anna. „Time, memory and class: The unintended consequences of the bourgeois gaze“. Ethnography 19, Nr. 4 (18.06.2018): 548–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1466138118780863.

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In this article, I argue that currently there is a middle-class bias that dominates in sociological culture and structures the ways the discipline operates as a form of bourgeois gaze. These forms of regulation and structuration within the discipline are also visible in Paul Willis's book Learning to Labour (1977), and they need to be illuminated, problematized and challenged if the discipline is to be able to contribute meaningfully and critically to an enlargement of its approach to sociological analysis, including the analysis of class and youth culture. My attempt is to make an exposure and reconsider Learning to Labour through the lens of time, memory and class, by performing an additional reading of the ‘the lads’ orientation toward different temporalities and conscious practices of memory work.
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Nolan, Kathleen. „‘I’m a kid from the Bronx’: A reflection on the enduring contributions of Willis’s cultural production perspective in Learning to Labour“. Ethnography 19, Nr. 4 (06.06.2018): 464–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1466138118780869.

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In this essay, the author discusses the enduring significance of Paul Willis’s theorizations of cultural production and social reproduction as delineated in his classic work, Learning to Labour (1977). She reflects on the ways Willis’s theory informs her experiences as a high school teacher and, later, as an ethnographer examining school policing in the Bronx. The author uses data on her research participants’ experiences of schooling, the police, and the labour market within the context of neoliberal capitalism, ghettoization, and the intensified use of police force to show how a cultural production lens can provide important insights into the collective and spatialized experience of racial and class oppression. Further, the author argues that despite intensified repression in schools attended by poor and working class students of colour in US ghettoized areas, the transformative impulses within non-conformity signal a cogent social critique and can become a springboard for political action.
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Dinsmore, Brooke. „Theorizing race and cultural autonomy in education: An extension of differentiation and integration in Paul Willis’s Learning to Labour“. Ethnography 19, Nr. 4 (13.06.2018): 496–511. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1466138118781635.

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This paper addresses a misreading of Willis’s Learning to Labour within the American sociology of education, arguing that his central theoretical move, the treatment of cultural production as autonomous from social reproduction, has been neglected. Willis’s concepts of differentiation and integration extend dominant cultural approaches to racial inequality in education, theorizing how youth’s oppositional countercultures emerge through conflict with the institutional logic of schools. However, Willis’s theorization must be extended to account for race in addition to class and gender. Using black working-class boys in American schools as a comparison case, this paper argues that race alters the temporality of differentiation, with black boys perceived as noncompliant and disruptive by teachers prior to participating in high school oppositional countercultures. In response, black boys develop strategies of integration, managing their cultural performances to re-establish the terms of the educational exchange. These strategies may help facilitate class mobility for black youth.
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Davis, Emily, Amy Webster, Bethany Whiteside und Lorna Paul. „Dance for Multiple Sclerosis: A Systematic Review“. International Journal of MS Care 25, Nr. 4 (01.07.2023): 176–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.7224/1537-2073.2022-088.

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CE INFORMATION ACTIVITY AVAILABLE ONLINE: To access the article and evaluation online, go to https://www.highmarksce.com/mscare. TARGET AUDIENCE: The target audience for this activity is physicians, advanced practice clinicians, nursing professionals, social workers, rehabilitation professionals, and other health care providers involved in the management of patients with multiple sclerosis (MS). LEARNING OBJECTIVE: Describe the feasibility and potential effects of dance to improve functional, psychosocial, and participation outcomes in people with MS. Explain the limitations of current evidence for dance on functional and psychosocial outcomes in persons with MS in order to better inform patient recommendations. ACCREDITATION: In support of improving patient care, this activity has been planned and implemented by the Consortium of Multiple Sclerosis Centers (CMSC) and Intellisphere, LLC. The CMSC is jointly accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME), the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education (ACPE), and the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC), to provide continuing education for the healthcare team. This activity was planned by and for the health care team, and learners will receive 1.0 Interprofessional Continuing Education (IPCE) credit for learning and change. PHYSICIANS: The CMSC designates this journal-based activity for a maximum of 1.0 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s)™. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity. NURSES: The CMSC designates this enduring material for 1.0 contact hour of nursing continuing professional development (NCPD) (none in the area of pharmacology). PSYCHOLOGISTS: This activity is awarded 1.0 CE credits. SOCIAL WORKERS: As a Jointly Accredited Organization, the CMSC is approved to offer social work continuing education by the Association of Social Work Boards (ASWB) Approved Continuing Education (ACE) program. Organizations, not individual courses, are approved under this program. Regulatory boards are the final authority on courses accepted for continuing education credit. Social workers completing this course receive 1.0 general continuing education credits. DISCLOSURES: It is the policy of the Consortium of Multiple Sclerosis Centers to mitigate all relevant financial disclosures from planners, faculty, and other persons that can affect the content of this CE activity. For this activity, all relevant disclosures have been mitigated. Francois Bethoux, MD, editor in chief of the International Journal of MS Care (IJMSC), has served as physician planner for this activity. He has disclosed no relevant financial relationships. Alissa Mary Willis, MD, associate editor of IJMSC, has disclosed no relevant financial relationships. Authors Emily Davis, BA; Amy Webster, MSc; Bethany Whiteside, PhD; and Lorna Paul, PhD, have disclosed no relevant financial relationships. The staff at IJMSC, CMSC, and Intellisphere, LLC who are in a position to influence content have disclosed no relevant financial relationships. Laurie Scudder, DNP, NP, continuing education director at CMSC, has served as a planner and reviewer for this activity. She has disclosed no relevant financial relationships. METHOD OF PARTICIPATION: Release Date: July 1, 2023. Valid for credit through July 1, 2024. To receive CE credit, participants must: (1) Review the continuing education information, including learning objectives and author disclosures.(2) Study the educational content.(3) Complete the evaluation, which is available at https://www.highmarksce.com/mscare. Statements of Credit are awarded upon successful completion of the evaluation. There is no fee to participate in this activity. DISCLOSURE OF UNLABELED USE: This educational activity may contain discussion of published and/or investigational uses of agents that are not approved by the FDA. The CMSC and Intellisphere, LLC do not recommend the use of any agent outside of the labeled indications. The opinions expressed in the educational activity are those of the faculty and do not necessarily represent the views of the CMSC or Intellisphere, LLC. DISCLAIMER: Participants have an implied responsibility to use the newly acquired information to enhance patient outcomes and their own professional development. The information presented in this activity is not meant to serve as a guideline for patient management. Any medications, diagnostic procedures, or treatments discussed in this publication should not be used by clinicians or other health care professionals without first evaluating their patients’ conditions, considering possible contraindications or risks, reviewing any applicable manufacturer’s product information, and comparing any therapeutic approach with the recommendations of other authorities.
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Hadberg, Anders Vedel. „The methodology of Paul Willis. A review of "Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids get Working Class Jobs"“. Athenea Digital. Revista de pensamiento e investigación social 1, Nr. 9 (01.05.2006). http://dx.doi.org/10.5565/rev/athenea.275.

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Hadberg, Anders Vedel. „The methodology of Paul Willis. A review of "Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids get Working Class Jobs"“. Athenea Digital. Revista de pensamiento e investigación social 1, Nr. 9 (01.05.2006). http://dx.doi.org/10.5565/rev/athenead/v1n9.275.

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Noble, Greg, und Megan Watkins. „On the Arts of Stillness: For a Pedagogy of Composure“. M/C Journal 12, Nr. 1 (30.01.2009). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.130.

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We live in an era in which the ‘active learner’ has become accepted as the fundamental goal of good teaching from early childcare to university education (Silberman; University of Melbourne University). In this paper we reflect upon the arts of stillness in contemporary classrooms based on research in schools across Sydney (Watkins and Noble).Part of the context for this paper is the way ‘activity’ has been uncritically elevated to a pedagogic principle in contemporary education. Over several decades a critique of traditional or more formal approaches to education has produced an increasing emphasis on learning that is said to be more engaged often under labels such as ‘discovery’ or ‘experiential’ learning, enquiry methods or ‘learning by doing’. This desire to give students a greater role in the educational process is admirable. It is also seen to be more democratic and ‘relevant’ to young people (Cope & Kalantzis). Positioned against a straw man of ‘passive learning’, characterised by the dominance of teacher direction, rote learning and individuated desk work, this active learning or progressivist perspective on education privileges student ‘ownership’ of curriculum, group-based activity and the ‘doing’ of things. Stillness is characterised as a ‘problem of passivity’, a ‘disease’ of ‘chalk and talk’ (Lucas 84-85). In its most extreme form, this emphasis on activity has been translated into ‘educational kinesiology’ and ‘brain gym’, in which physical movement is seen to have a direct, beneficial effect on learning, often in place of content-based curriculum (Lucas 50). In this paper we don’t engage in a critique of ‘active learning’ per se; rather, taking seriously Foucault’s insistence on the productivity of discipline, we argue stillness is crucial to scholarly labour.Part of the context for this research is public anxiety about ‘Asian success’ within Australian education systems. Students from ‘Asian’ backgrounds are often perceived as having a cultural proneness towards educational achievement (Duffy 28). These perceptions rest on assumptions about ‘Asian values’ of family, sacrifice, hard work and success (Robinson). These assumptions, however, are problematic (Wu and Singh), and carry a concern that such students are ‘passive’ in the classroom, deferential to traditional forms of education and obsessed with exams. Certainly, despite their success, these students don’t conform to what many teachers favour as the ideal learner within the dominant paradigm of progressivism (Cope & Kalantzis 4). These anxieties have also emerged in response to the proliferation of coaching colleges which are seen to transgress western notions of childhood.The research – based on a parent survey in 10 primary schools, interviews with Year 3 teachers, parents and students and classroom observations in six of these schools – explored the extent to which a ‘disposition’ to academic achievement can be explained by ethnicity or relates to a complex set of socio-cultural factors. The report from this study engages with the broad question of the relationship between ethnicity and, what we call, following Bourdieu, the ‘scholarly habitus’ (Watkins & Noble). Against a pathologising of cultural background, it examines the ways achievement is embodied as orientations to learning through different home and school practices. Here we use examples drawn from the observations to focus on the capacities for self-discipline and stillness that can foster achievement. Against the tendency to equate stillness with inaction, we argue that a 'productive stillness' underlines capacities for sustained attention and self-direction. This bodily discipline entails a state of composure, a 'staying' of movement which entails a readiness for action necessary for academic tasks. While not all stillness is ‘productive’, we argue there are forms of stillness which are conducive to the formation of the 'scholarly habitus' (Bourdieu, Logic). The Bodily Capacity for Scholarly LabourBourdieu (State) refers to dispositions that are valued in education: self-discipline, the ability to work intensively, confidence, independence, contemplation, abstraction and the value of excellence. Yet he is less interested in exploring these capacities in relation to teaching practice than in discussing them as forms of social distinction. Educational applications of Bourdieu also focus on the social reproduction of inequality, separate to the technical competencies of schooling, although Bourdieu does not differentiate between them (Lareau and Weininger). To understand the uneven distribution of educational competencies, however, they first need to be examined as bodily capacities that are enabling.To do this, let us contrast two classrooms in Broughton PS, a large school in a low-to-mid SES area in Sydney’s inner south-west with large numbers of Arabic-speaking and Asian students, and smaller groups of Anglo, Pasifika and African students. One class is an enrichment class, in which high ability students are placed and where there is a strong focus on academic work. The other class has many of the least able students. The enrichment class comprises students of mostly Chinese background, with a smaller number of Vietnamese, Indian and Anglo background. There is one Arabic-speaking student but no Pasifika students. The second class is more diverse, and has many Pasifika students, with fewer Chinese, Arabic and Anglo students.The first time we saw the enrichment class was after recess. Students shuffled into their classroom and sat down at their desks with minimum fuss. Many of them pulled out books and read them while waiting for their teacher, Heather, to enter. If they talked, it was quietly, and often about what they were reading. They sat still: the posture of most students was upright, even when they were working. Some students occasionally rocked back, stretching arms and legs. Overall, however, these students had mastered the arts of stillness. Sonia, of Chinese background, is a case in point – she was always work-focused, sitting still and getting on with it. Even during unstructured discussion she remained task-orientated displaying a substantial investment in her work.In the second class the students bustled in, taking a while to settle. Kids stood around chatting, playing, shoving each other until the teacher, Betty, shouted at them, which she did a lot. The noise of the students never abated, even as the teacher was giving instructions, and it frequently reached high levels. There was constant movement as students came in late, and teachers and students wandered in and out. Kids visited other kids; one student rolled on the floor. When they were directed to sit at the front, several squatted, some sat away from the area, several simply stood. When they were at their desks, many slouched forward or leant back; a large number of the students rocked on their chairs during the sessions, some constantly. The directions of the teacher to put ‘feet on floor’ and ‘hands on heads’, or putting her fingers to her lips to gesture for them to be quiet, shouting or by counting back from 5 had little effect. This class was a very active group, but little work got done. They did not have sustained capacities of stillness appropriate for academic activities. In the enrichment class, the teacher didn’t have to check noise or movement very often – the students had internalised these behaviours as capacities that directed their work. Occasionally, they policed each other if they were disrupted. There was occasional talk, but it tended to be in whispers. If the task required it, there was plenty of discussion; and some of the students didn’t hesitate in challenging the teacher when she made a mistake. These students’ stillness and quiet was by-and-large productive and appropriate. We call this a state of composure, a readiness for activity. When required, this class was capable of concentration and application; or, alternatively, discussion. We call it composure because it links to Foucault’s (162-3) insight that modern forms of discipline rest on a ‘composition of forces’ which not only produce an efficient organisation but individuals with a disposition towards acting skilfully.Betty’s class, in contrast, was in a state of decomposure, with unproductive movement and noise. They were rarely still, posture was poor, and many students spent little time attending to work or the teacher. They were rarely ready for work when the teacher called them to it. Rather they saw a change in activity as a chance for movement and chatter. This was not the caged resentment that Willis described in his analysis of resistance to school amongst working class boys. It was not a form of conscious insubordination, though a similar form of ‘self-damnation’ was evident.Sonny, a Samoan boy in this class, in contrast to Sonia, struggled to stay on-task for more than a few minutes, and clearly had little investment in his work. He generally didn’t care where he was at with the task, and expected the teacher to constantly direct him. Sonny was a very large child – the teacher commented that his physical presence in the class was an ongoing problem as he was unaware of other children, constantly bowling them over. The teacher struggled to manage Sonny’s body. He talked frequently and loudly, and leant back on his chair despite being placed in a way that pinned him against a cupboard. His location in the class was telling. He was sitting at a table with students who followed tasks, separated from the usual troublemakers. This is significant for another reason of which Sonny was not fully conscious. At one stage in the lesson he sat bolt upright and pointing at each of his tablemates, yelled, ‘Miss, why am I sitting with all Chinese?’ Betty apparently hoped that being with the quieter Chinese students Sonny would not only be out of harm’s way, he might absorb the skills of application they possessed!This uneven distribution of capacities was also seen in the way different classes undertook a maths assessment task on fractions. While other classes treated it as a general lesson, in the enrichment class it was completed in test conditions, which the teacher later commented the kids loved. The teacher explained the task and the conditions – that there should be no copying, to work in silence, concentrate on the questions, the amount of time they’d get and what to do when they finished (further maths work). She initiated an enthusiastic class discussion of the topic (fractions), reminded them of work they had completed in this area and got them to go through basic aspects of fractions. The task was distributed and students immediately filled in their name and the date. When they commenced their work she moved around the room monitoring their progress. Occasionally she directed a student to reread the instructions and towards the end she reminded them to check their work and then gave them a five-minute warning. There was little movement, fiddling or talk, unless it was a question of clarification directed to the teacher. Most finished and moved quickly onto their maths workbooks. There was a lively discussion afterwards as the class went through the questions and discussed the answers and procedure. Overall, there was a clear sense of a strong investment in the process and the product: with many showing real annoyance when they got things wrong, and deep pleasure when they were correct. While the contrast between these classes is clear, and show an uneven distribution of particular capacities, we should be careful not to make a simple assumption that stillness, quiet and obedience are good, and their opposites bad. Apart from the fact that the enrichment class showed itself capable of vociferous and physical behaviour (as when they were completing a craft activity), the point is really about the appropriateness and productivity of these embodied competencies for particular tasks, and the ability to move between these capacities when necessary.Stillness, and its attendant capacities described above, is not a good in and of itself. There is another kind of stillness that we found in a class in another school we observed. Chestervale PS was in a middle class area in a northern suburb of Sydney that was favoured by parents of Chinese background. This class was by no means as unruly as Sonny’s – classroom behaviour was generally well managed by the teacher, and the students were fairly adept at following tasks. Two students we observed – Walter (of Chinese background) and Eric (of Anglo background) – seemed at first glance to be well-behaved students who did their work. Watching these boys for several hours, however, we became aware of the fact that for large chunks of the classroom time they did nothing, but were not recognised as doing so. Walter spent 45 minutes without adding anything to his writing – a straightforward comprehension task. This was also run in near-test-like conditions of quiet concentration, and Walter, apart from a few minor distractions, seemed to be focused on the pages in front of him but actually wrote nothing in the lesson. The teacher strolled around checking students’ work and giving advice or praise as needed – she managed the class quite well – but seemed not to notice when she checked Walter’s work that he hadn’t written anything. Eric, rather more obviously distracted, but who nevertheless seemed to complete 1-2 questions, got by with little work by being, like Walter, generally quiet. His distractions amounted to little more than staring at the contents of the shelf next to him and fidgeting. Walter and Eric were acquiring specific types of capacities – skills in getting out of work that are also fundamentally unproductive. Walter’s general abilities allowed him to float through the class, but Eric’s failure to develop productive capacities was demonstrated in his poor reading and writing levels. We don’t wish to participate in the academic romanticisation of such tactics as ‘resistance’, however, because while this ‘ordinary art’ is diversionary it does not ultimately work to ‘the advantage’ of the student (de Certeau 29-31). Rather, it is simply disabling.This example highlights two important points. First, as mentioned, stillness and quiet are not in themselves signs of educational ‘productivity’ – such capacities always have to be seen in context, related to specific tasks and aims. Many teachers may encourage stillness and quiet – even reward it – simply because it produces an orderly classroom. Second, we should be wary of looking to ethnicity as an explanation of the uneven distribution of capacities: Eric, as an Anglo student, isn’t subject to the kind of cultural pathologising usually reserved for students of particular ethnic backgrounds and Walter, clearly, did not match the stereotype of an academically engaged Chinese student. These issues are taken up in the larger report. Disciplining the Scholarly HabitusOur point is not just to outline some differences in abilities, but to begin to analyse how these contribute to the dispositions, or lack thereof, of the scholarly habitus, to think about how these capacities relate to particular kinds of practices at home and school which instil specific kinds of discipline, and thus eventually to elaborate links between schooling and cultural background. Neither popular pathologies of cultural difference nor sociologies of education which reduce these complexities to either class or gender adequately account for the capacities and practices at stake here (Watkins and Noble).The comparative account of these vignettes of classroom practice provide examples of different disciplinary forms demonstrating the ways in which school structures and pedagogic practices affect students’ engagement in learning and overall performance at school. As indicated, the notion of discipline used here does not simply pertain to control, operating as a negative force inhibiting learning – though a disabling discipline of control was apparent in the pedagogy some teachers employed and also framed some whole school practices. Discipline, here, has a broader meaning. As Foucault intended, it also refers to the knowledge and skills which need to be mastered in order to achieve success in particular fields. Foucault famously analyses the roles of discipline in the functioning of modern institutions. He describes the emergence of the school in modern times as ‘a machine for learning’. Despite his much-repeated insistence on the productive and enabling nature of discipline (and his insight that discipline ‘is no longer simply an art of distributing bodies, … but of composing forces in order to obtain an efficient machine’), it is the machine-like and oppressive quality of discipline that is often the focus. In relation to the nineteenth century school, for example, he describes it as a ‘morality of obedience’ based on a prescriptive discipline of absolute silence and a Pavlovian process of ‘signalisation’ and response (164-7).Sonia’s class (the enrichment class), however, is not one where passivity or docility is the rule – and illustrates better the form of disciplined, productive stillness crucial to educational activity. As this first group of students demonstrates, this discipline takes a material form, whereby students’ bodies are capacitated through the control and focus they embody. This recalls Foucault’s other focus captured in his view that ‘a disciplined body is the prerequisite of an efficient gesture’ (152). This discipline predisposes students towards particular types of endeavour; a discipline that takes the form of dispositions as in the scholarly habitus. Differing degrees of discipline resulting from the repeated performance of certain practices is what distinguishes the three groups of students in this paper.Writing, listening and talking in class are all forms of labour that require bodily control as well as forms of knowledge. Sonia, for example, evinced capacities of stillness, quiet, attention, self-direction and self-discipline which disposed her to engaged learning. This is a state of composure which evinces a readiness for activity. When required, she was capable of sustained application. This is not to be mistaken for docility – her stillness and quiet were productive for academic engagement. In contrast, many in Sonny’s class were far from composed. They did not have sustained capacities of stillness and quiet or the capacity for self-control in an educational environment. They manifested different types of bodily capacities which incline them, like Sonny, towards disengagement. Eric and Walter are different cases yet again. They displayed a degree of quiet and stillness that was unproductive, that didn’t ready them for engaged activity.This sense of bodily control also operates at basic levels of mastery as well as readiness for intellectual activity. Indeed, low-order capacities are stepping stones for higher order skills. It is difficult to develop literacy, for example, without mastering the physical skills of writing. Such skills require a certain posture and control for perfecting letter and word formation. Such mastery, for example, is needed for writing to become ‘transparent’: the student stops ‘thinking’ about forming the letter or word with the pen, and concentrates on the content of their writing. The physical nature of the labour of writing stops being a conscious task and becomes a largely unconscious capacity, which lends itself to the development of capacities in composition, analysis and abstraction. Neither Walter nor Eric had developed a mastery of the pen or their own body. In the case of Eric, Deirdre, his teacher, commented that he had ‘immature fine motor skills’, which affected his writing. She pointed out that ‘when your writing doesn’t come easy it is going to take longer’, which meant Eric ‘rarely completes things’. ConclusionAs Vitalis argued thousands of years ago, with writing, the whole body labours (cited in Ong 95). But this form of labour entails stillness, self-control and the bodily capacity for sustained intellectual engagement. Educational practice needs to not only return to an appreciation of the arts of stillness but to rethink the ways in which activity in learning is understood; the ways in which an active mind is reliant upon a composed yet capacitated body and the particular pedagogies that, from the early years of school, can promote this form of corporeal governance. ReferencesBourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Polity, 1990.———. The State Nobility. Trans. Lauretta Clough. Cambridge: Polity, 1996.Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. “Introduction.” In The Powers of Literacy. Eds. Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis. London: Falmer. 1993. 1-21.De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.Duffy, Michael. “Improved by Asian Work Ethic.” Courier Mail 29 Sep. 2001: 28.Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.Lareau, Annette, and Elliot Weininger. “Cultural Capital in Educational Research.” Theory and Society 32.5/6 (2003): 567-606.Lucas, Bill. Power Up your Mind. London: Nicholas Brealey, 2001.Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy. London: Methuen, 1982.Robinson, Kathryn. “Looking for Father-Right.” In Race, Colour and Identity in Australia and New Zealand. Eds. John Docker and Gerhard Fischer. Kensington: UNSW P, 2000. 158-173.Silberman, Mel. The Active Learner. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1996.University of Melbourne. Active Learning. Academic Skills Unit. 6 Mar. 2009 ‹http://www.services.unimelb.edu.au/asu/resources/study/estudy008.html›.Watkins, Megan, and Greg Noble. Cultural Practices and Learning: Diversity, Discipline and Dispositions in Schooling. Penrith South: U of Western Sydney, 2008.Willis, Paul. Learning to Labour. Aldershot: Gower, 1977. Wu, Jianguo, and Michael Singh. ‘“Wishing for Dragon Children”: Ironies and Contradictions in China’s Educational Reforms and the Chinese Diaspora’s Disappointments with Australian Education.” The Australian Educational Researcher 31.2 (2004): 29-44.
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Fox, Nick J., und Pam Alldred. „Bodies, non-human matter and the micropolitical production of sociomaterial dis/advantage“. Journal of Sociology, 16.04.2021, 144078332110026. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/14407833211002641.

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This article sets out a more-than-human framework within which to explore the contribution of non-human matter to social inequality. Applying an approach based in Deleuzian ethology, we extend three invitations: to address the multiplicity and fluidity of dis/advantage, to explore its production in everyday interactions, and to acknowledge non-human as well as human matter in the emergence of dis/advantage. The article examines how the interactions between human and non-human matter produce and reproduce context-specific bodily capacities and incapacities, and consequently ‘a thousand tiny dis/advantages’. These dis/advantages may accumulate to produce substantive inequalities and social divisions. An illustrative re-reading of Paul Willis’s 1970s study of the cultural reproduction of social inequality Learning to Labour reveals the complex ways in which daily encounters between human and non-human matter produce both transient and lasting dis/advantage. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of this more-than-human perspective for the sociological study of inequality.
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Varney, Wendy. „Homeward Bound or Housebound?“ M/C Journal 10, Nr. 4 (01.08.2007). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2701.

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If thinking about home necessitates thinking about “place, space, scale, identity and power,” as Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling (2) suggest, then thinking about home themes in popular music makes no less a conceptual demand. Song lyrics and titles most often invoke dominant readings such as intimacy, privacy, nurture, refuge, connectedness and shared belonging, all issues found within Blunt and Dowling’s analysis. The spatial imaginary to which these authors refer takes vivid shape through repertoires of songs dealing with houses and other specific sites, vast and distant homelands, communities or, less tangibly, geographical or cultural settings where particular relationships can be found, supporting Blunt and Dowling’s major claim that home is complex, multi-scalar and multi-layered. Shelley Mallett’s claim that the term home “functions as a repository for complex, inter-related and at times contradictory socio-cultural ideas about people’s relationships with one another…and with places, spaces and things” (84) is borne out heavily by popular music where, for almost every sentiment that the term home evokes, it seems an opposite sentiment is evoked elsewhere: familiarity versus alienation, acceptance versus rejection, love versus loneliness. Making use of conceptual groundwork by Blunt and Dowling and by Mallett and others, the following discussion canvasses a range of meanings that home has had for a variety of songwriters, singers and audiences over the years. Intended as merely partial and exploratory rather than exhaustive, it provides some insights into contrasts, ironies and relationships between home and gender, diaspora and loss. While it cannot cover all the themes, it gives prominence to the major recurring themes and a variety of important contexts that give rise to these home themes. Most prominent among those songs dealing with home has been a nostalgia and yearning, while issues of how women may have viewed the home within which they have often been restricted to a narrowly defined private sphere are almost entirely absent. This serves as a reminder that, while some themes can be conducive to the medium of popular music, others may be significantly less so. Songs may speak directly of experience but not necessarily of all experiences and certainly not of all experiences equally. B. Lee Cooper claims “most popular culture ventures rely upon formula-oriented settings and phrasings to attract interest, to spur mental or emotional involvement” (93). Notions of home have generally proved both formulaic and emotionally-charged. Commonly understood patterns of meaning and other hegemonic references generally operate more successfully than alternative reference points. Those notions with the strongest cultural currency can be conveyed succinctly and denote widely agreed upon meanings. Lyrics can seldom afford to be deeply analytical but generally must be concise and immediately evocative. Despite that, this discussion will point to diverse meanings carried by songs about home. Blunt and Dowling point out that “a house is not necessarily nor automatically a home” (3). The differences are strongly apparent in music, with only a few songs relating to houses compared with homes. When Malvina Reynolds wrote in 1962 of “little boxes, on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tacky,” she was certainly referring to houses, not homes, thus making it easier to bypass the relationships which might have vested the inhabitants with more warmth and individuality than their houses, in this song about conformity and homogeneity. The more complex though elusive concept of home, however, is more likely to feature in love songs and to emanate from diasporal songs. Certainly these two genres are not mutually exclusive. Irish songs are particularly noteworthy for adding to the array of music written by, or representational of, those who have been forced away from home by war, poverty, strife or other circumstances. They manifest identities of displacement rather than of placement, as studied by Bronwen Walter, looking back at rather than from within their spatial imaginary. Phil Eva claims that during the 19th Century Irish émigrés sang songs of exile in Manchester’s streets. Since many in England’s industrial towns had been uprooted from their homes, the songs found rapport with street audiences and entered popular culture. For example, the song Killarney, of hazy origins but thought to date back to as early as 1850, tells of Killarney’s lakes and fells, Emerald isles and winding bays; Mountain paths and woodland dells… ...her [nature’s] home is surely there. As well as anthropomorphising nature and giving it a home, the song suggests a specifically geographic sense of home. Galway Bay, written by A. Fahy, does likewise, as do many other Irish songs of exile which link geography with family, kin and sometimes culture to evoke a sense of home. The final verse of Cliffs of Doneen gives a sense of both people and place making up home: Fare thee well to Doneen, fare thee well for a while And to all the kind people I’m leaving behind To the streams and the meadows where late I have been And the high rocky slopes round the cliffs of Doneen. Earlier Irish songs intertwine home with political issues. For example, Tho’ the Last Glimpse of Erin vows to Erin that “In exile thy bosum shall still be my home.” Such exile resulted from a preference of fleeing Ireland rather than bowing to English oppression, which then included a prohibition on Irish having moustaches or certain hairstyles. Thomas Moore is said to have set the words of the song to the air Coulin which itself referred to an Irish woman’s preference for her “Coulin” (a long-haired Irish youth) to the English (Nelson-Burns). Diasporal songs have continued, as has their political edge, as evidenced by global recognition of songs such as Bayan Ko (My Country), written by José Corazon de Jesus in 1929, out of love and concern for the Philippines and sung among Filipinos worldwide. Robin Cohen outlines a set of criteria for diaspora that includes a shared belief in the possibility of return to home, evident in songs such as the 1943 Welsh song A Welcome in the Hillside, in which a Welsh word translating roughly as a yearning to return home, hiraeth, is used: We’ll kiss away each hour of hiraeth When you come home again to Wales. However, the immensely popular I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen, not of Irish origin but written by Thomas Westendorf of Illinois in 1875, suggests that such emotions can have a resonance beyond the diaspora. Anti-colonial sentiments about home can also be expressed by long-time inhabitants, as Harry Belafonte demonstrated in Island in the Sun: This is my island in the sun Where my people have toiled since time begun. Though I may sail on many a sea, Her shores will always be home to me. War brought a deluge of sentimental songs lamenting separation from home and loved ones, just as likely to be parents and siblings as sweethearts. Radios allowed wider audiences and greater popularity for these songs. If separation had brought a longing previously, the added horrors of war presented a stronger contrast between that which the young soldiers were missing and that which they were experiencing. Both the First and Second World Wars gave rise to songs long since sung which originated in such separations, but these also had a strong sense of home as defined by the nationalism that has for over a century given the contours of expectations of soldiers. Focusing on home, these songs seldom speak of the details of war. Rather they are specific about what the singers have left behind and what they hope to return to. Songs of home did not have to be written specifically for the war effort nor for overseas troops. Irving Berlin’s 1942 White Christmas, written for a film, became extremely popular with US troops during WWII, instilling a sense of home that related to familiarities and festivities. Expressing a sense of home could be specific and relate to regions or towns, as did I’m Goin’ Back Again to Yarrawonga, or it could refer to any home, anywhere where there were sons away fighting. Indeed the American Civil War song When Johnny Comes Marching Home, written by Patrick Sarsfield Gilmour, was sung by both Northerners and Southerners, so adaptable was it, with home remarkably unspecified and undescribed. The 1914 British song Keep the Home Fires Burning by Ivor Novello and Lena Ford was among those that evoked a connection between home and the military effort and helped establish a responsibility on those at home to remain optimistic: Keep the Homes fires burning While your hearts are yearning, Though your lads are far away They dream of home, There’s a silver lining Through the dark clouds shining, Turn the dark clouds inside out, Till the boys come Home. No space exists in this song for critique of the reasons for war, nor of a role for women other than that of homemaker and moral guardian. It was women’s duty to ensure men enlisted and home was rendered a private site for emotional enlistment for a presumed public good, though ironically also a point of personal hope where the light of love burned for the enlistees’ safe return. Later songs about home and war challenged these traditional notions. Two serve as examples. One is Pink Floyd’s brief musical piece of the 1970s, Bring the Boys Back Home, whose words of protest against the American war on Viet Nam present home, again, as a site of safety but within a less conservative context. Home becomes implicated in a challenge to the prevailing foreign policy and the interests that influence it, undermining the normal public sphere/private sphere distinction. The other more complex song is Judy Small’s Mothers, Daughters, Wives, from 1982, set against a backdrop of home. Small eloquently describes the dynamics of the domestic space and how women understood their roles in relation to the First and Second World Wars and the Viet Nam War. Reinforcing that “The materialities and imaginaries of home are closely connected” (Blunt and Dowling 188), Small sings of how the gold frames held the photographs that mothers kissed each night And the doorframe held the shocked and silent strangers from the fight. Small provides a rare musical insight into the disjuncture between the men who left the domestic space and those who return to it, and we sense that women may have borne much of the brunt of those awful changes. The idea of domestic bliss is also challenged, though from the returned soldier’s point of view, in Redgum’s 1983 song I Was Only Nineteen, written by group member John Schuman. It touches on the tragedy of young men thrust into war situations and the horrific after-affects for them, which cannot be shrugged off on return to home. The nurturing of home has limits but the privacy associated with the domestic sphere has often concealed the violence and mental anguish that happens away from public view. But by this time most of the songs referring to home were dominated once more by sentimental love, often borne of travel as mobility rose. Journeys help “establish the thresholds and boundaries of home” and can give rise to “an idealized, ideological and ethnocentric view of home” (Mallett 78). Where previously songsters had sung of leaving home in exile or for escape from poverty, lyrics from the 1960s onwards often suggested that work had removed people from loved ones. It could be work on a day-by-day basis, as in A Hard Day’s Night from the 1964 film of the same name, where the Beatles illuminate differences between the public sphere of work and the private sphere to which they return: When I’m home, everything seems to be alright, When I’m home feeling you holding me tight, tight, yeah and reiterated by Paul McCartney in Every Night: And every night that day is through But tonight I just want to stay in And be with you. Lyrics such as these and McCartney’s call to be taken “...home to the Mull of Kintyre,” singled him out for his home-and-hearth messages (Dempsey). But work might involve longer absences and thus more deepfelt loneliness. Simon and Garfunkel’s exemplary Homeward Bound starkly portrays a site of “away-ness”: I’m sittin’ in the railway station, got a ticket for my destination… Mundaneness, monotony and predictability contrast with the home to which the singer’s thoughts are constantly escaping. The routine is familiar but the faces are those of strangers. Home here is, again, not simply a domicile but the warmth of those we know and love. Written at a railway station, Homeward Bound echoes sentiments almost identical to those of (Leaving on a) Jet Plane, written by John Denver at an airport in 1967. Denver also co-wrote (Take Me Home) Country Roads, where, in another example of anthropomorphism as a tool of establishing a strong link, he asks to be taken home to the place I belong West Virginia, mountain momma, Take me home, Country Roads. The theme has recurred in numerous songs since, spawning examples such as Darin and Alquist’s When I Get Home, Chris Daughtry’s Home, Michael Bublé’s Home and Will Smith’s Ain’t No Place Like Home, where, in an opening reminiscent of Homeward Bound, the singer is Sitting in a hotel room A thousand miles away from nowhere Sloped over a chair as I stare… Furniture from home, on the other hand, can be used to evoke contentment and bliss, as demonstrated by George Weiss and Bob Thiele’s song The Home Fire, in which both kin and the objects of home become charged with meaning: All of the folks that I love are there I got a date with my favourite chair Of course, in regard to earlier songs especially, while the traveller associates home with love, security and tenderness, back at home the waiting one may have had feelings more of frustration and oppression. One is desperate to get back home, but for all we know the other may be desperate to get out of home or to develop a life more meaningful than that which was then offered to women. If the lot of homemakers was invisible to national economies (Waring), it seemed equally invisible to mainstream songwriters. This reflects the tradition that “Despite home being generally considered a feminine, nurturing space created by women themselves, they often lack both authority and a space of their own within this realm” (Mallett 75). Few songs have offered the perspective of the one at home awaiting the return of the traveller. One exception is the Seekers’ 1965 A World of Our Own but, written by Tom Springfield, the words trilled by Judith Durham may have been more of a projection of the traveller’s hopes and expectations than a true reflection of the full experiences of housebound women of the day. Certainly, the song reinforces connections between home and intimacy and privacy: Close the door, light the lights. We’re stayin’ home tonight, Far away from the bustle and the bright city lights. Let them all fade away, just leave us alone And we’ll live in a world of our own. This also strongly supports Gaston Bachelard’s claim that one’s house in the sense of a home is one’s “first universe, a real cosmos” (qtd. in Blunt and Dowling 12). But privacy can also be a loneliness when home is not inhabited by loved ones, as in the lyrics of Don Gibson’s 1958 Oh, Lonesome Me, where Everybody’s going out and having fun I’m a fool for staying home and having none. Similar sentiments emerge in Debbie Boone’s You Light up My Life: So many nights I’d sit by my window Waiting for someone to sing me his song. Home in these situations can be just as alienating as the “away” depicted as so unfriendly by Homeward Bound’s strangers’ faces and the “million people” who still leave Michael Bublé feeling alone. Yet there are other songs that depict “away” as a prison made of freedom, insinuating that the lack of a home and consequently of the stable love and commitment presumably found there is a sad situation indeed. This is suggested by the lilting tune, if not by the lyrics themselves, in songs such as Wandrin’ Star from the musical Paint Your Wagon and Ron Miller’s I’ve Never Been to Me, which has both a male and female version with different words, reinforcing gendered experiences. The somewhat conservative lyrics in the female version made it a perfect send-up song in the 1994 film Priscilla: Queen of the Desert. In some songs the absentee is not a traveller but has been in jail. In Tie a Yellow Ribbon round the Ole Oak Tree, an ex-inmate states “I’m comin’ home. I’ve done my time.” Home here is contingent upon the availability and forgivingness of his old girl friend. Another song juxtaposing home with prison is Tom Jones’ The Green, Green Grass of Home in which the singer dreams he is returning to his home, to his parents, girlfriend and, once again, an old oak tree. However, he awakes to find he was dreaming and is about to be executed. His body will be taken home and placed under the oak tree, suggesting some resigned sense of satisfaction that he will, after all, be going home, albeit in different circumstances. Death and home are thus sometimes linked, with home a euphemism for the former, as suggested in many spirituals, with heaven or an afterlife being considered “going home”. The reverse is the case in the haunting Bring Him Home of the musical Les Misérables. With Marius going off to the barricades and the danger involved, Jean Valjean prays for the young man’s safe return and that he might live. Home is connected here with life, safety and ongoing love. In a number of songs about home and absence there is a sense of home being a place where morality is gently enforced, presumably by women who keep men on the straight and narrow, in line with one of the women’s roles of colonial Australia, researched by Anne Summers. These songs imply that when men wander from home, their morals also go astray. Wild Rover bemoans Oh, I’ve been a wild rover for many a year, and I’ve spent all my money on whiskey and beer… There is the resolve in the chorus, however, that home will have a reforming influence. Gene Pitney’s Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa poses the dangers of distance from a wife’s influence, while displaying opposition to the sentimental yearning of so many other songs: Dearest darlin’, I have to write to say that I won’t be home anymore ‘cause something happened to me while I was drivin’ home And I’m not the same anymore Class as well as gender can be a debated issue in meanings attached to home, as evident in several songs that take a more jaundiced view of home, seeing it as a place from which to escape. The Animals’ powerful We Gotta Get Outta This Place clearly suggests a life of drudgery in a home town or region. Protectively, the lyrics insist “Girl, there’s a better life for me and you” but it has to be elsewhere. This runs against the grain of other British songs addressing poverty or a working class existence as something that comes with its own blessings, all to do with an area identified as home. These traits may be loyalty, familiarity or a refusal to judge and involve identities of placement rather than of displacement in, for instance, Gerry and the Pacemakers’ Ferry Cross the Mersey: People around every corner, they seem to smile and say “We don’t care what your name is, boy. We’ll never send you away.” This bears out Blunt and Dowling’s claim that “people’s senses of themselves are related to and produced through lived and metaphorical experiences of home” (252). It also resonates with some of the region-based identity and solidarity issues explored a short time later by Paul Willis in his study of working class youth in Britain, which help to inform how a sense of home can operate to constrict consciousness, ideas and aspirations. Identity features strongly in other songs about home. Several years after Neil Young recorded his 1970 song Southern Man about racism in the south of the USA, the group Lynyrd Skynyrd, responded with Sweet Home Alabama. While the meaning of its lyrics are still debated, there is no debate about the way in which the song has been embraced, as I recently discovered first-hand in Tennessee. A banjo-and-fiddle band performing the song during a gig virtually brought down the house as the predominantly southern audience clapped, whopped and stamped its feet. The real meanings of home were found not in the lyrics but in the audience’s response. Wally Johnson and Bob Brown’s 1975 Home Among the Gum Trees is a more straightforward ode to home, with lyrics that prescribe a set of non-commodified values. It is about simplicity and the right to embrace a lifestyle that includes companionship, leisure and an enjoyment of and appreciation of nature, all threatened seriously in the three decades since the song’s writing. The second verse in which large shopping complexes – and implicitly the consumerism they encourage – are eschewed (“I’d trade it all tomorrow for a little bush retreat where the kookaburras call”), is a challenge to notions of progress and reflects social movements of the day, The Green Bans Movement, for instance, took a broader and more socially conscientious attitude towards home and community, putting forward alternative sets of values and insisting people should have a say in the social and aesthetic construction of their neighbourhoods as well as the impacts of their labour (Mundey). Ironically, the song has gone on to become the theme song for a TV show about home gardens. With a strong yet more vague notion of home, Peter Allen’s I Still Call Australia Home, was more prone to commodification and has been adopted as a promotional song for Qantas. Nominating only the desire to travel and the love of freedom as Australian values, both politically and socially innocuous within the song’s context, this catchy and uplifting song, when not being used as an advertisement, paradoxically works for a “diaspora” of Australians who are not in exile but have mostly travelled for reasons of pleasure or professional or financial gain. Another paradox arises from the song Home on the Range, dating back to the 19th century at a time when the frontier was still a strong concept in the USA and people were simultaneously leaving homes and reminiscing about home (Mechem). Although it was written in Kansas, the lyrics – again vague and adaptable – were changed by other travellers so that versions such as Colorado Home and My Arizona Home soon abounded. In 1947 Kansas made Home on the Range its state song, despite there being very few buffalo left there, thus highlighting a disjuncture between the modern Kansas and “a home where the buffalo roam” as described in the song. These themes, paradoxes and oppositional understandings of home only scratch the surface of the wide range of claims that are made on home throughout popular music. It has been shown that home is a flexible concept, referring to homelands, regions, communities and private houses. While predominantly used to evoke positive feelings, mostly with traditional views of the relationships that lie within homes, songs also raise challenges to notions of domesticity, the rights of those inhabiting the private sphere and the demarcation between the private and public spheres. Songs about home reflect contexts and challenges of their respective eras and remind us that vigorous discussion takes place about and within homes. The challenges are changing. Where many women once felt restrictively tied to the home – and no doubt many continue to do so – many women and men are now struggling to rediscover spatial boundaries, with production and consumption increasingly impinging upon relationships that have so frequently given the term home its meaning. With evidence that we are working longer hours and that home life, in whatever form, is frequently suffering (Beder, Hochschild), the discussion should continue. In the words of Sam Cooke, Bring it on home to me! References Bacheland, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994. Beder, Sharon. Selling the Work Ethic: From Puritan Pulpit to Corporate PR. London: Zed Books, 2000. Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. Home. London: Routledge, 2006. Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. London: UCL Press, 1997. Cooper, B. Lee. “Good Timin’: Searching for Meaning in Clock Songs.” Popular Music and Society 30.1 (Feb. 2007): 93-106. Dempsey, J.M. “McCartney at 60: A Body of Work Celebrating Home and Hearth.” Popular Music and Society 27.1 (Feb. 2004): 27-40. Eva, Phil. “Home Sweet Home? The Culture of ‘Exile’ in Mid-Victorian Popular Song.” Popular Music 16.2 (May 1997): 131-150. Hochschild, Arlie. The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work. New York: Metropolitan/Holt, 1997. Mallett, Sonia. “Understanding Home: A Critical Review of the Literature.” The Sociological Review 52.1 (2004): 62-89. Mechem, Kirke, “The Story of ‘Home on the Range’.” Reprint from the Kansas Historical Quarterly (Nov. 1949). Topeka, Kansas: Kansas State Historical Society. 28 May 2007 http://www.emporia.edu/cgps/tales/nov2003.html>. Mundey, Jack. Green Bans and Beyond. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1981. Nelson-Burns, Lesley. Folk Music of England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and America. 29 May 2007 http://www.contemplator.com/ireland/thoerin.html>. Summers, Anne. Damned Whores and God’s Police: The Colonization of Women in Australia. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975. Walter, Bronwen. Outsiders Inside: Whiteness, Place and Irish Women. London: Routledge, 2001. Waring, Marilyn. Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth. Wellington, NZ: Allen & Unwin, 1988. Willis, Paul. Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. New York: Columbia UP, 1977. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Varney, Wendy. "Homeward Bound or Housebound?: Themes of Home in Popular Music." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/16-varney.php>. APA Style Varney, W. (Aug. 2007) "Homeward Bound or Housebound?: Themes of Home in Popular Music," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/16-varney.php>.
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Russell, Francis. „NFTs and Value“. M/C Journal 25, Nr. 2 (25.04.2022). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2863.

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Depending on your perspective, Non-Fungible Token (NFT) artworks are inaugurating an exciting new chapter in the history of art, or a dangerous new chapter in the history of online market bubbles. NFTs index artworks, and are typically strings of characters stored on a blockchain such as Ethereum. NFTs are not exclusively used to index artworks, and have been used to index a range of collectibles, but it is the sale of NFTs associated with artworks that has launched the phenomenon into public consciousness. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the digital artist Beeple’s sale of an NFT for the equivalent of $69 million (Krastrenakes). For some, such staggering prices suggest NFTs are poised to become the next Beanie Babies—i.e., commodities without utility that sell at vastly inflated prices. Despite such cynicism, some argue that NFTs have revolutionary technical import, such that they could overturn many common and unequal practices within the contemporary art market (Rennie et al.). Chief among these is the supposed disposability of digital artworks, which are viewed as difficult to sell, resell, and protect from piracy. Such issues are thought to be ameliorated by NFTs, since they function as a token that is understood to stand as a “definitive indicator of ownership” of digital artworks (Mackenzie and Bērziņa 2). Or, as Rachel O’Dwyer has summarised, NFT art auctions like the Ethereal Summit held in New York in 2018 allow individuals to bid for the “ownership and provenance details of the works of art encrypted in the Ethereum blockchain and represented by a token” (O’Dwyer). Unlike a more conventional artwork, such as a painting, NFT artworks typically take the form of JPEGs or GIFs, and therefore circulate the Internet widely, regardless of who owns the token that designates ownership. While reproductions and printed documentations of traditional artworks are commonplace—e.g., art gallery giftshops will often sell relatively low-cost posters of masterpieces like Picasso’s Guernica, or coffee table books showcasing the masterworks of influential movements like post-impressionism—there are obvious material differences between the reproduction and the original. In the case of the typically digital NFT artworks, this distinction does not apply. Accordingly, the academic and popular discussions that surround NFT artworks have reignited theoretical questions around the ontological status of artworks, and the source of their economic value. For some, the NFT market is a financial bubble and the prices attracted by particular NFT-linked artworks have no underlying value (BBC News). For others, the value of NFTs can be explained through an appeal to the value subjectively attributed to the image or animation by the purchaser (Nguyen), while for others the value of NFTs should be understood in terms of digital scarcity and provenance (Rennie et al.; Joselit) or as a technological means for artists to maintain a greater share of their artwork’s value (Kugler). While the NFT market is novel, and is worthy of study in terms of its specific technological and economic forms, this article will argue that NFTs can be placed in a longer history of the emergence of what Luc Boltanski and Arnauld Esquerre have called the “enrichment economy”. In their Enrichment: A Critique of Commodities, Boltanski and Esquerre argue that, since at least the last quarter of the twentieth century, a new site of valorisation has emerged in post-industrial economies. According to Boltanski and Esquerre, globalisation and deindustrialisation provoked many economies to embrace tourism, luxury good production, and the commodification of heritage and culture as new sites of extraction. As the viability of the mass production of commodities has receded, the production of unique commodities and transient yet “unforgettable” experiences have become more economically significant. For Boltanski and Esquerre, enrichment refers both to the often-discursive refining and redefining of existing commodities—such that they fetch greater prices—and a greater emphasis on an economy for those with disposable income—such as tourists, art collectors, and the wealthy more generally (3-4). Often, Boltanski and Esquerre argue, the enrichment economies of art and luxury tend to mine and exploit the “underlying substratum that is purely and simply the past” (2). For this reason, the enrichment economy requires the production of new forms of authenticity, “aura”, and belief, such that the overlooked or taken-for-granted objects of the past can be reframed as unique and worthy of investment or consumption. The interesting question, then, is not necessarily that of why someone would pay a large sum of money to own a piece of code on a blockchain, but, instead, that of how a particular piece of contemporary art or an NFT comes to be “enriched” with authenticity and aura. While a thoroughgoing discussion of this topic would require a longer piece, this article will nevertheless attempt to open up connections between art history, debates around the production of artistic value during and after Modernism, and the newly emerging NFT art market. While many have declared that NFTs are “disrupting the art market” (Tripathi)—supposedly evinced by the staggering growth of the NFT market, and emerging institutional recognition, such as ArtReview’s decision to place an NFT at the top of their Power 100 List for 2021—this article seeks to locate the NFT explosion within a slightly longer timeframe, one in which NFTs would feature as a continuation—albeit a non-linear one—rather than a disruption of ongoing cultural and economic logics. Value and Void Despite the incredulity that commonly meets NFT artworks, the contemporary art market similarly flaunts conventional understandings of aesthetic and economic value. While many would surely agree with journalist Amy Castor’s claim that “it’s hard to justify that a Bored Ape NFT is worth $300,000 based on the art” (quoted in Artnet), almost identical criticisms have been raised around the contemporary artist Maurizio Cattelan’s 2019 work Comedian. Released in an edition of three, Comedian consisted of a banana duct-taped to a wall, with two of the three selling for $120,000 each. As Sara Callahan puts it, works like Comedian reignited debates around “what makes something a high-priced artwork when another, seemingly identical, object is not?” (Callahan). While NFTs are reawakening interest in the question of artistic value, the financialisation of cheaply made and mass-produced artworks has a much longer history. Indeed, by the 1960s, a booming secondary art market that traded in increasingly expensive, yet cheap-to-produce avant-garde works—often requiring relatively small amounts of time and inexpensive materials—raised suspicions that art was becoming indistinguishable from more traditional financial assets. In response, in 1968 the influential art critic Leo Steinberg argued that, “avant-garde art, lately Americanized, is for the first time associated with big money. … Another decade, and we shall have mutual funds based on securities in the form of pictures held in bank vaults” (quoted in Beech 300). As Dave Beech has shown, in the ensuing period, “art’s relationship to finance capital has outstripped Steinberg’s worst fears” (Beech 301). By the 1980s, banks allowed individuals to borrow large sums of money against the value of their art collections, and investment in artworks became a normal practice of portfolio diversification (Beech 299–300). When interest rates are low, investments in productive capital offer low levels of liquidity, and international markets appear vulnerable to shocks, artworks—whether physical or in the form of an NFT—offer a means of hedging against future losses. Furthermore, in both the contemporary art market and the NFT market, purchases of artworks at inflated prices often allow an individual to prevent “the bottom from falling out of a market they have already invested in” (O’Dwyer). The fact that artworks could hold a value well in excess of the cost of the materials or labour time required to produce them, was not solely recognised by art collectors and investors. Instead, this period saw a great number of artists explicitly playing with the aporia that had emerged around art’s economic value—insofar as ready-made artworks could now fetch prices typically reserved for laboriously produced and unique masterpieces. Take, for example, Yves Klein’s project Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility, which he developed over the late 1950s and early 1960s. In these works, Klein offered collectors the opportunity to purchase a void or “immaterial zone” for varying quantities of gold, with “20 grams (3/4 ounce) of pure gold for the Zones of series no. 1, the least expensive, to 1,280 grams (27/8 pounds) for those of series no. 7, the most expensive” (Cras 24). In exchange for the gold, the void-owner would receive a receipt as proof of purchase. However, for the work to be completed, Klein requested that the receipt be burned by the collector, and in response Klein would throw half of the received gold into the river Seine (Cras 24). By destroying the proof of purchase, and by releasing some of the gold into the river, the collector would receive “the full authentic immaterial value of the work” (Klein quoted in Cras 24). We see some resemblances here between Klein’s Zones and NFTs—and here Klein is no exception, since, as Cras has documented, the 1960s were replete with artists experimenting with the production of artworks as novel financial assets. For Cras, it was a time in which “the problem of attaching a price to works of art and offering them for sale, traditionally considered to be external to creation in this domain, was now incorporated in artistic practice” (Cras 3). If artists were increasingly embracing the artwork’s status as an asset, and if the price of artworks became divorced from luxurious materials or skilled production, how were artworks able to assert themselves as valuable and worthy of collection and investment? How is that, rather than the decoupling of artworks from some secure material base of value diminishing their market value, such decoupling has instead led to immense growth in the art market? In order to pursue this question, in the next section we will turn to Beech’s rethinking of the Marxist labour theory of value in the context of the art market. Value and Labour Here, it is worthwhile to turn to Beech’s distinction between the price of the artwork and the value of the artwork. For Beech, an artwork’s price is whatever sum of money it can be exchanged for in the market. Most neoclassical economists treat price and value as being synonymous, and, from this position, it makes no sense to ask if an artwork is worth—or if its value is equivalent—to its current price. As Beech writes, “neoclassical economics claims to be able to treat the sale of artworks as a standard transaction with prices determined entirely by demand and the subjective perception of utility by wealthy purchasers” (Beech 291). Against this view, Beech offers a Marxist interpretation of artistic value, one that emphasises labour-time in the production of artistic reputation. Reputation is key here, as Beech dismisses the notion that an increase in artistic labour-time increases the value of an artwork. Against neoclassical economists, Beech (311) writes that “the increase or decrease in the price of artworks is not ‘a floating crap game’, but is determined by the changing circumstances of the artwork itself vis-à-vis the esteem it is held in by the art community”. Accordingly, Beech states that the prices of artworks are seriously affected—perhaps even driven—by the non-purchasing “consumers” of art, namely academics, commentators, and other artists, who determine the general reputation of artworks. Accordingly, if we want to understand the prices of artworks at the marketplace, we need to focus our attention on art’s evaluative discourses, the production of knowledge, and the practices of producing objects that provide an assessment and legacy for a work or body of work, such as photographic reproductions and monographs. Artistic value as reputation is not only expressed through the economic consumption of products, but in the activities of learning from them, asking questions of them, reconfiguring them in new products, combining them and rejecting them. The high prices of art derive from the high status of the work within the discourses of art (Beech 312). Whereas the conventional Marxist labour theory of value focusses on the socially necessary labour time for the production of a commodity, Beech emphasises the labour of the consumer rather than that of the producer. As we have shown, an artwork that takes very little time to produce—such as Cattelan’s Comedian—can attract a much larger price than a painting by a lesser-known artist who spends months in the studio. Nevertheless, Beech argues that the greater the labour time of the non-purchasing consumers of art, the greater the artwork’s value. By maintaining a distinction between price—the quantity of money an artwork can be exchanged for—and value—the total of labour-time expended in discussing, viewing, and reproducing an artwork—Beech provides us with a framework for understanding how prices emerge, without exaggerating the predictive powers of such a framework. If an artist’s work is priced relatively low, but the discourse around their work is expanding rapidly, there is the potential to make a purchase below value, even if this investment is still speculative. By contrast, the neoclassical perspective renders this approach to the price/value relationship unthinkable. What, then, distinguishes artistic—or artworld—discourse from marketing? Beyond the simple observation that marketing teams are directly employed by capitalists in order to push a message that is directly related to increasing surplus-value, Beech argues that “it is a condition of the contribution of art discourse to the inflation of the value of art that it is independent from the economic interests at stake” (Beech 313). Though Beech does not put it this way, we could argue that the gap between artistic discourse and those who stand to financially benefit from the inflation of an artwork’s value produces the “aura” of the artwork. Coca-Cola’s marketing team is unlikely to change its opinion about its famous product, whereas art discourse is produced—for the most part—by a decentralised “artworld” of curators, critics, museologists, historians, philosophers, artists, and viewers, all of whom gravitate towards certain works at certain times—and it is arguably the uncertainty and uncoordinated nature of these shifts in reputational favour that make certain works feel miraculous. While, in the short term, a Bored Ape, and an artwork like Comedian, can attract a high price, it is unlikely that these artworks will maintain that price overtime—for this to happen, one would have to imagine an ongoing process of enrichment, one that would find new conversations to have about such works beyond the novelty of their unlikely price tags. Enriching the Blockchain While recent years have seen the publication of impressive and sophisticated quantitative studies of the NFT market, such studies have focussed on the quantifiable aspects of value and reputation (Vasan et al.; Nadini et al.). While such research has shown that connection to prominent collectors, and visibility on popular crypto-platforms, is an indicator of the expected price of an NFT, Beech’s research suggests that a range of difficult-to-quantify factors must be taken into consideration. While quantifiable forms of influence are of course important, the capacity for an artwork—linked to an NFT or not—to be discursively enriched, such that its status as historically and culturally significant appears independent from the testimony of those who would financially benefit from its revaluation, appears vital for its long-term enrichment and accrual of value. Some have attempted to articulate the emerging value of the NFT market in such terms. For example, Paul Dylan-Ennis claims that in order to understand CryptoPunks—one of the older artistic series to be linked to NFTs, and which can sell for up to $1.6 million—we must appreciate that they “are sought after because of their age, like blockchain antiques” (Dylan-Ennis). For Dylan-Ennis, NFTs like Cryptopunks are valuable insofar as they are “the oldest NFTs”, and, accordingly, it is “their ‘metadata’” or their “longevity on the blockchain” that is desired (Dylan-Ennis). In Dylan-Ennis’s account, NFTs are worth investing in because their past will one day be historically significant, hence his injunction for us to “look past the art and look at the medium to get what is going on” (Dylan-Ennis). But rather than looking at the medium, perhaps it is more fruitful to look to the institutional forms that nurture, generate, and circulate the reputational discourses that modify artistic value. In doing so, we will not only avoid the conservative move of denouncing NFT artworks on the basis of an arbitrary aesthetic standard, but also the utopian move of associating NFTs with the fantasy of a future “in which the subject is free from coercive mediating institutions, the state chief among them, wielding data certainty as a means of freedom and social transformation” (Jutel 4). Rather than NFTs freeing the digital artist from the problems imposed by ease of reproduction, we can see that the reputational value of the artwork linked to a non-fungible token requires the fungibility of reproduction, circulation, commentary, and discussion. NFT boosters have been quick to critique the institutions that have traditionally provided the training that fosters such discourse and expertise—in the form of the non-purchasing consumers discussed by Beech— as gatekeepers that exploit artists. While we should acknowledge the gross inequities of the artworld and academia, such institutions have nevertheless been relatively historically successful in their attempt to produce large audiences that can participate in the enrichment of past objects, and the connection of new objects to that past. The challenge that the cryptoworld will face, is whether, like the artworld, it can marshal similar long-term discursive labour in the process of enrichment. If it cannot, we may ironically see the same “gatekeeping” institutions of the artworld invoked to bolster the value of the NFT market. References Artnet. “‘They’ve Created Perceived Value Out of Thin Air’: The Whole Bored Ape Yacht Club Phenomenon, Explained.” 8 April 2022 <https://news.artnet.com/multimedia/the-art-angle-podcast-bored-ape-yacht-club-2094073>. BBC News. “What Are NFTs and Why Are Some Worth Millions?” 23 Sep. 2021. <https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56371912>. Beech, Dave. Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Boltanski, Christian, and Arnauld Esquerre. Enrichment: A Critique of Commodities. Trans. Catherine Porter. London: Polity, 2020. Callahan, Sara. “The Value of a Banana: Understanding Absurd and Ephemeral Artwork.” The Conversation 8 Oct. 2020. <https://theconversation.com/the-value-of-a-banana-understanding-absurd-and-ephemeral-artwork-147689>. Cras, Sophie. The Artist as Economist: Art and Capitalism in the 1960s. Trans. Malcolm DeBevoise. Massachusetts: Yale UP, 2019. Dylan-Ennis, Paul. “NFT Art: The Bizarre World Where Burning a Banksy Can Make It More Valuable.” The Conversation 6 Mar. 2021. <https://theconversation.com/nft-art-the-bizarre-world-where-burning-a-banksy-can-make-it-more-valuable-156605>. Krastrenakes, Jacob. “Beeple Sold an NFT for $69 Million.” The Verge 11 Mar. 2021. <https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/11/22325054/beeple-christies-nft-sale-cost-everydays-69-million>. Kugler, Logan. “Non-Fungible Tokens and the Future of Art.” Communications of the ACM 64.9 (2021). DOI: 10.1145/3474355. Mackenzie, Simon, and Diāna Bērziņa. “NFTs: Digital Things and Their Criminal Lives.” Crime Media Culture (2021). DOI: 10.1177/17416590211039797. Nadini, Matthieu, et al. “Mapping the NFT Revolution: Market Trends, Trade Networks, and Visual Features.” Scientific Reports 11.20902 (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41598021000538. Nguyen, Terry. “The Value of NFTs, Explained by an Expert: How Emotional Attachment to Certain Items and Gifts Could Affect Our Understanding of Value.” Vox 31 Mar. 2021. <https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22358262/value-of-nfts-behavioral-expert>. O’Dwyer, Rachel. “A Celestial Cyberdimension: Art Tokens and the Artwork as Derivative.” Circa Art Magazine 3 Dec. 2018. <https://circaartmagazine.net/a-celestial-cyberdimension-art-tokens-and-the-artwork-as-derivative/#_ftn21>. Joselit, David. “NFTs, or the Readymade Reversed.” October 175 (2021): 3–4. Jutel, Olivier. “Blockchain Imperialism in the Pacific.” Big Data & Society (2021). DOI: 10.1177/2053951720985249. Rennie, Ellie, et al. “Provocation Paper: Blockchain and the Creative Industries.” RMIT, 2019. <https://apo.org.au/sites/default/files/resource-files/2019-11/apo-nid267131.pdf>. Tripathi, Smita. “How NFTs Are Disrupting the Art World.” Business Today 20 Feb. 2022. <https://www.businesstoday.in/magazine/luxury-lifestyle/story/how-nfts-are-disrupting-the-art-world-321706-2022-02-15>. Vasan, Kishore, et al. “Quantifying NFT-Driven Networks in Crypto Art.” Scientific Reports 12.2769 (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-05146-6.
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Ambrosetti, Angelina. „The Portrayal of the Teacher as Mentor in Popular Film: Inspirational, Supportive and Life-Changing?“ M/C Journal 19, Nr. 2 (04.05.2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1104.

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The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires. — William Arthur WardIntroductionThe first documented use of the term Mentor can be traced back to the 8th century BC poem by Homer entitled Odyssey (Hay, Gerber and Minichiello). Although this original representation of Mentor is contested in the literature (Colley), historically the term mentor has evolved to imply a wise and trusted other who advises, teaches, protects and supports someone younger who is inexperienced and not so knowledgeable with the ways of the world. The mentor within a 21st century construct still aligns to this historical portrayal, however the evolution of society, the influence of technology, the growth of entrepreneurship, and a greater understanding of the impact of our interactions with others has forced us to consider mentoring in contemporary ways. As such, popular culture, through books, film and images, provide many impressions of the mentor and what it means to mentor in both historical and contemporary circumstances. Similarly, popular culture provides us with a variety of impressions of the teacher. Throughout old and new history, teaching is considered to be a honourable profession, one that is complex and involves specific skills and knowledge to be effective (Marsh). Society has high expectations of teachers as they are entrusted with shaping the future generation (Parkay). Although the levels of respect and trust of teachers changes within different cultural circumstances, society allows teachers to be one of the most influential figures in a child’s life. Popular film often picks up on this theme and portrays teachers as inspirational figures, pillars of society and those that can have a major influence over the development of the student’s in their care. Within the brief story that a film provides, teachers are more often than not, positioned as a ‘mentor type’ figure to the students entrusted in their care, who guides and supports them to become who they want to be. This paper explores the constructs of the mentor and mentorship through a popular culture lens. Culture is broadly described as the “bricks and mortar of our most commonplace understandings” (Willis 185) and our understandings are shaped by what we see, hear and do. The paper is framed by and seeks to answer the following question: To what extent is the teacher as mentor portrayed in popular film a realistic image? Accordingly this paper will examine the rise of the teacher as mentor and determine what images are portrayed through the medium of film. In order to answer the question, the paper will briefly examine current literature for the characteristics and roles of mentors and teachers. The paper will then delve into the way that teachers are portrayed in film and will be followed by an examination of a selection of films that portray teachers as mentors. A comparison will be made between the characteristics of mentors and the characteristics that the movie teachers display. Analysis through the use of reader-response theory will provide insight into the extent of the reality of the teacher as mentor that are portrayed. Mentors and Teachers: A Review of Selected Literature Mentoring consists of a series of interactions that can be of a social, intellectual or emotional nature (Lentz and Allen). Mentoring can be described as a helping relationship whereby two or more people work together in order to achieve personal and professional goals (Johnson and Ridley). Effective mentoring is also known to be mutually beneficial to all participants (Ambrosetti, Knight and Dekkers). When scanning the literature there are a number of common descriptors that are used consistently to situate the interactions a mentor undertakes: supporter, guide, advisor, teacher, protector and counselor (Sundli; Hall et al.). Such descriptors indicate that a mentor performs a series of roles that change according to the needs of those being mentored (Ambrosetti and Dekkers). If the mentor has a series of roles to perform, then it is logical that the mentee also will also have a number of roles to play, however these are lnot well documented in the literature. The roles that both mentors and mentees play during a relationship can be identified and underpinned through the three dimensions of mentoring: the relationship itself, the developmental needs of the participants and the integration of the context in which the mentoring is situated (Ambrosetti, Knight and Dekkers). The interactions that a mentor engages in with a mentee span over a number of dimensions and are often reactive in nature. The three dimensions of mentoring can assist in describing a mentor and the roles they play. The relational dimension includes such roles as supporter, protector, friend and counselor. The roles of guide, teacher/trainer, collaborator, facilitator and reflector can be classified as developmental whereas being a role model can be both a developmental role and contextual role (230). There are a number of characteristics that are common to a mentor. Johnson and Ridley summarize them to include the following traits: exuding warmth, listening actively, showing unconditional regard, tolerating idealization, embracing humor, not expecting perfection, being trustworthy, having interpersonal competence, respecting another’s values and not being jealous of the mentee (43-62). The above list of traits are personal and often linked to personality, thus can be connected explicitly to the relational dimension of mentoring. The possession (or non-possession) of such traits can impact on the interactions that occur within mentorship. Accordingly it can be assumed that the characteristics, in conjunction with the roles that mentors play, that not everyone is suited to the role of mentor. Most people have experienced schooling at some stage in their life and is therefore familiar with the role of a teacher. Teaching is one most well known professions and can be described as a “creative act in which teachers continually shape and reshape lessons, events and the experiences of their students”(Parkay 45). The role of a teacher is to teach both knowledge and skills to their learners in order to prepare them as citizens for the future. More specifically, the role of the teacher is to design and deliver learning experiences that cater for and challenge the learners, that develop skills and knowledge both inside and outside of the classroom, and help them become confident, creative and responsible citizens. Despite this important role, the image of teachers is split between two types: one that is bitter, spiteful and egocentric, and the other being caring, accepting and reflective (Connell). We remember teachers according to such categories. The types of characteristics that teachers hold are extensive, however the following encompasses those that are key within the literature. Teachers generally have compassion, empathy and a caring nature. They can be flexible, creative, personable, humorous, positive, knowledgeable, motivational and dependable. Teachers are often well organised people, fair minded and resourceful (Howell). When examining the characteristics of teachers and the traits of mentors, similarities can be seen indicating that a particular type of person may be more suited to being a teacher and/or mentor. Teachers as Mentors in Film Teachers seem to be a popular subject of feature films. Films such as Goodbye Mr Chips (1939), Blackboard Jungle (1955) and To Sir with Love (1967) provide us with insight into the way teachers are portrayed in society and the role they play. Film however, has the specific ability to shape the cultural understanding we develop and allows us to make comparisons to our own experiences and those that are played out in fictional circumstances (Delamarter). While there are some films that provide a negative portrayal of teachers, generally they provide a view that teachers are positive influences on the students in their care.A search of the World Wide Web about the teacher as mentor brings up a treasure trove of film titles that span from the 1930s to the present day. Despite such a choice of titles, the following films have been selected to examine in this paper: Dead Poets Society (1989), Dangerous Minds (1995), Freedom Writers (2007) and the Harry Potter series of films (2001-2011). Selection of these films was based on the following two criteria: 1) they occurred within in a school setting and 2) are embedded within a contemporary theme of struggle where rebellion and/or other teenage angst are highlighted. Reader-response theory will underpin the analysis of the teachers in each of the films selected, so that an answer to the earlier posed question can be illuminated. Broadly speaking, reader-response theory is concerned with how readers, or in this case viewers, “make meaning from their experience with the text” (Beach 1). There are many perspectives on reader-response theory and how one might focus upon when responding to a text. In this instance the author will highlight the transaction that occurs between the reader, the text and the context. The transactions will include the social, cultural, experiential, psychological and textual viewpoints (Beach 8). Firstly, each film will be briefly described. This will be followed by an analysis of the teachers portrayed in the films. Dead Poets Society (1989) is set at a conservative secondary boys academy in the late 1950s and focuses on a group of students completing their senior year. Mr Keating is a new English teacher who uses unconventional teaching methods in the classroom. He inspires his students to ‘seize the day’ and ‘make your lives extraordinary’ and does this through the teaching of poetry. He encourages them to stand on desks during his lessons and to throw out tradition. It is Keating’s messages to his students to question what they believe that permeates the film and inspires his students to pursue what they want to do and become. The film Dangerous Minds (1995) is set in a low socio-economic area, where un-privilege and protecting yourself is a way of life. The teacher in this film is new and young, but is an ex US Marine. The class the film centres on is a difficult one to teach. This teacher uses unorthodox methods to gain the attention and trust of her students. The film makes a point to show us that she makes particular effort to relate the curriculum to the students’ interests in order to engage them in learning. Emphasis is also on the fact that she takes an interest in the students and many become her ‘personal projects’ and helping them to realize who they can become. Freedom Writers (2007) is set in the years directly following the Los Angeles riots of 1992 whereby issues of racism, segregation and inequality along with the changing view of the world is the focus. The students in the classrooms of this film are from diverse backgrounds and un-trusting of the education system. Their teacher is new and young and her first attempts to earn their trust fail until she begins to get to know the students and make links between what is being taught to their own lives. She inspires her class to learn tolerance, apply themselves and pursue further education. In the Harry Potter (2001-2011) series of films, there are several teachers who make an impact upon the young wizards. Although set in a fantasy world, the audience is treated to both inspirational teachers looking to nurture, protect and develop their charges, and teachers who are painted as egocentric and suspicious. Inspirational teachers include Dumbledore and McGonagall who offer subtle life lessons, specific skills and knowledge and protect the young wizards from danger. Egocentric and somewhat suspicious teachers include Snape and Quirrell who look to thwart the wizard’s time at school, however they too offer subtle life lessons to their students. The theme of good versus evil is paramount throughout the film series and the teachers are aligned with this theme.Teachers as Mentors – An AnalysisAlthough only a brief description of each film has been offered, the teachers as mentors to their students is the focus. Mr Keating (Dead Poets Society) and LouAnne Johnson (Dangerous Minds) are both described as unorthodox as they each use teaching methods that are frowned upon by others. However their purposeful and different teaching methods draw their students into their lessons so that life learning can occur. In each film, the unorthodox teaching touches the students in ways unknown to them before and in both cases the students demonstrate intellectual and personal growth. The unorthodox methods provide an avenue for a different relationship that is far from the traditional. In some scenes friendship is hinted at where guiding and supporting the students towards their hopes and dreams is highlighted. Aspects of mentoring can be seen through relational, developmental and contextual domains as the students are supported, guided and provided explicit role modeling. The young teacher in Freedom Writers, Erin Gruwell, uses a teaching approach that includes taking time to get to know her students. This approach, like Keating and Johnson, provides the opportunity to tweak the curriculum to the interests of the students and thus engage them in academic learning. They teach skills and knowledge in ways which relate to the students’ lives and interests. They guide, support the students towards the unfamiliar and facilitate opportunities for success. They help them to set goals and make them realise that they have a future and can be successful in their lives. The transformations that occur due to the teaching approaches used by the teachers cause their students admire and want to be like them. In Harry Potter, teachers Dumbledore and McGonagall are wise in years and life experience. They offer wisdom, protection and guidance to the young wizards throughout the series. These teachers, like Keating, Johnson and Gruwell, are role models in that they represent what life can be like and how best to achieve that life. Snape and Quirell also take an interest in their students, but represent an alternative view of life and learning. The difference between the four Harry Potter teachers can be drilled down to the traits of effective teachers. Two of which emulate the traits and two whom do not readily display any of the traits. Dumbledore and McGonagall can be considered as teacher mentors whereas Snape and Quirell cannot. In each film the student can be seen as central to the teacher as mentor and this in turn influences the way in which they behave. The teachers in these films pass on life lessons through their teaching. Throughout the films the teachers are guiding, supporting, befriending, protecting and training their charges. Interactions that occur between the teachers and the students are followed by a reflective phase by the teachers, whereby solutions to problems are sought or self-realisation occurs. In many instances the films show the teacher learning from the student and thus learning their own life lessons through reflection. From a social and cultural perspective, what is portrayed within the storylines are often close to the reality of what is expected from teachers. In many instances these lead towards a stereotyping of who teachers are and how they behave. However, from an experiential point of view, our expectations of the actions that teachers undertake do not usually take such form. In reality, teachers are busy people with a complex job to do (Connell) and often do not have time to take personal interest in all of their students individually. The teachers within the films chosen seem to have one class to prepare for, whereas in reality, a school teacher will have many classes to consider. Psychologically, some teachers and the style they embrace appeal to a particular a type of student or group of students. In the case of Dead Poets Society, Dangerous Minds and Freedom Writers, the storyline painted the students as those needing a particular type of teacher, someone who would save them from their circumstance and visa versa. The textual perspective was well highlighted by the teachers in the Harry Potter films as the viewer expects to see teachers with rather unusual but interesting teaching styles. However the text (within all films) included insight into mentor characteristics such as warmth, humour, tolerance, respect and unconditional regards. Generally, the films examined highlight two different types of teachers, challenging the categories written about by Connell. The first type of teacher highlighted was one who was seen as being more contemporary. One who is individual, unorthodox, and maybe a little rebellious; this teacher highlights that you need to be ‘different’ to make a difference. The second type was one who aligns to the traditional form of teacher; one who uses their knowledge, wisdom and life experience to break through to their student. Each of the films were underpinned by the relationship, the developmental needs and the context in which the narrative was played out, however the relationship between the students and the teacher was highlighted as being central to the storyline. Thus films of this nature often portray teachers as those who help their students in the emotional sense rather than the intellectual sense (Delamarter). Conclusion Several understandings about the teacher as mentor have been brought to light through the examination of the teacher as mentor in film. Firstly, in revisiting the mentoring definitions offered within this paper, it can be said that the teachers highlighted in the discussed films were mentoring their students in a way unique to the relationship developed between teacher and student. In each instance the teacher worked with their students to identify teaching approaches that would be successful in the context in which they were situated. Each film demonstrated that the teachers were committed to creating a relationship that met the developmental needs of their students. Interestingly, it was observed that the relationships were mutually beneficial in that the teachers grew along with the students with many coming to realisations about themselves through reflection and self thought. Secondly, the teachers within the films were portrayed as playing several important roles within their students’ lives. The teachers were role models inside and outside of the classroom. Each film’s storyline positioned the teacher as an influential other, whether they be portrayed as rebellious and unorthodox, evil and suspicious or inspirational and wise. The teachers in these films can be considered as mentors as they were supporting, guiding, protecting and nurturing the students to become better versions of themselves. However, the question that this article sought to answer was: to what extent is the teacher as mentor portrayed in popular film a realistic image? In looking back at the image the teacher in society and the role that they play in developing citizens of the future, it can be said the image presented has slivers of realism. In the real world, teachers must conform to society’s expectations, educational policies and codes of professionalism. Professional relationships with students do not encompass them in behave a student as a ‘personal project’, although catering to their needs is encouraged within the curriculum. It would be thought that if teachers did not encourage their students to be the best they can be, then they would not be doing their job. Many figures throughout our cultural history have been viewed as a mentor due to the role they play and how these roles align to societal beliefs and values. Thus, the portrayal of mentors and mentorship through a popular culture lens provides insight into our understanding about what mentorship is and how this may develop in the future. Both in the past and present, teachers are seen as inspirational figures and pillars of society, and are often considered a mentor by default. Films portray teachers in a variety of fashions, however there are many films that subtly position the teacher as a mentor to their students and it is this that this article has focused on. ReferencesAmbrosetti, Angelina, and John Dekkers. “The Interconnectedness of the Roles of Mentors and Mentees in Pre-Service Teacher Education Mentoring Relationships.” Australian Journal of Teacher Education 35.6 (2010): 42-55.Ambrosetti, Angelina, Bruce Allen Knight, and John Dekkers. “Maximizing the Potential of Mentoring: A Framework for Pre-Service Teacher Education.” Mentoring and Tutoring: Partnership in Learning 22.3 (2014): 224-39.Beach, Richard. A Teacher’s Response to Reader-Response Theories. Illinois: National Council Teachers of English, 1993.Blackboard Jungle. Directed by Richard Brooks. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1955.Colley, Helen. “Righting Rewritings of the Myth of Mentor: A Critical Perspective on Career Guidance Mentoring.” British Journal of Guidance & Counselling 29.2 (2001): 177-197.Connell, Raewyn. “Teachers.” Education, Change and Society. Eds. Raewyn Connell, Anthony Welch, Margaret Vickers, Dennis Foley, Nigel Bagnall, Debra Hayes, Helen Proctor, Arathi Sriprakash, and Craig Campbell. South Melbourne: Oxford, 2013. 261-275.Dangerous Minds. Directed by John N. Smith. Hollywood Pictures/Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer Films/Via Rosa Productions, 1995.Dead Poets Society. Directed by Peter Weir. Touchstone Pictures/Silver Screen Partners IV, 1989.Delamater, Jeremy. “Avoiding Practice Shock: Using Teacher Movies to Realign Pre-Service Teachers’ Expectations of Teaching.” Australian Journal of Teacher Education 40.2 (2015): 1-14.Freedom Writers. Directed by Richard LaGravenese. Paramount Pictures, 2007.Goodbye Mr Chips. Directed by Sam Wood. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Denham Studios, 1939.Hall, Kendra M., Rani Jo Draper, Leigh K. Smith, and Robert V. Bullough. “More than a Place to Teach: Exploring the Perceptions of the Roles and Responsibilities of Mentor Teachers.” Mentoring and Tutoring: Partnership in Learning 16.3 (2008): 328-45.Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Directed by Chris Columbus. Heyday Films/1492 Pictures, 2001.Hay, Terence, Rod Gerber, and Victor Minichiello. “Mentorship: A Review of the Concept.” Unicorn 25.2 (1999): 84-95.Howell, Jennifer. Teaching and Learning: Building Effective Pedagogies. South Melbourne, Vic.: Oxford University Press, 2014.Lentz, Elizabeth, and Tammy D. Allen. “Reflections on Naturally Occurring Mentoring Relationships.” The Blackwell Handbook of Mentoring: A Multiple Perspectives Approach. Eds. Tammy D. Allen and Lillian T. Eby. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007. 159-162.Johnson, W. Brad, and Charles R. Ridley. The Elements of Mentoring. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Marsh, Colin. Becoming a Teacher: Knowledge Skills and Issues. 5th ed. Frenchs Forest Pearson, 2010.Parkay, Forrest W. Becoming a Teacher. 9th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.Sundli, Liv. “Mentoring: A New Mantra for Education?” Teaching and Teacher Education 23 (2007): 201-14.To Sir with Love. Directed by James Clavell. Columbia British Productions, 1967.Willis, Paul. “Shop-Floor Culture, Masculinity and the Wage Form.” Working Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory. Eds. John Clarke, Chas Critcher, and Richard Johnson. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2007. 185-200.
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Champion, Katherine M. „A Risky Business? The Role of Incentives and Runaway Production in Securing a Screen Industries Production Base in Scotland“. M/C Journal 19, Nr. 3 (22.06.2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1101.

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IntroductionDespite claims that the importance of distance has been reduced due to technological and communications improvements (Cairncross; Friedman; O’Brien), the ‘power of place’ still resonates, often intensifying the role of geography (Christopherson et al.; Morgan; Pratt; Scott and Storper). Within the film industry, there has been a decentralisation of production from Hollywood, but there remains a spatial logic which has preferenced particular centres, such as Toronto, Vancouver, Sydney and Prague often led by a combination of incentives (Christopherson and Storper; Goldsmith and O’Regan; Goldsmith et al.; Miller et al.; Mould). The emergence of high end television, television programming for which the production budget is more than £1 million per television hour, has presented new opportunities for screen hubs sharing a very similar value chain to the film industry (OlsbergSPI with Nordicity).In recent years, interventions have proliferated with the aim of capitalising on the decentralisation of certain activities in order to attract international screen industries production and embed it within local hubs. Tools for building capacity and expertise have proliferated, including support for studio complex facilities, infrastructural investments, tax breaks and other economic incentives (Cucco; Goldsmith and O’Regan; Jensen; Goldsmith et al.; McDonald; Miller et al.; Mould). Yet experience tells us that these will not succeed everywhere. There is a need for a better understanding of both the capacity for places to build a distinctive and competitive advantage within a highly globalised landscape and the relative merits of alternative interventions designed to generate a sustainable production base.This article first sets out the rationale for the appetite identified in the screen industries for co-location, or clustering and concentration in a tightly drawn physical area, in global hubs of production. It goes on to explore the latest trends of decentralisation and examines the upturn in interventions aimed at attracting mobile screen industries capital and labour. Finally it introduces the Scottish screen industries and explores some of the ways in which Scotland has sought to position itself as a recipient of screen industries activity. The paper identifies some key gaps in infrastructure, most notably a studio, and calls for closer examination of the essential ingredients of, and possible interventions needed for, a vibrant and sustainable industry.A Compulsion for ProximityIt has been argued that particular spatial and place-based factors are central to the development and organisation of the screen industries. The film and television sector, the particular focus of this article, exhibit an extraordinarily high degree of spatial agglomeration, especially favouring centres with global status. It is worth noting that the computer games sector, not explored in this article, slightly diverges from this trend displaying more spatial patterns of decentralisation (Vallance), although key physical hubs of activity have been identified (Champion). Creative products often possess a cachet that is directly associated with their point of origin, for example fashion from Paris, films from Hollywood and country music from Nashville – although it can also be acknowledged that these are often strategic commercial constructions (Pecknold). The place of production represents a unique component of the final product as well as an authentication of substantive and symbolic quality (Scott, “Creative cities”). Place can act as part of a brand or image for creative industries, often reinforcing the advantage of being based in particular centres of production.Very localised historical, cultural, social and physical factors may also influence the success of creative production in particular places. Place-based factors relating to the built environment, including cheap space, public-sector support framework, connectivity, local identity, institutional environment and availability of amenities, are seen as possible influences in the locational choices of creative industry firms (see, for example, Drake; Helbrecht; Hutton; Leadbeater and Oakley; Markusen).Employment trends are notoriously difficult to measure in the screen industries (Christopherson, “Hollywood in decline?”), but the sector does contain large numbers of very small firms and freelancers. This allows them to be flexible but poses certain problems that can be somewhat offset by co-location. The findings of Antcliff et al.’s study of workers in the audiovisual industry in the UK suggested that individuals sought to reconstruct stable employment relations through their involvement in and use of networks. The trust and reciprocity engendered by stable networks, built up over time, were used to offset the risk associated with the erosion of stable employment. These findings are echoed by a study of TV content production in two media regions in Germany by Sydow and Staber who found that, although firms come together to work on particular projects, typically their business relations extend for a much longer period than this. Commonly, firms and individuals who have worked together previously will reassemble for further project work aided by their past experiences and expectations.Co-location allows the development of shared structures: language, technical attitudes, interpretative schemes and ‘communities of practice’ (Bathelt, et al.). Grabher describes this process as ‘hanging out’. Deep local pools of creative and skilled labour are advantageous both to firms and employees (Reimer et al.) by allowing flexibility, developing networks and offsetting risk (Banks et al.; Scott, “Global City Regions”). For example in Cook and Pandit’s study comparing the broadcasting industry in three city-regions, London was found to be hugely advantaged by its unrivalled talent pool, high financial rewards and prestigious projects. As Barnes and Hutton assert in relation to the wider creative industries, “if place matters, it matters most to them” (1251). This is certainly true for the screen industries and their spatial logic points towards a compulsion for proximity in large global hubs.Decentralisation and ‘Sticky’ PlacesDespite the attraction of global production hubs, there has been a decentralisation of screen industries from key centres, starting with the film industry and the vertical disintegration of Hollywood studios (Christopherson and Storper). There are instances of ‘runaway production’ from the 1920s onwards with around 40 per cent of all features being accounted for by offshore production in 1960 (Miller et al., 133). This trend has been increasing significantly in the last 20 years, leading to the genesis of new hubs of screen activity such as Toronto, Vancouver, Sydney and Prague (Christopherson, “Project work in context”; Goldsmith et al.; Mould; Miller et al.; Szczepanik). This development has been prompted by a multiplicity of reasons including favourable currency value differentials and economic incentives. Subsidies and tax breaks have been offered to secure international productions with most countries demanding that, in order to qualify for tax relief, productions have to spend a certain amount of their budget within the local economy, employ local crew and use domestic creative talent (Hill). Extensive infrastructure has been developed including studio complexes to attempt to lure productions with the advantage of a full service offering (Goldsmith and O’Regan).Internationally, Canada has been the greatest beneficiary of ‘runaway production’ with a state-led enactment of generous film incentives since the late 1990s (McDonald). Vancouver and Toronto are the busiest locations for North American Screen production after Los Angeles and New York, due to exchange rates and tax rebates on labour costs (Miller et al., 141). 80% of Vancouver’s production is attributable to runaway production (Jensen, 27) and the city is considered by some to have crossed a threshold as:It now possesses sufficient depth and breadth of talent to undertake the full array of pre-production, production and post-production services for the delivery of major motion pictures and TV programmes. (Barnes and Coe, 19)Similarly, Toronto is considered to have established a “comprehensive set of horizontal and vertical media capabilities” to ensure its status as a “full function media centre” (Davis, 98). These cities have successfully engaged in entrepreneurial activity to attract production (Christopherson, “Project Work in Context”) and in Vancouver the proactive role of provincial government and labour unions are, in part, credited with its success (Barnes and Coe). Studio-complex infrastructure has also been used to lure global productions, with Toronto, Melbourne and Sydney all being seen as key examples of where such developments have been used as a strategic priority to take local production capacity to the next level (Goldsmith and O’Regan).Studies which provide a historiography of the development of screen-industry hubs emphasise a complex interplay of social, cultural and physical conditions. In the complex and global flows of the screen industries, ‘sticky’ hubs have emerged with the ability to attract and retain capital and skilled labour. Despite being principally organised to attract international production, most studio complexes, especially those outside of global centres need to have a strong relationship to local or national film and television production to ensure the sustainability and depth of the labour pool (Goldsmith and O’Regan, 2003). Many have a broadcaster on site as well as a range of companies with a media orientation and training facilities (Goldsmith and O’Regan, 2003; Picard, 2008). The emergence of film studio complexes in the Australian Gold Coast and Vancouver was accompanied by an increasing role for television production and this multi-purpose nature was important for the continuity of production.Fostering a strong community of below the line workers, such as set designers, locations managers, make-up artists and props manufacturers, can also be a clear advantage in attracting international productions. For example at Cinecitta in Italy, the expertise of set designers and experienced crews in the Barrandov Studios of Prague are regarded as major selling points of the studio complexes there (Goldsmith and O’Regan; Miller et al.; Szczepanik). Natural and built environments are also considered very important for film and television firms and it is a useful advantage for capturing international production when cities can double for other locations as in the cases of Toronto, Vancouver, Prague for example (Evans; Goldsmith and O’Regan; Szczepanik). Toronto, for instance, has doubled for New York in over 100 films and with regard to television Due South’s (1994-1998) use of Toronto as Chicago was estimated to have saved 40 per cent in costs (Miller et al., 141).The Scottish Screen Industries Within mobile flows of capital and labour, Scotland has sought to position itself as a recipient of screen industries activity through multiple interventions, including investment in institutional frameworks, direct and indirect economic subsidies and the development of physical infrastructure. Traditionally creative industry activity in the UK has been concentrated in London and the South East which together account for 43% of the creative economy workforce (Bakhshi et al.). In order, in part to redress this imbalance and more generally to encourage the attraction and retention of international production a range of policies have been introduced focused on the screen industries. A revised Film Tax Relief was introduced in 2007 to encourage inward investment and prevent offshoring of indigenous production, and this has since been extended to high-end television, animation and children’s programming. Broadcasting has also experienced a push for decentralisation led by public funding with a responsibility to be regionally representative. The BBC (“BBC Annual Report and Accounts 2014/15”) is currently exceeding its target of 50% network spend outside London by 2016, with 17% spent in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Channel 4 has similarly committed to commission at least 9% of its original spend from the nations by 2020. Studios have been also developed across the UK including at Roath Lock (Cardiff), Titanic Studios (Belfast), MedicaCity (Salford) and The Sharp Project (Manchester).The creative industries have been identified as one of seven growth sectors for Scotland by the government (Scottish Government). In 2010, the film and video sector employed 3,500 people and contributed £120 million GVA and £120 million adjusted GVA to the economy and the radio and TV sector employed 3,500 people and contributed £50 million GVA and £400 million adjusted GVA (The Scottish Parliament). Beyond the direct economic benefits of sectors, the on-screen representation of Scotland has been claimed to boost visitor numbers to the country (EKOS) and high profile international film productions have been attracted including Skyfall (2012) and WWZ (2013).Scotland has historically attracted international film and TV productions due to its natural locations (VisitScotland) and on average, between 2009-2014, six big budget films a year used Scottish locations both urban and rural (BOP Consulting, 2014). In all, a total of £20 million was generated by film-making in Glasgow during 2011 (Balkind) with WWZ (2013) and Cloud Atlas (2013), representing Philadelphia and San Francisco respectively, as well as doubling for Edinburgh for the recent acclaimed Scottish films Filth (2013) and Sunshine on Leith (2013). Sanson (80) asserts that the use of the city as a site for international productions not only brings in direct revenue from production money but also promotes the city as a “fashionable place to live, work and visit. Creativity makes the city both profitable and ‘cool’”.Nonetheless, issues persist and it has been suggested that Scotland lacks a stable and sustainable film industry, with low indigenous production levels and variable success from year to year in attracting inward investment (BOP Consulting). With regard to crew, problems with an insufficient production base have been identified as an issue in maintaining a pipeline of skills (BOP Consulting). Developing ‘talent’ is a central aspect of the Scottish Government’s Strategy for the Creative Industries, yet there remains the core challenge of retaining skills and encouraging new talent into the industry (BOP Consulting).With regard to film, a lack of substantial funding incentives and the absence of a studio have been identified as a key concern for the sector. For example, within the film industry the majority of inward investment filming in Scotland is location work as it lacks the studio facilities that would enable it to sustain a big-budget production in its entirety (BOP Consulting). The absence of such infrastructure has been seen as contributing to a drain of Scottish talent from these industries to other areas and countries where there is a more vibrant sector (BOP Consulting). The loss of Scottish talent to Northern Ireland was attributed to the longevity of the work being provided by Games of Thrones (2011-) now having completed its six series at the Titanic Studios in Belfast (EKOS) although this may have been stemmed somewhat recently with the attraction of US high-end TV series Outlander (2014-) which has been based at Wardpark in Cumbernauld since 2013.Television, both high-end production and local broadcasting, appears crucial to the sustainability of screen production in Scotland. Outlander has been estimated to contribute to Scotland’s production spend figures reaching a historic high of £45.8 million in 2014 (Creative Scotland ”Creative Scotland Screen Strategy Update”). The arrival of the program has almost doubled production spend in Scotland, offering the chance for increased stability for screen industries workers. Qualifying for UK High-End Television Tax Relief, Outlander has engaged a crew of approximately 300 across props, filming and set build, and cast over 2,000 supporting artist roles from within Scotland and the UK.Long running drama, in particular, offers key opportunities for both those cutting their teeth in the screen industries and also by providing more consistent and longer-term employment to existing workers. BBC television soap River City (2002-) has been identified as a key example of such an opportunity and the programme has been credited with providing a springboard for developing the skills of local actors, writers and production crew (Hibberd). This kind of pipeline of production is critical given the work patterns of the sector. According to Creative Skillset, of the 4,000 people in Scotland are employed in the film and television industries, 40% of television workers are freelance and 90% of film production work in freelance (EKOS).In an attempt to address skills gaps, the Outlander Trainee Placement Scheme has been devised in collaboration with Creative Scotland and Creative Skillset. During filming of Season One, thirty-eight trainees were supported across a range of production and craft roles, followed by a further twenty-five in Season Two. Encouragingly Outlander, and the books it is based on, is set in Scotland so the authenticity of place has played a strong component in the decision to locate production there. Producer David Brown began his career on Bill Forsyth films Gregory’s Girl (1981), Local Hero (1983) and Comfort and Joy (1984) and has a strong existing relationship to Scotland. He has been very vocal in his support for the trainee program, contending that “training is the future of our industry and we at Outlander see the growth of talent and opportunities as part of our mission here in Scotland” (“Outlander fast tracks next generation of skilled screen talent”).ConclusionsThis article has aimed to explore the relationship between place and the screen industries and, taking Scotland as its focus, has outlined a need to more closely examine the ways in which the sector can be supported. Despite the possible gains in terms of building a sustainable industry, the state-led funding of the global screen industries is contested. The use of tax breaks and incentives has been problematised and critiques range from use of public funding to attract footloose media industries to the increasingly zero sum game of competition between competing places (Morawetz; McDonald). In relation to broadcasting, there have been critiques of a ‘lift and shift’ approach to policy in the UK, with TV production companies moving to the nations and regions temporarily to meet the quota and leaving once a production has finished (House of Commons). Further to this, issues have been raised regarding how far such interventions can seed and develop a rich production ecology that offers opportunities for indigenous talent (Christopherson and Rightor).Nonetheless recent success for the screen industries in Scotland can, at least in part, be attributed to interventions including increased decentralisation of broadcasting and the high-end television tax incentives. This article has identified gaps in infrastructure which continue to stymie growth and have led to production drain to other centres. Important gaps in knowledge can also be acknowledged that warrant further investigation and unpacking including the relationship between film, high-end television and broadcasting, especially in terms of the opportunities they offer for screen industries workers to build a career in Scotland and notable gaps in infrastructure and the impact they have on the loss of production.ReferencesAntcliff, Valerie, Richard Saundry, and Mark Stuart. Freelance Worker Networks in Audio-Visual Industries. University of Central Lancashire, 2004.Bakhshi, Hasan, John Davies, Alan Freeman, and Peter Higgs. "The Geography of the UK’s Creative and High–Tech Economies." 2015.Balkind, Nicola. World Film Locations: Glasgow. Intellect Books, 2013.Banks, Mark, Andy Lovatt, Justin O’Connor, and Carlo Raffo. "Risk and Trust in the Cultural Industries." Geoforum 31.4 (2000): 453-464.Barnes, Trevor, and Neil M. Coe. “Vancouver as Media Cluster: The Cases of Video Games and Film/TV." 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MacGill, Bindi, Julie Mathews, Aunty Ellen Trevorrow, Aunty Alice Abdulla und Deb Rankine. „Ecology, Ontology, and Pedagogy at Camp Coorong“. M/C Journal 15, Nr. 3 (03.05.2012). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.499.

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Introduction Ngarrindjeri futures depend on the survival of the land, waters, and other interconnected living things. The Murray-Darling Basin is recognised nationally and internationally as a system under stress. Ngarrindjeri have long understood the profound and intricate connection of land, water, humans, and non-humans (Trevorrow and Hemming). In an effort to secure environmental sustainability the Ngarrindjeri Regional Authority (NRA) have engaged in political negotiations with the State, primarily with the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), to transform natural resource management arrangements that engage with an ethics of justice, redistribution, and recognition (Hattam, Rigney and Hemming). In 1987, prior to the formation of the NRA, Camp Coorong: Race Relations and Cultural Education Centre was established by the Ngarrindjeri Lands and Progress Association in partnership with the South Australian Museum and the South Australian Education Department (Hemming) as a place for all citizens to engage with the values of a land ethic of care. The complex includes a cultural museum, accommodation, conference facilities, and workshop facilities for primary, secondary, and tertiary education students; it also serves as a base for research and course development on Indigenous and Ngarrindjeri culture and history (Hattam, Rigney and Hemming). Camp Coorong seeks to share Ngarrindjeri cultural values, knowledges, and histories with students and visitors in order to “improve relations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people with a broader strategy aimed at securing a future for themselves in their own ‘Country’” (Hemming 37). The Centre is adjacent to the Coorong National Park and 200 km South-East of Adelaide. The establishment of Camp Coorong on Ngarrindjeri Ruwe/Ruwar (land/body/spirit) occurred when Ngarrindjeri Elders negotiated with the Department of Education and Children’s Services (DECS) to establish the race relations and cultural education centre. This negotiation was the beginning of many subsequent negotiations between Ngarrindjeri, local, State, and Federal governments about reclaiming ownership, management, and control of Ngarrindjeri lands, waters, and knowledge systems for a healthy Country and by implication healthy people (Hemming, Trevorrow and Rigney). As Elder Tom Trevorrow states: The waters and the seas, the waters of the Kurangh (Coorong), the waters of the rivers and lakes are all spiritual waters…The land and waters is a living body…We the Ngarrindjeri people are a part of its existence…The land and waters must be healthy for the Ngarrindjeri people to be healthy…We say that if Yarluwar-Ruwe dies, the water dies, our Ngartjis die, the Ngarrindjeri will surely die (Ngarrindjeri Nation Yarluwar-Ruwe Plan 13). Ruwe/Ruwar is an important aspect of the public pedagogy practiced at Camp Coorong and by the Ngarrindjeri Regional Authority (NRA). The NRA’s nation building activities arise from negotiated contractual agreements called KNYs: Kungan Ngarrindjeri Yunnan (Listen to Ngarrindjeri people talking). KNYs establish a vital aspect of the NRA’s strategic platform for political negotiations. However, the focus of this paper is concerned with local Indigenous experience of teaching and experience with the education system rather than the broader Ngarrindjeri educational objectives in the area. The specific concerns of this paper are the performance of storytelling and the dialectic relationship between the listener/learner (Tur and Tur). The pedagogy and place of Camp Coorong seeks to engage non-Indigenous people with Indigenous epistemologies through storytelling as a pedagogy of experience and a “pedagogy of discomfort” (Boler and Zembylas). Before detailing the relationship of these with one another, it is necessary to grasp the importance of the interconnectedness of Ruwe/Ruwar articulated in the opening statement of Ngarrindjeri Nations Yarluwar-Ruwe Plan: Caring for Ngarrindjeri Sea, Country and Culture: Our Lands, Our Waters, Our People, All Living Things are connected. We implore people to respect our Ruwe (Country) as it was created in the Kaldowinyeri (the Creation). We long for sparkling, clean waters, healthy land and people and all living things. We long for the Yarluwar-Ruwe (Sea Country) of our ancestors. Our vision is all people Caring, Sharing, Knowing and Respecting the lands, the waters, and all living things. Caring for Country The Lakes and the Coorong are dying as irrigation, over grazing, and pollution have left their toll on the Murray-Darling Basin. Camp Coorong delivers a key message (Hemming, 38) concerning the on-going obligation of Ngarrindjeri’s Ruwe/Ruwar to heal damaged sites both emotionally and environmentally. Couched as a civic responsibility, caring for County augments environmental action. However, there are epistemological distinctions between Natural Resources Management and Ngarrindjeri Ruwe/Ruwar. Ngarrindjeri conceive of the River Murray as one system that cannot be demarcated along state lines. Ngarrrindjeri Elder Uncle Matt Rigney, who recently passed away, argued that the River Murray and the Darling is embodied and that when the river is sick it impacts directly on Ngarrindjeri personhood and wellbeing (Hemming, Trevorrow and Rigney). Therefore, Ngarrindjeri have a responsibility to care for Ngarrindjeri Country and Ngarrindjeri governance systems are informed by cultural and ethical obligations to Ruwe/Ruwar of the lower Murray River, Lakes and Coorong. Transmitting knowledge of Country is imperative as Aunty Ellen Trevorrow states: We have to keep our culture alive. We want access to our special places, our lands and our waters. We need to be able to protect our places, our ngatji [totems], our Old People and restore damaged sites. We want respect for our land and our water and we want to pass down knowledge (cited in Bell, Women and Indigenous Religions 3). Ruwe/Ruwar is an ethic of care where men and women hold distinctive cultural and environmental knowledge and are responsible for passing knowledge to future generations. Knowledge is not codified into a “canon” but is “living knowledge” connected to how to live and how to understand the connection between material, spiritual, human, and non-human realms. Elders at Camp Coorong facilitate understandings of this ontology by sharing stories that evoke questions in children and adults alike. For settler Australians, the first phase of this understanding begins with an engagement with the discomfort of the colonial history of Indigenous dispossession. It also requires learning new modes of “re/inhabition” through a pedagogy informed by “place-consciousness” that centralises Indigenous connection to Country (Gruenewald Both Worlds). Many settler communities embody a dualist western epistemology that is necessarily disrupted when there is acknowledgment from whence one came (Carter 2009). The activities and stories at Camp Coorong provide a positive transformative pedagogy that transforms a possessive white logic (Moreton-Robinson) to one of shared cultural heritage. Ngarrindjeri epistemologies of connection to Country are expressed through a pedagogy of storytelling at Camp Coorong. This often occurs during weaving, making feather flowers, or walking on Ngarrindjeri Country with visitors and students. Enactments such as weaving are not simply occupational or functional. Weaving has deep cultural and metaphorical significance as Aunty Ellen Trevorrow states: There is a whole ritual in weaving. From where we actually start, the centre part of a piece, you’re creating loops to weave into, then you move into the circle. You keep going round and round creating the loops and once the children do those stages they’re talking, actually having a conversation, just like our Old People. It’s sharing time. And that’s where our stories were told (cited in Bell, Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin 44). At Camp Coorong learning involves listening to stories while engaging with activities such as weaving or walking on Country. The ecological changes and the history of dispossession are woven into narrative on Country and students see the impact of the desecration of the Coorong, Lower Murray and Lakes and lands. In this way the relatively recent history of colonial race relations and contemporary struggles with government bureaucracies and legislation also comprise the warp and weave of Ngarrindjeri knowledge and connection to Country. Pedagogy of Experience A pedagogy of experience involves telling the story of Indigenous peoples’ sense of “placelessness” within the nation (Watson) as a story of survival and resistance. It is through such pedagogies that Ngarrindjeri Elders at Camp Coorong reconstruct their lives and create agency in the face of settler colonialism. The experiences of growing up in Australia during the assimilation era, fighting against the State on policies that endorsed child theft, being forced to live at fringe camps, experiencing violent racisms, and, for some, living as part of a diaspora in one’s own Country is embedded in the stories of survival, resilience and agency. “Camp Coorong began as an experiment in alternative teaching methods developed largely by George Trevorrow, a local Ngarrindjeri man” (Hemming 38). Classroom malaise was experienced by Ngarrindjeri Elders from Camp Coorong, such as Uncle Tom and Aunty Ellen Trevorrow and the late Uncle George Trevorrow, Aunty Alice Abdulla, and others when interacting or employed in schools as Aboriginal Education Workers (AEWs). It was the invisibility of these Elders’ knowledges inside schools that generated the impetus to establish Camp Coorong as a counter-institution. The spatial dimension of situationality, and its attention to social transformation, connects critical pedagogy to a pedagogy of place at Camp Coorong. Both discourses are concerned with the contextual, geographical conditions that shape people, and the actions people take to shape these conditions (Gruenewald, Both Worlds). Place-based education at Camp Coorong advocates a new localism in order to stimulate community revitalisation and resistance to globalisation and commodity capitalism. It provides the space and opportunity to develop the capacity for inventiveness and adaptation to changing environments and resistance to ecological destruction. Of concern to the growing field of place-based education are how to promote care for people and places (Gruenewald and Smith, xix). For Gruenewald and Smith this requires decolonisation and developing sensitivity to forms of thought that injure and exploit people and places, and re/inhabitation by identifying, conserving, and creating knowledge that nurtures and protects people and places. Engaging in a land ethic of care on Country informs the educational paradigm at Camp Coorong that does not begin in front of bulldozers or under police batons at anti-globalisation rallies, but in the contact zones (Somerville 342) where “a material and metaphysical in-between space for the intersection of multiple and contested stories” (Somerville 342) emerge. Ngarrindjeri knowledge, environmental knowledge, scientific knowledge, colonial histories, and media representations all circulate in the contact zone and are held in productive tension (Carter). Decolonising Pedagogy and Pedagogies of Discomfort The critical and transformative aspects of decolonising pedagogies emerge from storytelling and involve the gift of narrative and the enactment of reciprocity that occurs between the listener and the storyteller. Reciprocity is based on the principles of interconnectedness, balance, and the idea that actions create corresponding action through the gift of story (Stewart-Harawira). Camp Coorong is a place for inter-cultural dialogue through storytelling. Being located on Ngarrindjeri Country the non-Indigenous listener is more able to “hear” and at the same time move along a continuum of a) disbelief and anger about the dispossession of Indigenous peoples; b) emotional confusion about their own sense of belonging in Australia; c) shock at the ways in which liberal western society’s structural privilege is built on Indigenous inequality on the grounds of race and habitus (Bordieu and Passeron); then, d) towards empathy that is framed as race cognisance (Aveling). Stories are not represented through a sanguine vision of the past, but are told of colonisation, dispossession, as well as of hope for the healing of Ngarrinjderi Country. The listener is gifted with stories at Camp Coorong. However, there is an ethical obligation to the gifting that learners may not understand until later and which concern the rights and obligations fundamental to notions of deep connection to Country. It is often in the recount of one’s experience at Camp Coorong, such as in reflective journals or in conversation, that recognition of the importance of history, social justice, and sovereignty are brought to light. In the first phase of learning, non-Indigenous students and teachers may move from uncomfortable silence, to a space where they can hear the stories and thereby become engaged listeners. They may go through a process of grappling with a range of issues and emotions. There is frustration, anger, and blame that knowledge has been omitted from their education, and they routinely ask: “How did we not know this history?” In the second stage learners tend to remain outside of the story until they are hooked by an aspect that draws them into it. They have the choice of engagement and this requires empathy. At this stage learners are grappling with the antithetical feelings of guilt and innocence; these feelings emerge when those advantaged and challenged by their complicity with settler colonialism, racism, and the structural privilege of whiteness start to understand the benefits they gain from Indigenous dispossession and ask “was it my fault?” Thirdly, learners enter a space which may disavow and dismiss the newly encountered knowledge and move back into resistance, silence, and reluctance to hear. However, it is at this point that a choice emerges. The choice to engage in the emotional labour required to acknowledge the gift of the story and thereby unsettle white Australian identity (Bignall; Boler and Zembylas). In this process “inscribed habits of attention,” as described by Boler and Zembylas (127), are challenged. These habits have been enabled by the emotional binaries of “us” and “them”. The colonial legacy of Indigenous dispossession is an emotive subject that disrupts national pride that is built on this binary. At Camp Coorong, discomfort is created during the reiteration of stories and engagement in various activities. Uncertainty and discomfort are necessary parts of restructuring the emotional habitus and reconstructing identity. The primary ethical aim of a pedagogy of discomfort is the creation of contestability. The learner comes to understand the rights and obligations of caring for Country and has to decide how to carry the story. Ngarrindjeri ethics of care inspire the learner to undertake the emotional labour necessary to relocate their understanding of identity. As a zone of cultural contestation, Camp Coorong also enables pedagogies that allow for critical reflection on common educational practices undertaken by educators and students. Conclusion The aim of the camp was to overturn racism and provide employment for Ngarrindjeri on Country (Hemming, 38). Students and teachers from around the state come to Camp Coorong and learn to weave, make feather flowers, and listen to stories about Ngarrindjeri Country whilst walking on Country (Hemming 38). Camp Coorong fosters understanding of Ngarrindjeri Ruwe/Ruwar and at the same time overturns essentialist notions developed by deficit theories that routinely remain embedded in the school curriculum. Camp Coorong’s anti-racist epistemology mobilises an Indigenous pedagogy of storytelling and experience as a decolonising methodology. Learning Ngarrindjeri history, cultural heritage, and land ethic of care deepens students’ understanding of connecting to Country through reflection on situations, histories, and shared spaces of human and non-human actors. Pedagogies of discomfort also inform practice at Camp Coorong and the intersections of theory and practice in this context disrupts identity formations that have been grounded in a white colonial construction of nationhood. Education is a means of social and cultural reproduction, as well as a key site of resistance and vehicle for social change. Although the analysis of domination is a feature of critical pedagogy, what is urgently required is a language of hope and transformation understood from a Ngarrindjeri standpoint; something that is achieved at Camp Coorong. Acknowledgments I would like to acknowledge the process of collaboration that occurred at Camp Coorong with Aunty Ellen Trevorrow, Aunty Alice Abdulla, and Deborah Rankine. The key ideas were established in conversation and the article was revised on subsequent occasions whilst at Camp Coorong with the aforementioned authors. This paper was produced as part of the Australian Research Council Discovery Project, ‘Negotiating a Space in the Nation: The Case of Ngarrindjeri’ (DP1094869). The Chief Investigators are Robert Hattam, Peter Bishop, Pal Ahluwalia, Julie Matthews, Daryle Rigney, Steve Hemming and Robin Boast, working with Simone Bignall and Bindi MacGill. References Aveling, Nado. “Critical whiteness studies and the challenges of learning to be a 'White Ally'.” Borderlands e-journal 3. 2 (2004). 12 Dec 2006 ‹www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au› Bell, Diane. Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin: A World That Is, Was, and Will Be. North Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 1998. ——-. Kungun Ngarrindjeri Miminar Yunnan. Listen to Ngarrindjeri Women Speaking. Melbourne: Spinifex, 2008. ——-. “Ngarrindjeri Women’s Stories: Kungun and Yunnan.” Women and Indigenous Religions. Ed. Sylvia Marcos. California: Greenwood, 2010: 3-20. Bignall, Simone. Postcolonial Agency: Critique and Constructivism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Boler, Megan and Michalinos Zembylas. “Discomforting Truths: The Emotional Terrain of Understanding Difference.” Pedagogies of Difference: Rethinking Education for Social Change. Ed. P. Trifonas. New York: Routledge Falmer, 2003: 110-36. Bourdieu, Pierre and Jean-Claude Passeron. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. London: Sage Publications, 1990. Carter, Paul. “Care at a Distance: Affiliations to Country in a Global Context.” Lanscapes and learning. Place Studies for a Global Village. Ed. Margaret. Somerville, Kerith Power and Phoenix de Carteret. Rotterdam: Sense. 2, 2009. 1-33. Gruenewald, David. “The Best of Both Worlds: A Critical Pedagogy of Place.” Educational Researcher 43.4 (2003): 3-12. ——-. “Foundations of Place: A Multidisciplinary Framework for Place-Conscious Education.” American Educational Research Journal, 40.3 (2003): 619-54. Gruenewald, David and Gregory Smith. “Making Room for the Local.” Place-Based Education in the Global Age: Local Diversity. Ed. David Gruenewald & Gregory Smith. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2008. Hattam, Rob., Daryle Rigney and Steve Hemming. “Reconciliation? Culture and Nature and the Murray River.” Fresh Water: New Perspectives on Water in Australia. Ed. Emily Potter, Alison Mackinnon, McKenzie, Stephen & Jenny McKay. Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2007:105-22. Hemming, Steve., Tom Trevorrow and Matt, Rigney. “Ngarrindjeri Culture.” The Murray Mouth: Exploring the Implications of Closure or Restricted Flow. Ed. M Goodwin and S Bennett. Department of Water, Land and Biodiversity Conservation, Adelaide (2002): 13–19. Hemming, Steve. “Camp Coorong—Combining Race Relations and Cultural Education.” Social Alternatives 12.1 (1993): 37-40. MacGill, Bindi. Aboriginal Education Workers: Towards Equality of Recognition of Indigenous Ethics of Care Practices in South Australian School (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Adelaide: Finders University, 2008. 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Oravec, Jo Ann. „Promoting Honesty in Children, or Fostering Pathological Behaviour?“ M/C Journal 26, Nr. 3 (27.06.2023). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2944.

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Introduction Many years ago, the moral fable of Pinocchio warned children about the evils of lying (Perella). This article explores how children are learning lie-related insights from genres of currently marketed polygraph-style “spy kits”, voice stress analysis apps, and electric shock-delivering games. These artifacts are emerging despite the fact that polygraphy and other lie detection approaches are restricted in use in certain business and community contexts, in part because of their dubious scientific support. However, lie detection devices are still applied in many real-life settings, often in critically important security, customs, and employment arenas (Bunn). A commonly accepted definition of the term “lie” is “a successful or unsuccessful deliberate attempt, without forewarning, to create in another a belief which the communicator considers to be untrue” (Vrij 15), which includes the use of lies in various gaming situations. Many children’s games involve some kind of deception, and mental privacy considerations are important in many social contexts (such as “keeping a poker face”). The dystopian scenario of children learning basic honesty notions through technologically-enabled lie detection games scripted by corporate developers presents frightening prospects. These lie detection toys and games impart important moral perspectives through technological and algorithmic means (including electrical shocks and online shaming) rather than through human modelling and teaching. They normalise and lessen the seriousness of lying by reducing it into a game. In this article I focus on United States and United Kingdom toys and games, but comparable lie detection approaches have permeated other nations and cultures. Alder characterises the US as having an “obsession” with lie detection devices (1), an enthusiasm increasingly shared with other nations. Playing with the Truth: Spy Kits, Voice Stress Apps, and Shocking Liar The often-frightening image of an individual strapped to sensors and hooked up to a polygraph is often found in movies, television shows, and social media (Littlefield). I construe the notion of “lie detection” as “the use of a physiological measurement apparatus with the explicit aim of identifying when someone is lying. This typically comes with specific protocols for questioning the subject, and the output is graphically represented” (Bergers 1). Some lie detection toys utilise autonomic or unintentionally-supplied input in their analyses (such as the vocal changes related to stress); with networked toys, the data can subsequently be utilised by third parties. These aspects raise questions concerning consent as well as the validity of the results. Developers are producing related artifacts that challenge the difference between truth and lies, such as robots that “lie” by giving children responses to questions based on the children’s analysed preferences rather than standard determinations of truth and falsity (Zhu). Early lie detection games for children include the 1961 Lie Detecto from Manning Manufacturing. The technologies involved are galvanometers that required a 9-volt battery to operate, and sensors strapped to the hands of the subjects. It was reportedly designed “for junior G-men”, with suggested test questions for subjects such as "Do you like school?" Its ratings included "Could Be" and "Big Whopper" (“TIME’s New Products”). Lie detection had also been projected as fertile ground for children’s own educational research ventures. For example, in 2016 the popular magazine Scientific American outlined how young people could conduct experiments as to whether cognitive load (such as working on complex puzzles) affects the subject’s galvanic input to lie detection devices (Science Buddies). However, the Science Buddies’ description of the proposed activity did not encourage children to question the validity of the device itself. In organisational and agency settings, polygraph-style strategies are generally labour-intensive, involving experts who set up and administer tests (Bunn). These resource-intensive aspects of polygraphs may make their use in games attractive to players who want theatrical scripts to act out particular roles. An example of a lie detection toy that models the polygraph is the currently marketed Discovery Kids’ Electronic Lie Detection Portable Spy Kit, in which children go through the procedures of attaching the polygraph’s sensors to a human subject (Granich). The roles of “spy” and “detective” are familiar ones in many children’s books and movies, so the artifacts involved fit readily into children’s narratives. However, the overall societal importance of what they are modelling may still be beyond children’s grasps. Users of the comparable spy kit Project MC2 are given the following characterisation of their lie detection device, designed for individuals aged 6 and older: When someone lies, his or her body often produces small reactions from being nervous or stressed. One of those reactions is a small release of sweat. That moisture increases the skin’s electrical conductivity, or galvanic skin response, and the lie detector reads it as a fib. That's why the lie detector’s clips go on the fingers, because there are lots of sweat glands in your hands. Product includes: Lie detector, disguised as a mint box with a hidden button to force a truth or lie. Equipped with indicator light and sounds. Neon-colored wires with finger clips. (“Project MC2”) Similar sorts of lie detection approaches (though more sophisticated) are currently being used in US military operations. For example, the US Army’s Preliminary Credibility Assessment Screening Systems (PCASS) are handheld polygraphs designed for use in battle. Voice stress analysis systems for lie detection have been used for decades in business as well as medical and crime contexts. As described by Price, the US toy maker Hasbro distributes The Lie Detector Game, which “uses voice analysis to determine whether someone is lying”. In the box you’ll get a lie detector device and 64 cards with questions to answer as part of the gameplay … . If you tell the truth, or the device at least thinks you did, then you score a point. Lying loses you a point” (1). An assortment of smartphone apps with voice-stress analysis capabilities designed for lie detection are also widely available along with suggestions for their use in games (McQuarrie), providing yet another way for children to explore truth and deception in technologically-framed contexts. Lie detection devices for entertainment generally construe at least one of the participants in the toy’s or game’s operations as a “subject”. The Shocking Liar game openly entices users to construct the human game players as “victims”: The SHOCKING LIAR [sic] is a table top device that you strap your victim's hand to, delivering a small electric shock when it thinks a lie is being told… The lie detector evaluates the data and stores the information after each question giving an accumulation of data on the person being questioned. This means the more questions that you ask, the more information the lie detector has to evaluate... Place your hand onto the hand plate of the SHOCKING LIAR. If you tell the truth, you can move away from it safely and if you tell a direct lie or have given an unacceptable amount of half-truths, you will receive an electric shock. Children who use Shocking Liar are indeed led to assume that they can catch themselves or friends in dishonesty, but research justification for the Shocking Liar’s results is not available. The societal messages imparted by the toys to children (such as “this toy can determine whether you are lying”) make their impacts especially consequential. These toys and games extract from the subjects’ data various aspects of which the subjects may not have conscious control or even awareness. For instance, the pitch of the subject’s voice can be mined and subsequently given voice stress analysis, as in the previously described Hasbro game. From this “shadow” or autonomic input is developed an interpretation (however problematic) of the subjects’ mental state. The results of the analysis may eventually be processed consciously by subjects, either as polygraph readings or electrical shocks (as in Shocking Liar). The autonomic input involved is often known as “leakage” or “tells” (Ekman). Game playing with robots presents new lie detection venues. Children often react differently in robot-mediated interactions to truth and deception issues than they do with human beings (Pearson). Since the opportunities for child-robot interaction are increasing with the advent of companion robots, new contexts for lie detection games are emerging. Robots that present verbal feedback to children based on the child’s preferences over time, or that strategically withhold information, are being developed and marketed. Research on children’s responses to robots may provide clues as to how to make cognitive engineering and mental privacy invasions more acceptable. This raises serious concerns about children’s perceptions of the standings of robots as moral guides as well as gaming companions. For younger children who are just acquiring the notion of lying, the toys and games could extend the kinds of socialisation provided by their parents and guardians. As lie detection initiatives are taking on wide roles in everyday human interaction (such as educational cheating and employee credibility assessment), the integration of the approaches into children’s activities may serve to normalise the processes involved. Older children who already have some sense of what lying constitutes may find in the lie detection toys and games some insights as to how to become more effective as liars. Some parents may use these lie-detection toys in misguided attempts to determine whether their children are lying to them about something. Many toys and games are explicit in their lie detection and surveillance themes, with specific narratives relating to the societal roles of detectives and spies. Children become complicit in the societal functions of lie detection, rather than simply being subjects or audiences to them. Children’s toys and games are all about experimentation, and these lie detection artifacts are no different (Oravec 2000). Children are enabled through interactions with the toys and games to experiment with lying behavior and possibly explore certain aspects of their own mental lives as well as those of others. Children can learn how to modulate some of the external physiological signals that are often associated with lying, much in the way that individuals can alter various physiological responses with assistance of biofeedback technologies. Such efforts may be empowering in some senses but also increase the potential for confusion about truthfulness and lying. Use of the toys and games may support the emergence of psychopathic tendencies in which children exhibit antisocial and egocentric behavior along with a failure to learn about the consequences of their actions, in this case lying (Hermann). This situation is comparable to that of organisations that advertise training for how to “beat” or “outsmart” polygraphs, efforts that have often confounded law enforcement and intelligence agencies (Rosky). Playing with the Truth: Children and Honesty The constructions of lie detection events that are fostered in these toys and games generally simplify and mechanise truth-lie differences, and often present them in an unquestioning manner. Children are not encouraged to wonder whether the devices are indeed functioning as stated in the instructions and advertising materials. Failure to inform children about the toys’ intents and to request their consent about lie detection could also challenge some of them to attempt to subvert the toys’ mechanisms. However, many lie detection toys and games provide the opportunity for historically grounded lessons for children about the detection and surveillance strategies of other eras, if introduced in a critical and context-sensitive manner. The assumption that effective lie detection is possible and mental privacy is thus limited is reinforced by the framings of many of these toys and games (Oravec “Emergence”). Lying is indeed a reflection of “Theory of Mind” which enables us to imagine the minds of others, and children are given an arena for exploration on this theme. However, children also learn that their mental worlds and streams of consciousness are readily accessible by others with the use of certain technologies. Scientific justification for the use of polygraphs through the past decades has yielded problematic results, although polygraphs and many other lie detection technologies have still retained social acceptability apparently related to their cultural appeal (Paul, Fischer, and Voigt). Many voice stress apps are also not reliable according to recent research (Tyrsina). The normalisation of current and projected systems for lie detection and mental privacy incursions presents unsettling prospects for children’s development, and the designers and disseminators of toys and games need to consider these dimensions. Using technologically enhanced games, toys, or robots to detect “lies” rather than engaging more directly with other humans in a game context may have unfortunate overall outcomes. For example, the ability to practice various schemes to evade detection while lying may be an attractive aspect of these toys and games to some individuals. The kinds of input often linked with lying behaviors (or “leakage”) can include physiological changes in voice qualities that are generally not directly controllable by the speaker without specific practice; the games and toys provide such practice venues. Individuals who are able to disconnect from their autonomic expressions and lie without physical or acoustic signs can exacerbate personality issues and social pathologies. Some may become psychopaths, who lie to get their way and tend not to feel remorseful, with the games and toys potentially exacerbating genetic tendencies; others may become pathological liars, who lie regardless of whether there is specific benefit to them in doing so (Vrij). Some of these toy-related spying and detective activities can unfortunately be at the expense of others’ wellbeing, whatever their impacts on the children directly involved as players. For example, some forms of lie detection technologies incorporate the remote collection of data without notification of participants, as in the voice-analysis systems just described. Children’s curiosity about others’ thoughts and mental lives may be at the root of such initiatives, though children can also utilise them for bullying and other forms of aggressive behavior. Some research shows that early lie telling by children is often linked with self-defense as they attempt to save face, but other research couples it with anti-social action and behavioral problems (Lavoie). However, adults have been shown to have some considerable influence on children in their lie-telling conduct (Dykstra, Willoughby, and Evans), so there is hope that parents, guardians, teachers, and concerned community members can have some positive influence. Reflections and Conclusions: The “New Pinocchio”? Toys and games can indeed project comforting and nurturing imageries for children. However, they can also challenge individuals to think differently about themselves and others, and even present dystopian scenarios. For toy and game developers to promote lie detection technologies can be problematic because of the associations of lying with antisocial activity and behavioral problems as well as moral concerns. The characters that children play in roles of spies and lie detector administrators supply them with powerful narratives and impact on their mental concepts. The significance of truth-telling in children’s lives is expanding as societal attention to credibility issues increases. For example, children are often called on to present evidence during divorce proceedings and abuse-related cases, so there is a significant body of research about children’s verbal truth and deception patterns (Talwar, Lavoie, and Crossman). The data collected by some networked lie detection toys (such as voice stress analysers) can subsequently be used by third-parties for marketing purposes or direct surveillance, raising critical questions about consent (Oravec “Emergence”). Future entertainment modes may soon be developed with lie detection approaches comparable to the ones I discuss in this article, since many games rely on some form of mental privacy assumptions. Games often have some aspect of personal cognitive control at their roots, with the assumption that individuals can shield their own deliberations from other players at least to some extent. Technological capabilities for lie detection can alter the kinds of strategies involved in games. For example, if players know the quality of other players’ poker hands through technological means, games would need to be restructured substantially, with speed of response or other aspects at a premium. The current and future toy and game developments just discussed underscore the continuing need for ethical and professional vigilance on the part of researchers and developers as they choose projects to work on and technologies to bring to market. Children and young people who play with lie detection and surveillance-related artifacts are being exposed to assumptions about how their own consciousness functions and how they can best navigate in the world through truth-telling or lying. Although children once acquired insights about lying though moral fables like Pinocchio, they are now learning from corporate-developed technological toys and games. References Alder, Ken. The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession. Simon and Schuster, 2007. Bergers, Lara. “Only in America? A History of Lie Detection in the Netherlands in Comparative Perspective, ca. 1910–1980.” The Netherlands: Utrecht U, 2018. <https://studenttheses.uu.nl/handle/20.500.12932/30502>. Bunn, Geoffrey C. The Truth Machine: A Social History of the Lie Detector. Johns Hopkins UP, 2012. Dykstra, Victoria, Teena Willoughby, and Angela D. Evans. "Perceptions of Dishonesty: Understanding Parents’ Reports of and Influence on Children and Adolescents’ Lie-Telling." Journal of Youth and Adolescence 49 (2020): 49–59. <https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-019-01153-5>. Ekman, Paul. Telling Lies. New York: Norton, 1985. Granich, Mike. “17 Spy Gadgets and Spy Gear for Kids to Gift This Year.” Technolocheese, 2020. 14 Feb. 2020 <https://www.technolocheese.com/spy-gear-for-kids/>. Hermann, Henry. Dominance and Aggression in Humans and Other Animals: The Great Game of Life. Elsevier, 2017. Lavoie, Jennifer, et al. "Lie-telling as a Mode of Antisocial Action: Children’s Lies and Behavior Problems." Journal of Moral Education 47.4 (2018): 432–450. <https://doi.org/10.1080/03057240.2017.1405343>. Littlefield, Melissa. The Lying Brain: Lie Detection in Science and Science Fiction. U of Michigan P, 2011. McQuarrie, Laura. “Hasbro's Lie Detector Game Uses Voice Analysis to Pick Up on Untruths.” Trendhunter, 2019. <https://www.trendhunter.com/trends/lie-detector-game>. Oravec, Jo Ann. "Interactive Toys and Children's Education: Strategies for Educators and Parents." Childhood Education 77.2 (2000): 81-85. ———. "The Emergence of 'Truth Machines'? Artificial Intelligence Approaches to Lie Detection." Ethics and Information Technology 24.6 (2022). <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-022-09621-6>. Paul, Bettina, Larissa Fischer, and Torsten Voigt. “Anachronistic Progress? User Notions of Lie Detection in the Juridical Field.” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 6 (2020): 328–346. <https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2020.433>. Pearson, Yvette. "Child-Robot Interaction: What Concerns about Privacy and Well-Being Arise When Children Play with, Use, and Learn from Robots?" American Scientist 108.1 (2020): 16–22. 22 June 2023 <https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A613271878/AONE?u=anon~66b204b9&sid=googleScholar&xid=067570c2>. Perella, Nicolas. "An Essay on Pinocchio." Italica 63.1 (1986): 1–47. <https://doi.org/10.2307/479125>. Price, Emily. “Hasbro Is Launching a Lie Detector Party Game and Ghost-Busting Robot.” Fortune, 2019. 15 Feb. 2019 <http://fortune.com/2019/02/15/lie-detector-party-game/>. “Project MC2.” Amazon, 2020. <https://www.amazon.com/Project-Mc2-539230-Lie-Detector/dp/B015A7CHSA>. Rosky, Jeffrey. "The (F)utility of Post-Conviction Polygraph Testing." Sexual Abuse 25.3 (2013): 259–281. <https://doi.org/10.1177/1079063212455668>. Science Buddies. “Pinocchio’s Arm: A Lie Detector Test.” Scientific American, 10 Mar. 2016. <https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/pinocchio-s-arm-a-lie-detector-test/>. “Shocking Liar.” Amazon, 2020. <https://www.amazon.com/Dayan-Cube-Lie-Detector-Game/dp/B000GUGTYU>. Talwar, Victoria, Jennifer Lavoie, and Angela Crossman. "Carving Pinocchio: Longitudinal Examination of Children’s Lying for Different Goals." Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 181 (2019): 34–55. <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2018.12.003>. “TIME’s New Products.” TIME Magazine 78.1 (7 July 1961): 35. Tyrsina, Radu. “These 2 Lie Detecting Programs for PC Will Help You Determine the Truth from All the Lies.” Windowsreport, 5 Aug. 2017. <https://windowsreport.com/lie-detector-software-pc/>. Vrij, Aldert. Detecting Lies and Deceit: Pitfalls and Opportunities. John Wiley & Sons, 2008. Zhu, Dingju. "Feedback Big Data-Based Lie Robot." International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence 32.2 (2018). <https://doi.org/10.1142/S0218001418590024>.
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Daniel, Ryan. „Artists and the Rite of Passage North to the Temperate Zone“. M/C Journal 20, Nr. 6 (31.12.2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1357.

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IntroductionThree broad stages of Australia’s arts and culture sectors may be discerned with reference to the Northern Hemisphere. The first is in Australia’s early years where artists travelled to the metropoles of Europe to learn from acknowledged masters, to view the great works and to become part of a broader cultural scene. The second is where Australian art was promoted internationally, which to some extent began in the 1960s with exhibitions such as the 1961 ‘Survey of recent Australian painting’ at the Whitechapel gallery. The third relates to the strong promotion and push to display and sell Indigenous art, which has been a key area of focus since the 1970s.The Allure of the NorthFor a long time Australasian artists have mostly travelled to Britain (Britain) or Europe (Cooper; Frost; Inkson and Carr), be they writers, painters or musicians for example. Hecq (36) provides a useful overview of the various periods of expatriation from Australia, referring to the first significant phase at the end of the twentieth century when many painters left “to complete their atelier instruction in Paris and London”. Many writers also left for the north during this time, with a number of women travelling overseas on account of “intellectual pressures as well as intellectual isolation”(Hecq 36). Among these, Miles Franklin left Australia in “an open act of rebellion against the repressive environment of her family and colonial culture” (37). There also existed “a belief that ‘there’ is better than ‘here’” (de Groen vii) as well as a “search for the ideal” (viii). World War I led to stronger Anglo-Australian relations hence an increase in expatriation to Europe and Britain as well as longer-term sojourns. These increased further in the wake of World War II. Hecq describes how for many artists, there was significant discontent with Australian provincialism and narrow-mindedness, as well as a desire for wider audiences and international recognition. Further, Hecq describes how Europe became something of a “dreamland”, with numerous artists influenced by their childhood readings about this part of the world and a sense of the imaginary or the “other”. This sense of a dream is described beautifully by McAuliffe (56), who refers to the 1898 painting by A.J. Daplyn as a “melancholic diagram of the nineteenth-century Australian artist’s world, tempering the shimmering allure of those northern lights with the shadowy, somnolent isolation of the south”.Figure 1: The Australian Artist’s Dream of Europe; A.J. Daplyn, 1898 (oil on canvas; courtesy artnet.com)In ‘Some Other Dream’, de Groen presents a series of interviews with expatriate Australian artists and writers as an insight into what drove each to look north and to leave Australia, either temporarily or permanently. Here are a few examples:Janet Alderson: “I desperately wanted to see what was going on” (2)Robert Jacks: “the dream of something else. New York is a dream for lots of people” (21)Bruce Latimer: “I’d always been interested in America, New York in particular” (34)Jeffrey Smart: “Australia seemed to be very dull and isolated, and Italy seemed to be thrilling and modern” (50)Clement Meadmore: “I never had much to do with what was happening in Melbourne: I was never accepted there” (66)Stelarc: “I was interested in traditional Japanese art and the philosophy of Zen” (80)Robert Hughes: “I’d written everything that I’d wanted to write about Australian art and this really dread prospect was looming up of staying in Australia for the rest of one’s life” (128)Max Hutchison: “I quickly realised that Melbourne was a non-art consuming city” (158)John Stringer: “I was not getting the latitude that I wanted at the National Gallery [in Australia] … the prospects of doing other good shows seemed rather slim” (178)As the testimony here suggests, the allure of the north ranges from dissatisfaction with the south to the attraction of various parts of the world in the north.More recently, McAuliffe describes a shift in the impact of the overseas experience for many artists. Describing them as business travellers, he refers to the fact that artists today travel to meet international art dealers and to participate in exhibitions, art fairs and the like. Further, he argues that the risk today lies in “disorientation and distraction rather than provincial timidity” (McAuliffe 56). That is, given the ease and relatively cheap costs of international travel, McAuliffe argues that the challenge is in adapting to constantly changing circumstances, rather than what are now arguably dated concepts of cultural cringe or tyranny of distance. Further, given the combination of “cultural nationalism, social cosmopolitanism and information technology”, McAuliffe (58) argues that the need to expatriate is no longer a requirement for success.Australian Art Struggles InternationallyThe struggles for Australian art as a sector to succeed internationally, particularly in Britain, Europe and the US, are well documented (Frost; Robertson). This is largely due to Australia’s limited history of white settlement and established canon of great art works, the fact that power and position remain strong hence the dominance of Europe and North America in the creative arts field (Bourdieu), as well as Australia’s geographical isolation from the major art centres of the world, with Heartney (63) describing the “persistent sense of isolation of the Australian art world”. While Australia has had considerable success internationally in terms of its popular music (e.g. INXS, Kylie Minogue, The Seekers) and high-profile Hollywood actors (e.g. Geoffrey Rush, Hugh Jackman, Nicole Kidman), the visual arts in particular have struggled (O’Sullivan), including the Indigenous visual arts subsector (Stone). One of the constant criticisms in the visual art world is that Australian art is too focussed on place (e.g. the Australian outback) and not global art movements and trends (Robertson). While on the one hand he argues that Australian visual artists have made some inroads and successes in the international market, McAuliffe (63) tempers this with the following observation:Australian artists don’t operate at the white-hot heart of the international art market: there are no astronomical prices and hotly contested bidding wars. International museums acquire Australian art only rarely, and many an international survey exhibition goes by with no Australian representation.The Push to Sell Australian Cultural Product in the NorthWriting in the mid-nineties at the time of the release of the national cultural policy Creative Nation, the then prime minister Paul Keating identified a need for Australia as a nation to become more competitive internationally in terms of cultural exports. This is a theme that continues today. Recent decades have seen several attempts to promote Australian visual art overseas and in particular Indigenous art; this has come with mixed success. However, there have been misconceptions in the past and hence numerous challenges associated with promoting and selling Aboriginal art in international markets (Wright). One of the problems is that a lot of Europeans “have often seen bad examples of Aboriginal Art” (Anonymous 69) and it is typically the art work which travels north, less so the Indigenous artists who create them and who can talk to them and engage with audiences. At the same time, the Indigenous art sector remains a major contributor to the Australian art economy (Australia Council). While there are some examples of successful Australian art managers operating galleries overseas in such places as London and in the US (Anonymous-b), these are limited and many have had to struggle to gain recognition for their artists’ works.Throsby refers to the well-established fact that the international art market predominantly resides in the US and in Europe (including Britain). Further, Throsby (64) argues that breaking into this market “is a daunting task requiring resources, perseverance, a quality product, and a good deal of luck”. Referring specifically to Indigenous Australian art, Throsby (65) reveals how leading European fairs such as those at Basel and Cologne, displaying breath-taking ignorance if not outright stupidity, have vetoed Aboriginal works on the grounds that they are folk art. This saga continues to the present day, and it still remains to be seen whether these fairs will eventually wake up to themselves.It is also presented in an issue of Artlink that the “challenge is to convince European buyers of the value of Australian art, even though the work is comparatively inexpensive” (Anonymous 69). Is the Rite of Passage Relevant in the 21st Century?Some authors challenge the notion that the rite of passage to the northern hemisphere is a requirement for success for an Australian artist (Frost). This challenge is worthy of unpacking in the second decade of the twenty-first century, and particularly so in what is being termed the Asian century (Bice and Sullivan; Wesley). Firstly, Australia is far closer to Asia than it is to Europe and North America. Secondly, the Asian population is expected to continue to experience rapid economic and population growth, for example the rise of the middle class in China, potentially representing new markets for the consumption of creative product. Lee and Lim refer to the rapid economic modernisation and growth in East Asia (Japan to Singapore). Hence, given the struggles that are often experienced by Australian artists and dealers in attempting to break into the art markets of Europe and North America, it may be more constructive to look towards Asia as an alternative north and place for Australian creative product. Fourthly, many Asian countries are investing heavily in their creative industries and creative economy (Kim and Kim; Kong), hence representing an opportune time for Australian creative practitioners to explore new connections and partnerships.In the first half of the twentieth century, Australians felt compelled to travel north to Europe, especially, if they wanted to engage with the great art teachers, galleries and art works. Today, with the impact of technology, engaging with the art world can be achieved much more readily and quickly, through “increasingly transnational forms of cultural production, distribution and consumption” (Rowe et al. 8). This recent wave of technological development has been significant (Guerra and Kagan), in relation to online communication (e.g. skype, email), social media (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) as well as content available on the Web for both informal and formal learning purposes. Artists anywhere in the world can now connect online while also engaging with what is an increasing field of virtual museums and galleries. For example, the Tate Gallery in London has over 70,000 artworks in its online art database which includes significant commentary on each work. While online engagement does not necessarily enable an individual to have the lived experience of a gallery walk-through or to be an audience member at a live performance in an outstanding international venue, online technologies have made it much easier for developing artists to engage from anywhere in the world. This certainly makes the ‘tyranny of distance’ factor relevant to Australia somewhat more manageable.There is also a developing field of research citing the importance of emerging artists displaying enterprising and/or entrepreneurial skills (Bridgstock), in the context of a rapidly changing global arts sector. This broadly refers to the need for artists to have business skills, to be able to seek out and identify opportunities, as well as manage multiple projects and/or various streams of income in what is a very different career type and pathway (Beckman; Bridgstock and Cunningham; Hennekam and Bennett). These opportunity seeking skills and agentic qualities have also been cited as critical in relation to the fact that there is not only a major oversupply of artistic labour globally (Menger), but there is a growing stream of entrants to the global higher education tertiary arts sector that shows no signs of subsiding (Daniel). Concluding RemarksAustralia’s history features a strong relationship with and influences from the north, and in particular from Britain, Europe and North America. This remains the case today, with much of Australian society based on inherited models from Britain, be this in the art world or in such areas as the law and education. As well as a range of cultural and sentimental links with this north, Australia is sometimes considered to be a satellite of European civilisation in the Asia-Pacific region. It is therefore explicable why artists might continue this longstanding relationship with this particular north.In our interesting and complex present of the early twenty-first century, Australia is hampered by the lack of any national cultural policy as well as recent significant cuts to arts funding at the national and state levels (Caust). Nevertheless, there are opportunities to be further explored in relation to the changing patterns of production and consumption of creative content, the impact of new and next technologies, as well as the rise of Asia in the Asian Century. The broad field of the arts and artists is a rich area for ongoing research and inquiry and ultimately, Australia’s links to the north including the concept of the rite of passage deserves ongoing consideration.ReferencesAnonymous a. "Outposts: The Case of the Unofficial Attache." Artlink 18.4 (1998): 69–71.Anonymous b. "Who’s Selling What to Whom: Australian Dealers Taking Australian Art Overseas." Artlink 18. 4 (1998): 66–68.Australia Council for the Arts. Arts Nation: An Overview of Australian Arts. 2015. <http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/workspace/uploads/files/arts-nation-final-27-feb-54f5f492882da.pdf>.Beckman, Gary D. "'Adventuring' Arts Entrepreneurship Curricula in Higher Education: An Examination of Present Efforts, Obstacles, and Best Practices." The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society 37.2 (2007): 87–112.Bice, Sara, and Helen Sullivan. "Abbott Government May Have New Rhetoric, But It’s Still the ‘Asian Century’." The Conversation 2013. <https://theconversation.com/abbott-government-may-have-new-rhetoric-but-its-still-the-asian-century-19769>.Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984.Bridgstock, Ruth. "Not a Dirty Word: Arts Entrepreneurship and Higher Education." Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 12.2–3 (2013,): 122–137. doi:10.1177/1474022212465725.———, and Stuart Cunningham. "Creative Labour and Graduate Outcomes: Implications for Higher Education and Cultural Policy." International Journal of Cultural Policy 22.1 (2015): 10–26. doi:10.1080/10286632.2015.1101086.Britain, Ian. Once an Australian: Journeys with Barry Humphries, Clive James, Germaine Greer and Robert Hughes. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997.Caust, Josephine. "Cultural Wars in an Australian Context: Challenges in Developing a National Cultural Policy." International Journal of Cultural Policy 21.2 (2015): 168–182. doi:10.1080/10286632.2014.890607.Cooper, Roslyn Pesman. "Some Australian Italies." Westerly 39.4 (1994): 95–104.Daniel, Ryan, and Robert Johnstone. "Becoming an Artist: Exploring the Motivations of Undergraduate Students at a Regional Australian University". Studies in Higher Education 42.6 (2017): 1015-1032.De Groen, Geoffrey. Some Other Dream: The Artist the Artworld & the Expatriate. Hale & Iremonger, 1984.Frost, Andrew. "Do Young Australian Artists Really Need to Go Overseas to Mature?" The Guardian, 9 Oct. 2013. <https://www.theguardian.com/culture/australia-culture-blog/2013/oct/09/1https://www.theguardian.com/culture/australia-culture-blog/2013/oct/09/1, July 20, 2016>.Guerra, Paula, and Sacha Kagan, eds. Arts and Creativity: Working on Identity and Difference. Porto: University of Porto, 2016.Heartney, Eleanor. "Identity and Locale: Four Australian Artists." Art in America 97.5 (2009): 63–68.Hecq, Dominique. "'Flying Up for Air: Australian Artists in Exile'." Commonwealth (Dijon) 22.2 (2000): 35–45.Hennekam, Sophie, and Dawn Bennett. "Involuntary Career Transition and Identity within the Artist Population." Personnel Review 45.6 (2016): 1114–1131.Inkson, Kerr, and Stuart C. Carr. "International Talent Flow and Careers: An Australasian Perspective." Australian Journal of Career Development 13.3 (2004): 23–28.Keating, P.J. "Exports from a Creative Nation." Media International Australia 76.1 (1995): 4–6.Kim, Jeong-Gon, and Eunji Kim. "Creative Industries Internationalization Strategies of Selected Countries and Their Policy Implications." KIEP Research Paper. World Economic Update-14–26 (2014). <https://ssrn.com/abstract=2488416>.Kong, Lily. "From Cultural Industries to Creative Industries and Back? Towards Clarifying Theory and Rethinking Policy." Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 15.4 (2014): 593–607.Lee, H., and Lorraine Lim. Cultural Policies in East Asia: Dynamics between the State, Arts and Creative Industries. Springer, 2014.McAuliffe, Chris. "Living the Dream: The Contemporary Australian Artist Abroad." Meanjin 71.3 (2012): 56–61.Menger, Pierre-Michel. "Artistic Labor Markets and Careers." Annual Review of Sociology 25.1 (1999): 541–574.O’Sullivan, Jane. "Why Australian Artists Find It So Hard to Get International Recognition." AFR Magazine, 2016.Robertson, Kate. "Yes, Capon, Australian Artists Have Always Thought about Place." The Conversation, 2014. <https://theconversation.com/yes-capon-australian-artists-have-always-thought-about-place-31690>.Rowe, David, et al. "Transforming Cultures? From Creative Nation to Creative Australia." Media International Australia 158.1 (2016): 6–16. doi:10.1177/1329878X16629544.Stone, Deborah. "Presenters Reject Indigenous Arts." ArtsHub, 2016. <http://www.artshub.com.au/news-article/news/audience-development/deborah-stone/presenters-reject-indigenous-arts-252075?utm_source=ArtsHub+Australia&utm_campaign=7349a419f3-UA-828966-1&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_2a8ea75e81-7349a419f3-302288158>.Throsby, David. "Get Out There and Sell: The Visual Arts Export Strategy, Past, Present and Future." Artlink 18.4 (1998): 64–65.Wesley, Michael. "In Australia's Third Century after European Settlement, We Must Rethink Our Responses to a New World." The Conversation, 2015. <https://theconversation.com/in-australias-third-century-after-european-settlement-we-must-rethink-our-responses-to-a-new-world-46671>.Wright, Felicity. "Passion, Rich Collectors and the Export Dollar: The Selling of Aboriginal Art Overseas." Artlink 18.4 (1998): 16.
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Pont, Antonia Ellen. „With This Body, I Subtract Myself from Neoliberalised Time: Sub-Habituality, Relaxation and Affirmation After Deleuze“. M/C Journal 22, Nr. 6 (04.12.2019). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1605.

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IntroductionThis article proposes that the practice of relaxation—a mode of bodily self-organisation within time—provides a way to diversify times as political and creative intervention. Relaxation, which could seem counter-intuitive, may function as intentional temporal intervention and means to slip some of the binds of neoliberal, surveillance capitalist logics. Noting the importance of decision-making (resonant with what Zuboff has called “promising”) as political, ethical capacity (and what dilutes it), I will argue here that relaxation precedes and invites a more active relation to the future. Relaxing and deciding are contrasted, in turn, with something dubbed ‘sub-habituality.’ This neologism would work as a critical poetics for the kind of (non)time in which we may be increasingly living. If, in Discipline and Punish, 1970s Foucault explored the various strategies of coupling time constraints/‘refining’ of time periods (150) with surveillance, I argue here that we might reconsider these same elements—time, constraint, intentionality—aslant and anew, as we approach the third decade of the 21st century (nearly 20 years after Google began opportunistically gathering the data exhaust of its searches). If in a disciplinary society, the organisation of bodies in time served various orders of domination, is it possible that in a control society (as Deleuze has named it), time and bodily composure may be harnessed otherwise to evade surreptitious logics of a neoliberal flavour?The elements noted by Foucault (i.e. structured time, bodily organisation) can—when rendered decisive, coupled with relaxation (to be defined), and with surveillance muddled or subtracted—become tools and modes for questioning, resisting and unsettling various mechanisms of domination and the dilutions of ethical capacity that accompany them in the current moment. We may, in other words, decide to structure our time when unobserved (for example with Flight Mode or connectivity off on laptops, etc.) for intentional, onto-political ends. A later Foucault, incidentally, went on to connect certain practices of care of the self to ethics, as ethical obligations (Foucault, “Ethics”). Time plays a role in such practices. With this as background, this article will read atmospherically some of Gilles Deleuze’s ontological offerings regarding time from his 1968 work Difference and Repetition. However, before this, I wish to clarify the article’s understanding of neoliberalisation in a digital moment.A neoliberalising moment, to use Springer’s preferred nomenclature (5), co-exists presently with a ubiquity of digital media engagement and co-opts it and exacerbates its reach for its manoeuvres. The former’s logics—which digital practices might at once support and/or contest—involve well-known imperatives of ‘efficiency’, aesthetics of striving, untrammelled growth, logics of scarcity and competition, privatisation of community assets, the so-called autonomy of the market, and so on. In his essay on control societies (which notably, after World War II, eclipse the disciplinary societies described by Foucault), Deleuze puts it like this:the corporation constantly presents the brashest rivalry as a healthy form of emulation, an excellent motivational force that opposes individuals against one another and runs through each, dividing each within. (5, my emphasis)Neoliberalism, where corporations have tended to replace factories, relies variously on competition between peers, dubious forms of (often ludicrous) motivation, fluctuating salaries and debt (in the place of explicit enclosures), so as to reduce the capacity and the lived expansiveness of the human (and non-human) beings who exist within its order.With this as background, I’m interested in the ways that personal electronic devices (PEDs) and the apps they house may—if used mostly compliantly and uncritically—impact what I would like to call our temporal diversity. This would involve a whittling-down of our access to atmospheres, thus to more impoverished constellations of living, and finally to profound disenablings in many spheres. PEDs provide a monetisable means of pervasive surveillance and increasingly-normalised "veillance" (Lupton 44). Certain modes of domination—if we read this term to mean a reduction of (ethical, creative, political) capacity—furthermore mobilise very specifically a co-opting of time (in the form of ‘engagement’, our eyes on a screen) and time’s strategic fragmentation. The latter is facilitated variously by monetised, gamified apps, and social media Skinner-box effects, entwined with the veillance made possible by the data exhaust of our searches and other trackable online behaviours, self-loggings, and so on. Recalling the way, in disciplinary societies, that power relations play out via the enclosure and regulation of bodies and their movement—the latter imposed externally and with the imperative of a ‘useful time’ or with the aim of self-optimising—I’m curious about how self-selected modes of resistant bodily organisation might operate to insulate or shelter humans living under and within various intensities of neoliberalisation, its discourse and its gaze. Sheltered, one might recover a creative or robust response. To use temporal strategies and understandings, we may subtract ourselves (even just sometimes) from stealthy modes of control or ‘nudging’, from ways of being which are increasingly marketed as ‘common sense’ approaches to activity and spendings of time.With regard to neoliberalisation (defined according to Springer, 37-38) and its coupling with digital life, I query if we may be finding ourselves too-often dipping below the threshold of what ought to be our most assumed temporality: namely, Deleuze’s ‘living’ or habitual present (from the second chapter of his Difference and Repetition). The moniker of ‘temporal diversity’ seeks to flag that—in a moment where we observe and resist the shutting down of diversity in numerous spheres, of species, eco-systems, cultures and languages, and their eclipse by modes produced for our consumption by globalisation—we could easily miss another register at which diversity is threatened. We might arguably be facing the loss of something which, after the fact, we may struggle to name—since it is not a ‘thing’—and whose trajectory of disappearance might wholly elude us. This diversity is that of times.Deleuze’s Three Syntheses in Difference and RepetitionIn Chapter 2 of his 1968 work, Deleuze explores three ways in which time can synthesise. Each synthesis involves a kind of weaving of the basic operations of difference and repetition. One way to read Deleuze in this work is that he (among other things) effectively sketches three kinds of atmospheres of time. Each of these, I argue, if seen as frame, contributes a richness and diversity to what a life—and what our shared life—can be and feel like.The first kind of time is called the habitual or ‘living’ present. It synthesises from a stitching together, drawing together, of the retaining of disappearing, disparate instances that otherwise bear no basic relation to one another (Deleuze, Difference 97). As a ‘present’, it has a stretch, a ‘reach’ which depends somewhat on our organism’s capacity to contract discontinuous instants. As Hughes beautifully puts it: “Our contractile range is the index of our finitude” (110). As we’ll see below, it would be a crumbling of this ‘range’ that sub-habituality designates. This living present of Deleuze also has a past inflection, marked by the just-gone and by a mode of memory, as well as by a future aspect, marked—not always constructively—by anticipation.One way to read the ‘living’ present is as being akin to our temporal ‘food and shelter’, a basic synthesis in which to dwell basically. Not thrilling or obviously creative, seductive or vast, it is the time—I’d suggest—in which we establish routine, in which we maintain a liveable life. Theorists such as Grosz have argued—in this tradition with Deleuze which positively evaluates habit—that habit, as mode of time, frees the organism up so that invention and innovation can then seed (see Grosz).The ‘living’ present turns out, however, not to be assumable in every case. For example, in cases of PTSD, I’d contend, it may be interrupted, lost, thus is not to be taken for granted under all conditions. Its status under a gamified neoliberalisation or surveillance capitalism is of interest to me and thus I offer this poetics of sub-habituality as a way to designate its vulnerability—that we might slip below its steadying threshold.Neither does the habitual present constitute much of a diversity; it would not cut it, let’s say, as enough for an abundant or varied temporal life. The habitual present contributes to the conditions that would enable me to form intentions (as a cohering ‘self’), to fashion basic schedules with my own initiative, to order an adult life. For a truly rich temporal life, however, we’d wish to include the poetics intimated by Deleuze’s two other syntheses, their more diverse atmospheres and the arguably political capacities they open to us.The second (passive) synthesis pertains to a vast and insisting past, in the lineage of Henri Bergson, and which, Deleuze notes, might be accessed or ‘saved for ourselves’ via that which we call reminiscence (Difference 107)—a dreamy, expansive and often-pleasurable state (except, for example, in cases of PTSD, or even perhaps versions of dementia, where the person may not be able to leave or surface from it). To dig, in thought, ‘down’ into the register of this vast past and to unearth a rigorous account of it, one goes via a series of paradoxes (see Deleuze, Difference 101-105). If the first passive synthesis is constituted by habit’s mechanisms, the second passive synthesis is constituted by memory’s: “memory is the fundamental synthesis of time which constitutes the being of the past (that which causes the present to pass)” (Deleuze, Difference 101). Hughes puts it thus: “the pure past in general [is] a horizon of having-been-ness, in which what was apprehended [in the first synthesis] finds the conditions of its reproducibility” (108). If such a pastness designates one moment in how selves and their being-as-time synthesise, one might want to know how to include this rich, languorous, sometimes lost and meandering, atmosphere in a life. This might assist an understanding of what distorts or precludes it, and thus our learning for how to invite it in, alongside our more habitual modes.No mode of time, therefore, is simplistically inflected as positive or negative. Without their multiplicity, I’m arguing, we are left temporally less endowed. I wish to articulate not the swapping of one kind of time for another—as if one would only favour productive ‘times’, or efficient ‘times’, or competitive ‘times’, or steady ‘times’, or dreamy, meandering ‘times’—but a diversity. When we feel wildly dissatisfied and imagine that a tangible thing, situation or acquisition—content in time, in other words—would serve as a salve for this uneasiness, we might also consider that what’s missing could be a temporal mode. Which one have we lost the capacity to access or drift into? I’ll now turn to the third synthesis which Deleuze explores, which pertains to the future and its opening up.For the purposes of my argument here, I want to use this third synthesis to gesture towards the future as a possible mode—empty, sheer—and which distinguishes itself entirely from the future ‘aspects’ of the first two syntheses. I both take a poetic cue from Deleuze, as well as note that this synthesis is the least obvious or accessible in a usual life, one in which habit’s organisation is established, and even in which perhaps there are pockets of the ‘erotic’ (Deleuze, Difference 107) and/or expansive driftings of the second synthesis of memory. The third synthesis, then—associated with Deleuze’s take on thought—marks the moment when something becomes active. Deleuze presents it to the reader of Difference and Repetition in relation to Nietzsche’s Eternal Return:that is why it is properly called a belief of the future, a belief in the future. Eternal Return affects only the new, what is produced under the condition of default and by the intermediary of metamorphosis. However it causes neither the condition nor the agent to return: on the contrary, it repudiates these and expels them with all its centrifugal force. (Difference 113, emphasis original)When habit dominates our temporal palette, the future appears to be possible only in habit’s guise of it—that is, in the mode of anticipation, which then morphs to prediction as this synthesis moves into its more active modes. Anticipation is a pragmatic but weak future. It is useful, without doubt, since habit’s future mode knows to say: at three o’clock I need to get my shoes on, grab keys and wallet, and drive to pick up X. I anticipate that they will be waiting on this corner, and so on. Habit’s internally available ‘future’ is crucial and steadying. Knowing how to manoeuvre within it is part of learning to live some kind of organised life. In sub-habituality I’d argue, we may not even have that. Zuboff intimates this when in Chapter 11 she speaks of a right to a future tense.Deleuze’s third synthesis opens the self precisely onto that which-cannot-be-anticipated. The Nietzschean mode of the future that Deleuze explores at length is not akin to habit’s ordering and stabilising; it is not to be compared to the reminiscent climes of pure memory, to the vast dilations and contractions of its insisting topographies. The third synthesis asks more of us. It asks us to forget the versions of ourselves we have been (in the very moment that we affirm the repetition of everything that has been, to the letter) and to stare unblinkingly into a roaring Nothingness, or better into the strange weathers of a Not-Determined-Yet.My own practice-based creative research into these matters confirms Deleuze’s architectures. I say: we need the two other temporal syntheses and rely on them in order to dramatise something new in the third synthesis. The is the ability, in other words, to decide and to forget enough to be able to dance forward into an unknown future.Sub-Habituality: Or Less than a ‘Living’ PresentKorean thinker Byung-Chul Han links our use of devices, and the necessity of engaging with them for our social/economic survival, to the kind of dispersed and fretful awareness needed by animals surviving predators in the wild. He sees ‘multitasking’ in no way as any kind of evolution, but names it provocatively a regression, which precludes the kind of contemplation upon which sophisticated cultural practices and fields, such as art and philosophy, arguably depend (Han 26-29). Habit involves the crucial notion of a ‘range’ of, or a capacity for, contracting disparate instants—so as to make possible their being stitched together, via contemplation’s passivity (Deleuze 100), and thereby to synthesise a (stable, even liveable) present. Recall that Hughes called it the index of our finitude. How do digital engagements—specifically with apps and their intentionally gamified designs, and which involve a certain velocity of uncadenced movement and gesture (eyes, hands, neck position)—impact an ability to synthesise a steady-enough present? Sub-habituality, as name, seeks a poetics to bring to articulation an un-ease that would be specifically temporal, not psychological, or even merely physiological.To know about the stability offered by habit’s time allows the cultivation of temporal atmospheres that are pleasant and stable, as well as having the potential to open onto creative/erotic modes of a vast past, as well as not be closed to the pure future. This would be a curation of the present, learning how to ‘play’ its mechanisms such that the most expansive and interesting aspects of this mode—which can condition and court other modes—can come forth.Sub-habituality is that time where the gathering of instants into any stretch is hindered, shattering the operations of coherence and narrowing aperture for certain experiences. No stretch in which to dwell. The vast and calming surfaces of our attention breaking into shards. Sub-habituality would be anti-contemplative, in an ontological sense. No instant could hold for long enough to relate to its temporal peers. Teetering there on the edge of a non-time, any ‘subject’ who might intend is undermined.Next, I turn to the notion of relaxation as bodily practice and strategy to insulate or shelter humans living under and within various intensities of digitalised neoliberalisation. Instead of offering oneself up for monetised organisation, one organises oneself via the nuanced effort that is a ‘dropping of excess effort’. The latter is relaxation and may thwart surreptitious modes of (imposed temporal) (dis)organisation, or what tends to appear increasingly as ‘common sense’ approaches to activity and spendings of time. We practise deciding to structure blocks of time, so that within their bounds we can risk experimenting with relaxation, its erotics and its vectors of transformation.RelaxationNeoliberalisation, after Springer, involves the becoming common-sensical of numerous logics: competitiveness in every sphere of life, ubiquity of free market logics, supposed scarcity (of time, opportunity), rationalisation and instrumentalisation of processes and attitudes to doing, and an emphasis on a discourse of efficiency (even when it is not, in actuality, what obtains). For Deleuze, in a control society, similarlymany young people strangely boast of being “motivated”; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It’s up to them to discover what they are being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines. ("Postscript", 7)How can we serve less this current telos? What (counter or subtractive) practices might undermine the conditions for the entrenching of such logics? My contention in this article is that practices of the body that also involve the intentional organising of time, along with approaches to movement generally that forgo striving and forcing (that is: kinds of violent ‘work’), may counter some of the impacts (especially of a temporal nature, as discussed above) that align with and allow for neoliberal logics’ pervading of all spheres of life. Relaxation is a useful shorthand for such strategies.In my work elsewhere on practising, I’ve argued that relaxation is the third (of four) criteria that constitute the specific approach to ‘doing’ that can be designated practising (see Pont; Attiwill et al.). Relaxation is a very particular approach to any behaviour or movement, whereby the ‘doer’ pays close attention and seeks to use only the necessary amount of effort for the activity in question. This dropping of ‘natural’ (or knee-jerk) effort is itself a kind of unusual effort. The word ‘natural’ here comes from writings by Vachaspati Mishra (192) and makes the subtle point that relaxation intervenes on what is ‘natural’ or on what has acquired inertia, on that which enacts itself without decision or intention. In this strictly ontological/temporal intervention, relaxation refuses to collude with common-sense approval for striving-as-new-piety that dominate neoliberalised discourses and their motivational propagandas.Relaxation constitutes an enacted—repeatedly enacted—decision at the level of the body to organise movement/doing in ways subtracted from neoliberalised discourse, reawakening intention. It is a quiet intervention, precise and difficult, that works to counter a widespread fundamentalism of doing with excess (or Leistung with its inevitable flipside of collapse and exhaustion, as critiqued by Han 24-25). This dovetails with the ubiquity of digital engagements/behavioural training, which effectively constitute an unending labour for many. Counter-intuitively, relaxation (when understood strictly as practice, not in its lay inflection as compensatory ‘collapse’) can establish a minimum membrane hindering the penetration of this labour into all spheres of a life. Once PEDs are intentionally used—very difficult to do—and limited in terms of the proportion of time they are engaged with, they pose a reduced threat to times’ diversity. (To organise my time, curiously too, I make use of PED timer features, on flight mode, and so on. Others use apps specifically designed to help them use fewer apps.)We find ourselves here faced with various and emergent practices of saying ‘no’ to serve a process that experiments with affirming something else—perhaps this ‘else’ would be the conditions for that which does yet exist, that is: truly open futures, creativity, robustness in the face of change. Promising? Deciding? My argument is that a body immersed too much in sub-habituality is less capable overall of withstanding the atmospheres of the third synthesis (and, if we follow Han, too dispersed and fragmented to access certain atmospheres that we might associate with the second). It may not even have a sense of a living present. It becomes less and less intentional, more malleable, very tired.There is—in the work of the body that resists complying with the logics of neoliberalisation, that resists a certain corrosion of Deleuze’s first time (and of the subsequent two times that in Deleuze open from them)—a clear practice of dropping, letting fall, not picking up in the first place. We forgo then certain modes of, or approaches to, action when we work to subtract ourselves from an encroaching (a)temporality that is none at all. To foil reactivity we have two obvious options: we learn to activate our reactivity—to act it; or we pause just before enacting from within its logic. Relaxation is more about the latter.ConclusionThe sub-habitual discussed in this article is, most importantly, a grim affective/temporal register to inhabit. For many, its unpleasantness is met with queries about mental health, since it naturally impacts us in a register that feels like bad thinking, like bad feeling. By introducing an onto-temporal inflection into such queries, I suggest there might be a certain kind of ‘health’ or better still a ‘pleasure’ in a life that can obtain with the cultivation of a diversity of times. Deleuze’s model of three kinds of temporal synthesis tempts me as one way to track what might be going missing in a moment when certain technologies, serving particular economic and political agendas and ideologies, can coax our rhythms, behaviours and preoccupations down particular paths. The fleshy, energetic and thinking body, as a site of affirmation, as a vehicle for practices that subtract themselves from dominant logics, can—I’ve argued here—be a crucial factor in working with temporality in such a way that one is not left with an homogenised non-time in which we are not-quite-subjects or diluted selves vulnerable to being worked on by logics that drive neoliberalisation and its sufferings. Relaxation is among a suite of strategies that may keep our times (and ourselves as modes of time) diverse: stable, pleasure-capable, imaginative and fierce.ReferencesAttiwill, Suzie, Terri Bird, Andrea Eckersley, Antonia Pont, Jon Roffe, and Philipa Rothfield. Practising with Deleuze. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017.Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. London: Continuum, 2004.———. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59 (1992): 3-7.Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.———. “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom.” The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, Vol. 1: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: New Press, 1997. 281-302.Grosz, Elizabeth. “Habit Today: Ravaisson, Bergson, Deleuze and Us.” Body and Society 19(2&3): 2013. 217-239.Han, Byung-Chul. Müdigkeitsgesellschaft Burnoutgesellschaft Hoch-Zeit. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2016.Hughes, Joe. Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Bloomsbury, 2009. Lupton, Deborah. The Quantified Self. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016.Mishra, Vachaspati. The Yoga System of Patanjali. Trans. J. Haughton Woods. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1914 (by arrangement with Harvard University Press).Pont, Antonia. “An Exemplary Operation: Shikantaza and Articulating Practice via Deleuze.” Transcendence, Immanence and Intercultural Philosophy. Eds. Nahum Brown & William Franke. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 207-236.Springer, Simon. The Discourse of Neoliberalism. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016.Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. New York: PublicAffairs, 2019. (Kindle Edition.)
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Jacques, Carmen, Kelly Jaunzems, Layla Al-Hameed und Lelia Green. „Refugees’ Dreams of the Past, Projected into the Future“. M/C Journal 23, Nr. 1 (18.03.2020). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1638.

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This article is about refugees’ and migrants’ dreams of home and family and stems from an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant, “A Hand Up: Disrupting the Communication of Intergenerational Welfare Dependency” (LP140100935), with Partner Organisation St Vincent de Paul Society (WA) Inc. (Vinnies). A Vinnies-supported refugee and migrant support centre was chosen as one of the hubs for interviewee recruitment, given that many refugee families experience persistent and chronic economic disadvantage. The de-identified name for the drop-in language-teaching and learning social facility is the Migrant and Refugee Homebase (MARH). At the time of the research, in 2018, refugee and forced migrant families from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan constituted MARH’s primary membership base. MARH provided English language classes alongside other educational and financial support. It could also organise provision of emergency food and was a conduit for furniture donated by Australian families. Crucially, MARH operated as a space in which members could come together to build shared community.As part of her role, the researcher was introduced to Sara (de-identified), a mother-tongue Arabic speaker and the centre’s coordinator. Sara had personal experience of being a refugee, as well as being MARH’s manager, and she became both a point of contact for the researcher team, an interpreter/translator, and an empathetic listener as refugees shared their stories. Dreams of home and family emerged throughout the interviews as a vital part of participants’ everyday lives. These dreams and hopes were developed in the face of what was, for some, a nightmare of adversity. Underpinning participants’ sense of agency, subjectivity and resilience, Badiou argues (93, as noted in Jackson, 241) that hope can appear as a basic form of patience or perseverance rather than a dream for justice. Instead of imagining an improvement in personal circumstances, the dream is one of simply moving forward rather than backward. While dreams of being reunited with family are rooted in the past and project a vision of a family which no longer exists, these dreams help fashion a future which once again contains a range of possibilities.Although Sara volunteered her time on the research project as part of her commitment to Vinnies, she was well-known to interviewees as a MARH staff member and, in many cases, a friend and confidante. While Sara’s manager role implies an imbalance of power, with Sara powerful and participants comparatively less so, the majority of the information explored in the interviews pertained to refugees’ experiences of life outside the sphere in which MARH is engaged, so there was limited risk of the data being sanitised to reflect positively upon MARH. The specialist information and understandings that the interviewees shared positions them as experts, and as co-creators of knowledge.Recruitment and Methodological ApproachThe project researcher (Jaunzems) met potential contributors at MARH when its members gathered for a coffee morning. With Sara’s assistance, the researcher invited MARH members to take part in the research project, giving those present the opportunity to ask and have answered any questions they deemed important. Coffee morning attendees were under no obligation to take part, and about half chose not to do so, while the remainder volunteered to participate. Sara scheduled the interviews at times to suit the families participating. A parent and child from each volunteer family was interviewed, separately. In all cases it was the mother who volunteered to take part, and all interviewees chose to be interviewed in their homes. Each set of interviews was digitally recorded and lasted no longer than 90 minutes. This article includes extracts from interviews with three mothers from refugee families who escaped war-torn homelands for a new life in Australia, sometimes via interim refugee camps.The project researcher conducted the in-depth interviews with Sara’s crucial interpreting/translating assistance. The interviews followed a traditional approach, except that the researcher deferred to Sara as being more important in the interview exchange than she was. This reflects the premise that meaning is socially constructed, and that what people do and say makes visible the meanings that underpin their actions and statements within a wider social context (Burr). Conceptualising knowledge as socially constructed privileges the role of the decoder in receiving, understanding and communicating such knowledge (Crotty). Respecting the role of the interpreter/translator signified to the participants that their views, opinions and their overall cultural context were valued.Once complete, the interviews were sent for translation and transcription by a trusted bi-lingual transcriber, where both the English and Arabic exchanges were transcribed. This was deemed essential by the researchers, to ensure both the authenticity of the data collected and to demonstrate “trust, understanding, respect, and a caring connection” (Valibhoy, Kaplan, and Szwarc, 23) with the participants. Upon completion of the interviews with volunteer members of the MARH community, and at the beginning of the analysis phase, researchers recognised the need for the adoption of an interpretive framework. The interpretive approach seeks to understand an individual’s view of the world through the contexts of time, place and culture. The knowledge produced is contextualised and differs from one person to another as a result of individual subjectivities such as age, race and ethnicity, even within a shared social context (Guba and Lincoln). Accordingly, a mother-tongue Arabic speaker, who identifies as a refugee (Al-Hameed), was added to the project. All authors were involved in writing up the article while authors two, three and four took responsibility for transcript coding and analysis. In the transcripts that follow, words originally spoken in Arabic are in intalics, with non-italcised words originally spoken in English.Discrimination and BelongingAya initially fled from her home in Syria into neighbouring Jordan. She didn’t feel welcomed or supported there.[00:55:06] Aya: …in Jordan, refugees didn’t have rights, and the Jordanian schools refused to teach them [the children…] We were put aside.[00:55:49] Interpreter, Sara (to Researcher): And then she said they push us aside like you’re a zero on the left, yeah this is unfortunately the reality of our countries, I want to cry now.[00:56:10] Aya: You’re not allowed to cry because we’ll all cry.Some refugees and migrant communities suffer discrimination based on their ethnicity and perceived legitimacy as members of the host society. Although Australian refugees may have had searing experiences prior to their acceptance by Australia, migrant community members in Australia can also feel themselves “constructed in the public and political spheres as less legitimately Australian than others” (Green and Aly). Jackson argues that both refugees and migrants experiencethe impossibility of ever bridging the gap between one’s natal ties to the place one left because life was insupportable there, and the demands of the nation to which one has travelled, legally or illegally, in search of a better life. And this tension between belonging and not belonging, between a place where one has rights and a place where one does not, implies an unresolved relationship between one’s natural identity as a human being and one’s social identity as ‘undocumented migrant,’ a ‘resident alien,’ an ‘ethnic minority,’ or ‘the wretched of the earth,’ whose plight remains a stigma of radical alterity even though it inspires our compassion and moves us to political action. (223)The tension Jackson refers to, where the migrant is haunted by belonging and not belonging, is an area of much research focus. Moreover, the label of “asylum seeker” can contribute to systemic “exclusion of a marginalised and abject group of people, precisely by employing a term that emphasises the suspended recognition of a community” (Nyers). Unsurprisingly, many refugees in Australia long for the connectedness of the lives they left behind relocated in the safe spaces where they live now.Eades focuses on an emic approach to understanding refugee/migrant distress, or trauma, which seeks to incorporate the worldview of the people in distress: essentially replicating the interpretive perspective taken in the research. This emic framing is adopted in place of the etic approach that seeks to understand the distress through a Western biomedical lens that is positioned outside the social/cultural system in which the distress is taking place. Eades argues: “developing an emic approach is to engage in intercultural dialogue, raise dilemmas, test assumptions, document hopes and beliefs and explore their implications”. Furthermore, Eades sees the challenge for service providers working with refugee/migrants in distress as being able to move beyond “harm minimisation” models of care “to recognition of a facilitative, productive community of people who are in a transitional phase between homelands”. This opens the door for studies concerning the notions of attachment to place and its links to resilience and a refugee’s ability to “settle in” (for example, Myers’s ground-breaking place-making work in Plymouth).Resilient PrecariousnessChaima: We feel […] good here, we’re safe, but when we sit together, we remember what we went through how my kids screamed when the bombs came, and we went out in the car. My son was 12 and I was pregnant, every time I remember it, I go back.Alongside the dreams that migrants have possible futures are the nightmares that threaten to destabilise their daily lives. As per the work of Xavier and Rosaldo, post-migration social life is recreated in two ways: the first through participation and presence in localised events; the second by developing relationships with absent others (family and friends) across the globe through media. These relationships, both distanced and at a distance, are dispersed through time and space. In light of this, Campays and Said suggest that places of past experiences and rituals for meaning are commonly recreated or reproduced as new places of attachment abroad; similarly, other recollections and experience can trigger a sense of fragility when “we remember what we went through”. Gupta and Ferguson suggest that resilience is defined by the migrant/refugee capacity to “reimagine and re-materialise” their lost heritage in their new home. This involves a sense of connection to the good things in the past, while leaving the bad things behind.Resilience has also been linked to the migrant’s/refugee’s capacity “to manage their responses to adverse circumstances in an interpersonal community through the networks of relationships” (Eades). Resilience in this case is seen through an intersubjective lens. Joseph reminds us that there is danger in romanticising community. Local communities may not only be hostile toward different national and ethnic groups, they may actively display a level of hostility toward them (Boswell). However, Gill maintains that “the reciprocal relations found in communities are crucially important to their [migrant/refugee] well-being”. This is because inclusion in a given community allows migrants/refugees to shrug off the outsider label, and the feeling of being at risk, and provides the opportunity for them to become known as families and friends. One of MAHR’s central aims was to help bridge the cultural divide between MARH users and the broader Australian community.Hope[01:06: 10] Sara (to interviewee, Aya): What’s the key to your success here in Australia?[01:06:12] Aya: The people, and how they treat us.[01:06:15] Sara (to Researcher): People and how they deal with us.[01:06:21] Aya: It’s the best thing when you look around, and see people who don’t understand your language but they help you.[01:06:28] Sara (to Researcher): She said – this is nice. I want to cry also. She said the best thing when I see people, they don’t understand your language, and I don’t understand theirs but they still smile in your face.[01:06:43] Aya: It’s the best.[01:06:45] Sara (to Aya): yes, yes, people here are angels. This is the best thing about Australia.Here, Sara is possibly shown to be taking liberties with the translation offered to the researcher, talking about how Australians “smile in your face”, when (according to the translator) Aya talked about how Australians “help”. Even so, the capacity for social connection and other aspects of sociality have been linked to a person’s ability to turn a negative experience into a positive cultural resource (Wilson). Resilience is understood in these cases as a strength-based practice where families, communities and individuals are viewed in terms of their capabilities and possibilities, instead of their deficiencies or disorders (Graybeal and Saleeby in Eades). According to Fozdar and Torezani, there is an “apparent paradox between high-levels of discrimination experienced by humanitarian migrants to Australia in the labour market and everyday life” (30) on the one hand, and their reporting of positive well-being on the other. That disparity includes accounts such as the one offered by Aya.As Wilson and Arvanitakis suggest,the interaction between negative experiences of discrimination and reports of wellbeing suggested a counter-intuitive propensity among refugees to adapt to and make sense of their migration experiences in unique, resourceful and life-affirming ways. Such response patterns among refugees and trauma survivors indicate a similar resilience-related capacity to positively interpret and derive meaning from negative migration experiences and associated emotions. … However, resilience is not expressed or employed uniformly among individuals or communities. Some respond in a resilient manner, while others collapse. On this point, an argument could be made that collapse and breakdown is a built-in aspect of resilience, and necessary for renewal and ongoing growth.Using this approach, Wilson and Arvanitakis have linked resilience to hope, as a “present- and future-oriented mode of situated defence against adversity”. They argue that the term “hope” is often utilised in a tokenistic way “as a strategic instrument in increasingly empty domestic and international political vocabularies”. Nonetheless, Wilson and Arvanitakis believe hope to be of vital academic interest due to the prevalence of war and suffering throughout the world. In the research reported here, the authors found that participants’ hopes were interwoven with dreams of being reunited with their families in a place of safety. This is a common longing. As Jackson states,so it is that migrants travel abroad in pursuit of utopia, but having found that place, which is also no-place (ou-topos), they are haunted by the thought that utopia actually lies in the past. It is the family they left behind. That is where they properly belong. Though the family broke up long ago and is now scattered to the four winds, they imagine a reunion in which they are together again. (223)There is a sense here that with their hopes and dreams lying in the past, refugees/migrants are living forward while looking backwards (a Kierkegaardian concept). If hope is thought to be key to resilience (Wilson and Arvanitakis), and key to an individual’s ability to live with a sense of well-being, then perhaps a refugee’s past relations (familial) impact both their present relations (social/community), and their ability to transform negative experiences into positive experiences. And yet, there is no readily accessible way in which migrants and refugees can recreate the connections that sustained them in the past. As Jackson suggests,the irreversibility of time is intimately connected with the irreversibility of one’s place of origin, and this entwined movement through time and across space proves perplexing to many migrants, who, in imagining themselves one day returning to the place from where they started out, forget that there is no transport which will convey them back into the past. … Often it is only by going home that is becomes starkly and disconcertingly clear that one’s natal village is no longer the same and that one has also changed. (221)The dream of home and family, therefore and the hope that this might somehow be recreated in the safety of the here and now, becomes a paradoxical loss and longing even as it is a constant companion for many on their refugee journey.Esma’s DreamAccording to author three, personal dreams are not generally discussed in Arab culture, even though dreams themselves may form part of the rich tradition of Arabic folklore and storytelling. Alongside issues of mental wellbeing, dreams are constructed as something private, and it generally breaks social taboos to describe them publicly. However, in personal discussions with other refugee women and men, and echoing Jackson’s finding, a recurring dream is “to meet my family in a safe place and not be worried about my safety or theirs”. As a refugee, the third author shares this dream. This is also the perspective articulated by Esma, who had recently had a fifth child and was very much missing her extended family who had died, been scattered as refugees, or were still living in a conflict zone. The researcher asked Sara to ask Esma about the best aspect of her current life:[01:17:03] Esma: The thing that comforts me here is nature, it’s beautiful.[01:17:15] Sara (to the Researcher): The nature.[01:17:16] Esma: And feeling safe.[01:17:19] Sara (to the Researcher): The safety. ...[01:17:45] Esma: Life’s beautiful here.[01:17:47] Sara (to the Researcher): Life is beautiful here.[01:17:49] Esma: But I want to know people, speak the language, have friends, life is beautiful here even if I don’t have my family here.[01:17:56] Sara (to the Researcher): Life is so pretty you only need to improve the language and have friends, she said I love my life here even though I don’t have any family or community here. (To Esma:) I am your family.[01:18:12] Esma: Bring me my siblings here.[01:18:14] Sara (to Esma): I just want my brothers here and my sisters.[01:18:17] Esma: It’s a dream.[01:18:18] Sara (to Esma): it’s a dream, one day it will become true.Here Esma uses the term dream metaphorically, to describe an imagined utopia: a dream world. In supporting Esma, who is mourning the absence of her family, Sara finds herself reacting and emoting around their shared experience of leaving siblings behind. In doing so, she affirms the younger woman, but also offers a hope for the future. Esma had previously made a suggestion, absorbed into her larger dream, but more achievable in the short term, “to know people, speak the language, have friends”. The implication here is that Esma is keen to find a way to connect with Australians. She sees this as a means of compensating for the loss of family, a realistic hope rather than an impossible dream.ConclusionInterviews with refugee families in a Perth-based migrant support centre reveals both the nightmare pasts and the dreamed-of futures of people whose lives have experienced a radical disruption due to war, conflict and other life-threatening events. Jackson’s work with migrants provides a context for understanding the power of the dream in helping to resolve issues around the irreversibility of time and circumstance, while Wilson and Arvanitakis point to the importance of hope and resilience in supporting the building of a positive future. Within this mix of the longed for and the impossible, both the refugee informants and the academic literature suggest that participation in local events, and authentic engagement with the broader community, help make a difference in supporting a migrant’s transition from dreaming to reality.AcknowledgmentsThis article arises from an ARC Linkage Project, ‘A Hand Up: Disrupting the Communication of Intergenerational Welfare Dependency’ (LP140100935), supported by the Australian Research Council, Partner Organisation St Vincent de Paul Society (WA) Inc., and Edith Cowan University. The authors are grateful to the anonymous staff and member of Vinnies’ Migrant and Refugee Homebase for their trust in and support of this project, and for their contributions to it.ReferencesBadiou, Alan. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Trans. Ray Brassier. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2003.Boswell, Christina. “Burden-Sharing in the European Union: Lessons from the German and UK Experience.” Journal of Refugee Studies 16.3 (2003): 316–35.Burr, Vivien. Social Constructionism. 2nd ed. Hove, UK & New York, NY: Routledge, 2003.Campays, Philippe, and Vioula Said. “Re-Imagine.” M/C Journal 20.4 (2017). Aug. 2017 <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1250>.Crotty, Michael. The Foundations of Social Research: Meaning and Perspective in the Research Process. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1998.Eades, David. “Resilience and Refugees: From Individualised Trauma to Post Traumatic Growth.” M/C Journal 16.5 (2013). Aug. 2013 <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/700>.Fozdar, Farida, and Silvia Torezani. “Discrimination and Well-Being: Perceptions of Refugees in Western Australia.” The International Migration Review 42.1 (2008): 1–34.Gill, Nicholas. “Longing for Stillness: The Forced Movement of Asylum Seekers.” M/C Journal 12.1 (2009). Mar. 2009 <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/123>.Graybeal, Clay. “Strengths-Based Social Work Assessment: Transforming the Dominant Paradigm.” Families in Society 82.3 (2001): 233–42.Green, Lelia, and Anne Aly. “Bastard Immigrants: Asylum Seekers Who Arrive by Boat and the Illegitimate Fear of the Other.” M/C Journal 17.5 (2014). Oct. 2014 <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/896>.Guba, Egon G., and Yvonna S. Lincoln. "Competing Paradigms in Qualitative Research." Handbook of Qualitative Research 2 (1994): 163-194.Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson. “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference.” Religion and Social Justice for Immigrants. Ed. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo. New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 2006. 72-79.Jackson, Michael. The Wherewithal of Life: Ethics, Migration, and the Question of Well-Being. California: U of California P, 2013.Joseph, Miranda. Against the Romance of Community. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.Myers, Misha. “Situations for Living: Performing Emplacement." Research in Drama Education 13.2 (2008): 171-180. DOI: 10.1080/13569780802054828.Nyers, Peter. “Abject Cosmopolitanism: The Politics of Protection in the Anti-Deportation Movement.” Third World Quarterly 24.6 (2003): 1069–93.Saleeby, Dennis. “The Strengths Perspective in Social Work Practice: Extensions and Cautions.” Social Work 41.3 (1996): 296–305.Valibhoy, Madeleine C., Ida Kaplan, and Josef Szwarc. “‘It Comes Down to Just How Human Someone Can Be’: A Qualitative Study with Young People from Refugee Backgrounds about Their Experiences of Australian Mental Health Services.” Transcultural Psychiatry 54.1 (2017): 23-45.Wilson, Michael. Accumulating Resilience: An Investigation of the Migration and Resettlement Experiences of Young Sudanese People in the Western Sydney Area. Sydney: University of Western Sydney, 2012.Wilson, Michael John, and James Arvanitakis. “The Resilience Complex.” M/C Journal 16.5 (2013). <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/741>.Xavier, Johnathon, and Renato Rosaldo. “Thinking the Global.” The Anthropology of Globalisation. Eds. Johnathon Xavier and Renato Rosaldo. New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell Publishers, 2002.
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Chin, Bertha. „Locating Anti-Fandom in Extratextual Mash-Ups“. M/C Journal 16, Nr. 4 (12.08.2013). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.684.

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Fan cultural production, be it in the form of fan fiction, art or videos are often celebrated in fan studies as evidence of fan creativity, fans’ skills in adopting technology and their expert knowledge of the texts. As Jenkins argues, “the pleasure of the form centers on the fascination in watching familiar images wrenched free from their previous contexts and assigned alternative meanings” (227). However, can fan mash-up videos can also offer an alternative view, not of one’s fandom, but of anti-fandom? Fan pleasure is often seen as declaring love for a text through juxtaposing images to sound in a mash-up video, but this paper will argue that it can also demonstrate hate. Specifically, can these videos affirm anti-fandom readings of a particular text, when clips from two (or more) different texts, seemingly of the same genre and targeting the same demographics, are edited together to offer an alternative story? In 2009, a video entitled Buffy vs Edward: Twilight Remixed (hereafter BvE) (See Video 1) was uploaded to YouTube, juxtaposing clips from across the seven series of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and the first film of the Twilight series. Twilight is a series of novels written by Stephenie Meyer which was adapted into a successful series of five films between the period of 2008 and 2012. Its vampire-centric romance story has resulted in numerous comparisons to, among others, the cult and popular television series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (hereafter Buffy) created by Joss Whedon, which aired from 1997 to 2003. In BvE, which has over three million views to date and reportedly has been translated into thirty different languages, Jonathan McIntosh, the video’s creator, “changes Edward Cullen from a smouldering, sparkly antihero into a self-obsessed stalker who's prone to throwing tantrums. Buffy Summers reacts to him with disdain and dwindling patience, assertively rebuking his every self-indulgence” (Leduc). By editing together clips from two texts seemingly of the same genre and targeting the same demographics, this video affirms an anti-fandom reading of Twilight. Video 1: Buffy vs Edward: Twilight RemixedOn the first viewing of the video, I was struck by how accurately it portrayed my own misgivings about Twilight, and by how I had wished Bella Swan was more like Buffy Summers and been a positive role model for girls and women. The content of the video mash-up—along with fan reactions to it—suggests and perpetuates an anti-fandom reading of Twilight via Buffy, by positioning the latter as a text with higher cultural value, in terms of its influence and representations of female characters. As McIntosh himself clarifies in an interview, “the audience is not supposed to go “Oh, see how TV is stupid?” They’re supposed to go “Oh, see how Buffy was awesome!”” (ikat381). As such, the BvE mash-up can be read, not just as a criticism of popular commercial texts, but also as an anti-fan production. Much work surrounding fan culture extrapolates on fans’ love for a text, but I’d like to propose that mash-ups such as BvE reaffirms anti-fandom readings of derided texts via another that is deemed—and presented—as culturally more valuable. In this essay, BvE will be used as an example of how anti-fandom productions can reinforce the audience’s opinion of a despised text. When BvE first launched, it was circulated widely among Buffy fandom, and the narrative of the mash-up, and its implications were debated rather fiercely on Whedonesque.com [http://whedonesque.com/comments/20883], one of the main sites for Joss Whedon’s fandom. Comparisons between the two texts, despite existing in different mediums (film vs. television), were common among general media—some survey respondents reveal they were persuaded to read the books or watch the first film by its assumed similarities to Buffy— as both feature somewhat similar storylines on the surface: a young, teenaged (human) girl falling in love with a vampire, and were presumably aimed at the same demographics of teenaged and college-aged girls. The similarities seem to end there though, for while Buffy is often hailed as a feminist text, Twilight is dismissed as anti-feminist, down to its apparently rabid and overly-emotional (female) fanbase. As one Buffy fan on Whedonesque clarifies: Buffy was more real than Bella ever thought of being. Buffy was flawed, made mistakes, bad decisions and we never saw her sort out a healthy romantic relationship but she was still a tremendous role model not for just teen girl but teen boys as well. […] Bella's big claim to fame seems to be she didn't sleep with her boyfriend before marriage but that was his choice, not hers. BvE appears to reflect the above comparison, as McIntosh justifies the video as “a pro-feminist visual critique of Edward’s character and generally creepy behaviour”—essentially a problem that Buffy, as a vampire slayer and a feminist icon can solve (for the greater good). For the purpose of this paper, I was interested to see if those who are active in fandom in general are aware of the BvE video, and if it informs or reaffirms their anti-fandom views of Twilight. Methodology A short online survey was devised with this in mind and a link to the survey was provided via Twitter (the link was retweeted 27 times), with the explanation that it is on Twilight anti-fandom and the BvE mash-up video. It was further shared on Facebook, by friends and peers. At the same time, I also requested for the link to be posted by the administrators of Whedonesque.com. Despite the posting at Whedonesque, the survey was not particularly aimed at Buffy fans, but rather fans in general who are familiar with both texts. The survey received 419 responses in the span of 24 hours, suggesting that the topic of (Twilight) anti-fandom is one that fans—or anti-fans—are passionately engaged with. Out of the 419 responses, 357 people have seen BvE, and 208 have read the book(s) and/or saw the film(s). The other 211 respondents came into contact with Twilight through paratexts, “semi-textual fragments that surround and position the work” (Gray New 72), such as trailers, word-of-mouth and news outlets. Anti-Fandom, Twilight, and the Buffy vs Edward Mash-Up Fan studies have given us insights into the world of fandom, informing us about the texts that fans love, what fans do with those texts and characters, and how fans interact with one another within the context of fandom. As Henry Jenkins explains: Fan culture finds that utopian dimension within popular culture a site for constructing an alternative culture. Its society is responsive to the needs that draw its members to commercial entertainment, most especially the desire for affiliation, friendship, community (282). Fan studies has obviously progressed from Jenkins’s initial observations as fan scholars subsequently proceed to complicate and augment the field. However, many gaps and silences remain to be filled: Hills (2002) […] argued that fandom is ‘not a thing that can be picked over analytically’ (pp. xi-xii) and separated into neat categories, but is a performative, psychological action that differs according to person, fandom, and generation (Sheffield and Merlo 209). In a 2003 article, Jonathan Gray reflects that in fan scholars’ enthusiasm to present the many interesting facets of fan culture, “reception studies are distorting our understanding of the text, the consumer and the interaction between them” (New Audiences 68). So while there is the friendship, affiliation and sense of community where fans share their mutual affection for their favourite texts and characters, there are also those who engage critically with the texts that they dislike. Gray identifies them as the anti-fans, arguing that these anti-fans are not “against fandom per se, […] but they strongly dislike a given text or genre, considering it inane, stupid, morally bankrupt and/or aesthetic drivel” (New New Audiences 70). Most anti-fans’ encounter with their hated text will not merely be through the text itself, but also through its surrounding paratexts, such as trailers and press articles. These paratextual pieces inform the anti-fan about the text, as much as the original text itself, and together they add to the formation of the anti-fannish identity: Rather than engaging the text directly, […] anti-fans often respond to a “text” they construct from paratextual fragments such as news coverage or word-of-mouth, reading, watching, and learning all they can about a show, book, or person in order to better understand and criticize the text (and, very often, its fans) (Sheffield and Merlo 209). Media attention directed at the Twilight franchise, as well as the attention Twilight fans receive has made it a popular subject in both fan and anti-fan studies. Dan Haggard, in a 2010 online posting, commented on the fascinating position of Twilight fans in popular culture: The Twilight fan is interesting because of reports (however well substantiated) of a degree of extremism that goes beyond what is acceptable, even when considered from a perspective relative to standard fan obsession. The point here is not so much whether Twilight fans are any more extreme than standard fans, but that there is a perception that they are so. (qtd. in Pinkowitz) Twilight fans are more often than not, described as “rabid” and “frenzied” (Click), particularly by the media. This is, of course, in total opposition to the identity of the fan as effective consumer or productive (free) labourer, which scholars like Baym and Burnett, for example, have observed. The anti-fandom in this case seems to go beyond the original text (both the books and the film franchises), extending to the fans themselves. Pinkowitz explains that the anti-fans she examined resent the success Twilight has amassed as they consider the books to be poorly written and they “strongly dislike the popular belief that the Twilight books are good literature and that they deserve the fanaticism its rabid fans demonstrate”. Some survey respondents share this view, criticising that the “writing is horrible”, the books have “awful prose” and “melodramatic characterisations”. Sheffield and Merlo demonstrate that the “most visible Twilight anti-fan behaviors are those that mock or “snark” about the “rabid” Twilight fans, who they argue, “give other fans a bad name”” (210). However, BvE presents another text with which Twilight can be compared to in the form of Buffy. As one survey respondent explains: Bella is a weak character who lacks agency. She lacks the wit, will-power, and determination that makes Buffy such a fun character. […] She is a huge step back especially compared to Buffy, but also compared to almost any modern heroine. Paul Booth argues that for mash-ups, or remixes, to work, as audiences, we are expected to understand—and identify—the texts that are referenced, even if they may be out of context: “we as audiences must be knowledgeable about both sources, as well as the convergence of them, in order to make sense of the final product”. Survey respondents have commented that the mash-up was “more about pleasing Buffy fans”, and that it was “created with an agenda, by someone who hates Twilight and loves Buffy,” which gives “a biased introduction to Buffy”. On the other hand, others have commented that the mash-up “makes [Twilight] seem better than it actually is”, and that it “reinforced [their] perceptions” of Twilight as a weaker text. Booth also suggests that mash-ups create new understandings of taste, of which I would argue that is reinforced through BvE, which McIntosh describes as a “metaphor for the ongoing battle between two opposing visions of gender roles in the 21st century”. In fact, many of the survey respondents share McIntosh’s view, criticising Twilight as an anti-feminist text that, for all its supposed cultural influence, is sending a dangerous message to young girls who are the target demographic of the franchise. As they reflect: It bothers me that so many people (and especially women) love and embrace the story, when at its crux it is about a woman trying to choose between two men. Neither men are particularly good/safe for her, but the book romanticizes the possible violence toward Bella. The idea that Bella is nothing without Edward, that her entire life is defined by this man. She gives up her life—literally—to be with him. It is unhealthy and obsessive. It also implies to women that stalking behaviour like Edward's is romantic rather than illegal. I think what bothers me the most is how Meyers presents an abusive relationship where the old guy (but he's sparkly and pretty, so it's ok) in question stalks the heroine, has her kidnapped, and physically prevents her from seeing whom she wants to see is portrayed as love. In a good way. These testimonials show that fans take a moral stand towards Twilight’s representation of women, specifically Bella Swan. Twilight acts in counterpoint to a text like Buffy, which is critically acclaimed and have been lauded for its feminist representation (the idea that a young, petite girl has the power to fight vampires and other supernatural creatures). The fact that Buffy is a chronological older text makes some fans lament that the girl-power and empowerment that was showcased in the 1990s has now regressed down to the personification of Bella Swan. Gray argues that anti-fandom is also about expectations of quality and value: “of what a text should be like, of what is a waste of media time and space, of what morality or aesthetics texts should adopt, and of what we would like to see others watch or read” (New 73). This notion of taste, and cultural value comes through again as respondents who are fans of Buffy testify: It's not very well-written. I strongly dislike the weak parallels one could draw between the two. Yes Angel and Spike went through a creepy stalking phase with Buffy, and yes for a while there was some romantic triangle action but there was so much more going on. […] My biggest issue is with Bella's characterization. She has flaws and desires but she is basically a whiney, mopey blob. She is a huge step back especially compared to Buffy, but also compared to almost any modern heroine. There is tremendous richness in Buffy—themes are more literate, historically allusive and psychologically deeper than boy-meets-girl, girl submits, boy is tamed. Edward Cullen is white-faced and blank; Spike and Angel are white-faced and shadowed, hollowed, sculpted—occasionally tortured. Twilight invites teen girls to project their desires; Spike and Angel have qualities which are discovered. Buffy the character grows and evolves. Her environment changes as she experiences the world around her. Decisions that she made in high school were re-visited years later, and based on her past experiences, she makes different choices. Bella, however, loses nothing. There's no consequence to her being turned. There's no growth to her character. The final act in the mash-up video, of Buffy slaying Edward can be seen as a re-empowerment for those who do not share the same love for Twilight as its fans do. In the follow-up to his 2003 article that launched the concept of anti-fandom, Gray argues that: Hate or dislike of a text can be just as powerful as can a strong and admiring, affective relationship with a text, and they can produce just as much activity, identification, meaning, and “effects” or serve just as powerfully to unite and sustain a community or subculture (Antifandom 841). Conclusion The video mash-up, in this case, can be read as an anti-fandom reading of Twilight via Buffy, in which the superiority of Buffy as a text is repeatedly reinforced. When asked if the mash-up video would encourage the survey respondents to consider watching Twilight (if they have not before), the respondents’ answers range from a repeated mantra of “No”, to “It makes me want to burn every copy”, to “Not unless it is to mock, or for the purpose of a drinking game”. Not merely resorting to mocking, what McIntosh’s mash-up video has given Twilight anti-fans is yet another paratextual fragment with which to read the text (as in, Edward Cullen is creepy and controlling, therefore he deserves to be slayed, as should have happened if he was in the Buffy universe instead of Twilight). In other words, what I am suggesting here is that anti-fandom can be enforced through the careful framing of a mash-up video, such as that of the Buffy vs Edward: Twilight Remixed mash-up, where the text considered more culturally valuable is used to read and comment on the one considered less valuable. References Baym, Nancy, and Robert Burnett. Amateur Experts: International Fan Labour in Swedish Independent Music. Copenhagen, Denmark, 2008. Booth, Paul. “Mashup as Temporal Amalgam: Time, Taste, and Textuality.” Transformative Works and Cultures 9 (2012): n. pag. 3 Apr. 2013 < http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/297/285 >. Click, Melissa. “‘Rabid’, ‘Obsessed’, and ‘Frenzied’: Understanding Twilight Fangirls and the Gendered Politics of Fandom.” Flow 11.4 (2009): n. pag. 18 June 2013 < http://flowtv.org/2009/12/rabid-obsessed-and-frenzied-understanding-twilight-fangirls-and-the-gendered-politics-of-fandom-melissa-click-university-of-missouri/ >. Gray, Jonathan. “Antifandom and the Moral Text: Television without Pity and Textual Dislike.” American Behavioral Scientist 48 (2005): 840–858. ———. “New Audiences, New Textualities: Anti-Fans and Non-Fans.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 6.1 (2003): 64–81. Hills, Matt. Fan Cultures. London: Routledge, 2002. ikat381. “Total Recut Interviews Jonathan McIntosh about Buffy vs. Edward.” Total Recut 24 Dec. 2009. 20 July 2013 < http://www.totalrecut.com/permalink.php?perma_id=265 >. Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992. Leduc, Martin. “The Two-Source Illusion: How Vidding Practices Changed Jonathan McIntosh’s Political Remix Videos.” Transformative Works and Cultures 9 (2012): n. pag. 19 July 2013 < http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/379/274 >. McIntosh, Jonathan. “Buffy vs Edward: Twilight Remixed.” Rebelliouspixels 20 June 2009. 2 Apr. 2013 < http://www.rebelliouspixels.com/2009/buffy-vs-edward-twilight-remixed >. Pinkowitz, Jacqueline. “‘The Rabid Fans That Take [Twilight] Much Too Seriously’: The Construction and Rejection of Excess in Twilight Antifandom.” Transformative Works and Cultures 7 (2011): n. pag. 21 June 2013 < http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/247/253 >. Sheffield, Jessica, and Elyse Merlo. “Biting Back: Twilight Anti-Fandom and the Rhetoric of Superiority.” Bitten by Twilight: Youth Culture, Media and the Vampire Franchise. Eds. Melissa Click, Jessica Stevens Aubrey, & Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz. New York: Peter Lang Publishers, 2010. 207–224.
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Moore, Kyle. „Painting the Town Blue and Green: Curating Street Art through Urban Mobile Gaming“. M/C Journal 18, Nr. 4 (07.08.2015). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1010.

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Released in 2012 as an Android only open-beta, Ingress is an alternate-reality game for mobile devices. Developed by Niantic Labs, a subsidiary of Google, Ingress now has 7 million users worldwide (Ingress) on both Android and Apple operating systems. Players are aligned to one of two opposing factions, the Resistance (Blue) and the Enlightened (Green). Working on behalf of their faction, individual players interact with “portals” in order to establish dominance over material environments. Portals are located at places of educational or historical value, public artworks, “hyper-local” locations, public libraries, and also places of worship (Google, “Candidate Portal Criteria”). Players take on the role of portal creators, submitting potential portals to the game developers after confirming their location in the game (Google, “New Portal Submissions”).Portals become the primary point of interaction for players, bridging the digital world of the game with the players’ surrounding material environments. Players may gain inventory by hacking portals in order to destroy and (re)claim portals. Territories are claimed by forging links between fully developed portals in order to establish control fields. Portals play an important part not only of the game but in situating the practice of play within the larger sociocultural and material framework of the urban environment. Players navigate their material environment, using portals and digital representations of such spaces alongside their existing knowledge of local environments, to engage with their immediate location as efficiently as possible. While numerous public landmarks are currently used as portals, the primary interest of this paper is the role street art plays within the game, and within the larger practice of curating the city. This paper addresses the practice of playing Ingress as a form of situated play—that is, the notion that play is underscored by sociocultural and material circumstance, while simultaneously contributing to a new shared understanding of what constitutes urban play and the conditions that underscore it. In doing so, this paper firstly addresses the notion of play as a situated practice, mobilising concepts from the field of human–computer interaction as well as cultural studies analyses of games and gaming culture. This framework is applied to the practice of playing Ingress with specific focus on the role street art has in the practice of playing. The discussion of urban play as a means of exhibiting street art is extended to discuss the cultural practice of street art itself, with both occupying the liminal space struggle over the functionality of public space. Both practices occupy this liminal space between subversive use of urban environments and a form of legitimate art—a debate which has been central to forms of urban gaming. By focusing on the role of street art in urban mobile gaming, this paper addresses the cultural function of both practices, while addressing larger questions of curatorship within the urban environment. That is: how can the practice of play, as informed by the practice of street art, be thought of as a means of curating urban spaces? This paper goes on to argue that the practice of urban play may be viewed as a form of curation via the practice of re-reading, re-mixing, and re-mediating urban environments—establishing a new shared understanding of street art, urban environments, and urban play. In this paper I argue that urban mobile games such as Ingress are best thought of as a situated practice. The idea of situated practice is drawn from the fields of game studies and human–computer interaction, and the concept of situated learning. Firstly, situated practice draws from the concept of situated gaming, a term established by Yates and Littleton to understand the cultural niches in which video gaming takes place. For Yates and Littleton, these cultural niches arise from an interaction between gaming, gamers, and gaming culture—all of which are discursively constructed and culturally relative practices. Apperley (Gaming) expands on these ideas to define situated gaming as, firstly, an inclusion of the materiality of embodied gaming experiences and, secondly, an intersection of local gaming cultures and a larger global gaming ecology. Drawing from Suchman’s concept of situated actions, such interactions with technology must be understood as contextualised within specific sociocultural and material circumstances. Dourish expands on Suchman’s work and suggests thinking less about these contexts and more on the practice of technological engagement, of making meaning out of our interaction with technology. This use of “practice” is influenced by the work of Lave and Wenger, who situate learning within a social setting, what they term a “community of practice”. In short, then, the act of playing Ingress is not only an interaction with underlying sociocultural and material circumstance which constitute the urban and play but also a process of generating a shared understanding of both the urban and play within this specific context.Fig. 1: A view of Ingress’s map showing nearby portal using navigation function.Playing with Street Art Ingress functions foremost as a form of urban play; it is a mobile game with location-aware capabilities. The practice of playing games within urban environments is often compared to historically situated forms of urban exploration, such as the Situationist International practice of dérive—a form of urban drifting that is often compared to contemporary forms of mobile-mediated urban play (de Souza e Silva and Hjorth; Flanagan; Stevens). Ingress players, in their creation and constant interaction with portals, assist in the mapping of material environments—benefiting both communities of play and the game’s designers, Niantic Labs and parent company Google. Players are able to submit portals to the game’s developers if their proposed portal meets the satisfaction of the developer’s portal requirements. Portals may be erected at “a location with a cool story, a place in history or educational value … a cool piece of art or unique architecture … a hidden gem of hyper-local spot” (Google, Candidate Portal criteria). A large number of public marks form the basis of Ingress portals, alongside plaques and prominent signage. Significantly, through their submission of portals players are participating in legitimising the history of a number of locations, ensuring up-to-date mapping of locations and landmarks. While a number of other landmarks form the basis of Ingress’s dense map of material environments, this paper is primarily concerned with the role public art plays in the practice of urban play and the curatorial possibilities of urban play. Given the portal criteria put in place by the game’s developers, Ingress pays a certain amount of attention to the historical, sociocultural, and material circumstance which constitute specific locations. As a mobile game, Ingress occupies a certain place within the history of playing in urban environments. Such historical practices have been previously discussed at length, drawing comparisons between practices of urban mobility which are themselves situated in specific historical and sociocultural movements (de Souza e Silva and Hjorth; Flanagan; Stevens). Ingress, via its inclusion of street art as a potential anchor for digital portals, draws on this historical struggle over urban environments and the inherent questions of functionality and organisation which emerge from this struggle. For Stenros, Montola, and Mäyrä (262), pervasive gaming, a form of urban mobile gaming, occupies a similar cultural space to that of street art or graffiti. They argue that both practices are located within a larger struggle over public space—a struggle grounded in urbanisation, legislation, and cultural norms. Drawing comparisons between more contemporary forms of urban mobility, such as the practice/sport of parkour or skateboarding, and the historically situated flâneur or urban stroller, the authors suggest that pervasive forms of gaming and play occupy a similar liminal space and are grounded in questions of urban functionality. Similarly, the urban space may become a gallery or canvas, a space that may be subject to curatorship that is not bound to institutional bodies. The organisation and experience of urban environments then becomes deeply involved in a contested ownership and questions of functionality that are at the heart of urban play.Within the context of Australia, the struggle over the legitimacy of both street art and video games has been subject to ongoing legal discourses. The liminal relationship between gaming and street art is perhaps best illustrated by the 2006 game Marc Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure. The game was granted an MA15+ rating under the existing model of video game regulation but was later refused classification due to its depiction of antisocial behaviour. The game’s rating was appealed by the Queensland Local Government Association. Apperley (“Video”) provides further details on this issue, situating the legislative decision within the historical and political context of Australia at the time, and offering insight into the means in which Getting Up represented street art as a legitimate art form. The game’s narrative, a dystopian future where graffiti is mobilised as a form of social protest against authoritarian bodies, is similar to that of the 2002 game Jet Set Radio Future. However, unlike Jet Set, Getting Up was grounded in a detailed representation of graffiti subcultures. Getting Up’s refused classification is symbolic of the later Australian landscape in which video games and street art occupy a liminal space between art form and artistic practice. The key issue, that of antisocial behaviour, links to the notion of cultural norms and the functionality, organisation, and representations within urban spaces and, moreover, within spaces of play. This struggle for legitimacy is key to understanding the relationship between street art and urban play. Despite the struggle to overcome the functionality of urban environments, street art retains levels of value as a form of cultural heritage. Both Merrill and MacDowall discuss the cultural functions of graffiti and street art, focusing on what Merrill terms a turn towards “post-graffiti”—a shift from the historical and cultural roots of street art and the practice of tagging (373). Such a turn is exemplified by an increased public interest: a legitimisation of artistic practices. Perhaps the most notable figure of such a shift is the Bristol artist Banksy, who is most famous for stencil based art. Graffiti and street art have arguably moved beyond their function as a subversive and subcultural movement, occupying a more legitimate space within urban environments and general public discourse. Within the context of Ingress, street art holds the potential to exist as a digital node of equal value to historical plaques, public libraries, or large commissioned public artworks. This shift, argues Merrill (385) allows for street art and graffiti to be viewed as a form of alternative heritage to urban environments and cultural movements within specific locations. For MacDowell (476), graffiti may be viewed as a form of folk art, subject to new-found romanticism within the context of this “post-graffiti” turn. That is, as a form of alternative heritage, graffiti and street art signify historically situated sociocultural movements and the roots of the practice itself. Games such as Ingress, then, not only legitimate street art as a form of cultural heritage via their inclusion in a non-hierarchical network alongside longstanding institutionalised buildings and artworks but also allow players to participate in an archiving of street art through interactive cartography. The practice of playing Ingress, then, is not only a means of viewing and exploring existing street art but also a direct process in achieving and curating historically situated works of art. Fig. 2: Portal information illustrating possible actions, portal level, and resonator information. Urban Play and “the New Curatorship”Having considered the role of graffiti or street art within urban play as a form of cultural heritage, as a means of linking to the roots of the practice itself and signifying a struggle over the urban environment as a space of predetermined functions, the question then is: what role does the practice of curatorship have within this mesh of interconnected practices? For Bennett and Beudel, the work of the curator, as a caretaker of cultural heritage, is often institutionalised. Within the context of the city, such institutionalisation is itself a symptom of the city as a spectacle. The authors argue that there is the potential for art to be present on a range of surfaces within the urban environment, and call into question the role of the curator within this process.As Groys notes, since Duchamp, the ontological division between the labour of making art and displaying art has collapsed. Public urban spaces, as designed spaces regulated by institutional bodies, are subject to the changing practice of audiences. That is, those who inhabit and experience the urban environment itself now have the possibility to participate or subvert traditional curatorial structures. Drawing on the etymology of the word “curate” as related to “cure,” Groys (53) suggests that the exhibition practice is thus a cure to the powerlessness of the image—a contextualisation of the image within new institutionalised frameworks for a viewing public. Who, then, in the network of relations that is urban play, constitutes this public? Ingress players function as one faction of a public who view, inhabit, move through, and experience the urban environment and any subsequent street art within. As such, they have the potential to take on a curatorial role within the organisation of street art—recontextualising such artworks and generating a new shared understanding of the sociocultural and material conditions which contribute to a broad understanding of the urban and urban play. As such, these forms of digitally mediated urban play blur boundaries between production, consumption, and play. Players, regardless of whether they had a hand in submitting portals to the game’s developers, are articulating a collectively organised database of public art. The practice of curation, as described by Potter, is essential for contemporary digital gaming practices. Players are constantly participating in transmedia landscapes, articulating their literacies through the practice of arranging, assembling, cataloguing, collecting, distributing, and disassembling digital media (Apperley “Glitch” 240; Potter 175). Within Apperley’s example of Minecraft, play unites creativity and the curatorial as one activity. Within the context of Ingress, the practice of play brings together the practice of cartography and of the curatorial. Players, as individuals and as larger localised or global factions, participate in a global mapping of material space, expanding Google’s already extensive collection of cartographic data. Players are more concerned with exploring and territorialising within the context of local spaces, at the level of the national or regional. Such practices are an articulation of localised bodies of knowledge and often of local histories and contexts. Street art forms an integral part of this sociocultural and material fabric which underscores the practice of play. Thus, urban spaces are not subject to a transformative process, but rather to a collective curatorship whereby street art, and its embedded cultural heritage, form a key foundation of how play is performed within urban environments. Through the practice of arranging, assembling, cataloguing, collecting, distributing, and disassembling, the practices of urban play may be thought of as what Potter terms “new curatorship.” Potter’s notion of curatorship is grounded in the identity formation of young children through their use of social media and articulation of digital literacy practices. With playful urban practices such as Ingress, this practice is an articulation of urban literacies: of understanding the rich cultural heritage of specific locations, and of constituting the player’s identity as tied to these specific locations. Players no longer perform merely as an audience for existing forms of urban or street art. Alongside the technological infrastructures put in place by the game’s developers, Niantic Labs and Google, players may be viewed as actively participating in a curatorial process. Players, in their articulation of complex systems and archives of street art, through the ability to constantly update, document, and construct urban narratives with street art at their core, may be viewed as co-curating urban environments. Working together with developers, street artists, and urban planners, players are constantly re-developing and sharing a new shared understanding of urban environments and the complex network of relations which constitutes the urban environment and the practice of urban play.Fig. 3: Players may vote on and contribute new photographs to maintain accurate records of art.Conclusion To play Ingress is to participate in a situated practice of play. Here, play is grounded in material and sociocultural circumstance, with street art and graffiti representing just one of many practices which inform contemporary urban play. Within the context of Ingress, street art is played with as an object within the game (a portal), but it also occupies a similar liminal space. Both urban games and street art have been subject to ongoing debates about the functionality of urban spaces and appropriate behaviour within these spaces. Ingress also taps into street art as a form of cultural heritage; it represents shifts in power dynamics, local histories, and a range of other significant local histories. To play with street art is to acknowledge its roots, both on an international and local level. With the ability to digitally archive these histories and locations, as well as engage in the cartographic practice of urban play, Ingress players can thus be thought of as curators of the city. Through the lens of new curatorship, urban play can be thought of as a form of re-reading of urban environments, as a process of exhibiting a new-found shared understanding of specific locations and public artworks. Street art and graffiti are just one of many sociocultural and material circumstances which inform the practice of urban play. During play, there is a critical reflection on the role street art has, not only during the current context of play but also more broadly as a key component of contemporary urban landscapes. Street art functions as a form of cultural heritage, as an element of urban exploration, and as a point of reference for navigating city spaces. Ingress brings together these interrelated forms of organising and sharing experiences of urban environments, through the practice of curation. Such practices are reflexively intertwined with playing urban mobile games as such Ingress. As such, the act of playing Ingress is, in essence, a form of urban literacy, as a practice of understanding the rich and complex sociocultural conditions which contribute to our understanding of urban environments. It is a practice of collecting, assembling, and exhibiting a range of locations. The practice of playing Ingress is a collective curation of city spaces on a global scale.References Apperley, Thomas. “Glitch Sorting: Minecraft, Curation, and the Post Digital.” Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation and Design. Ed. David M. Berry and Michael Dieter. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 232–44.———. “Video Games in Australia.” The Video Game Explosion: A History from PONG to Playstation and Beyond. Ed. Mark J.P. Wolf. USA: Greenwood P, 2008. 22–29.———. Gaming Rhythms: Play and Counterplay from the Situated to the Global. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2009.Bennett, Jill, and Saskia Beudel. Curating Sydney: Imagining the City’s Future. Sydney: UNSW P, 2014.De Souza e Silva, Adriana, and Larissa Hjorth. “Playful Urban Spaces: A Historical Approach to Mobile Games.” Simulation & Gaming 40.5 (2009): 602–25. Dourish, Paul. “What We Talk about When We Talk about Context.” Personal Ubiquitous Computing 8.1 (2004): 19–30.Flanagan, Mary. Critical Play: Radical Game Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2009.———. “Locating Play and Politics: Real World Games & Activism.” Leonardo Electronic Almanac 16.2–3 (2008). 5 June 2015 ‹http://www.leonardo.info/LEA/perthDAC/MFlanagan_LEA160203.pdf›.Groys, Boris. Going Public. Ed. Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton Vidokle. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010.Google. “Candidate Portal Criteria.” 2015. 5 June 2015 ‹https://support.google.com/ingress/answer/3066197?hl=en›. ———. “New Portal Submissions.” 2015. 5 June 2015 ‹https://support.google.com/ingress/answer/2808254?hl=en›. Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.MacDowall, Lachlan. “In Praise of 70K: Cultural Heritage and Graffiti Style.” Continuum 20.4 (2006): 471–84.Merrill, Samuel. “Keeping It Real? Subcultural Graffiti, Street Art, Heritage and Authenticity.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 21.4 (2015): 369–89.Niantic Labs. Ingress. Android Mobile Application. 2012.Potter, John. Digital Media and Learner Identity: The New Curatorship. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.Stenros, Jaakko, Markus Montola, and Frans Mäyrä. “Pervasive Games in Media Culture.” Pervasive Games: Theory and Design. Eds. Markus Montola, Jakko Stenros, and Annika Waern. Amsterdam: CRC P, 2009.Stevens, Quentin. The Ludic City: Exploring the Potential of Public Spaces. New York: Routledge, 2007.Suchman, Lucy. Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006.———. Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.Yates, Simeon J., and Karen Littleton. “Understanding Computer Game Cultures: A Situated Approach.” Information, Communication & Society 2.4 (1999): 566–83.
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Ashton, Daniel, und Martin Couzins. „Content Curators as Cultural Intermediaries: “My reputation as a curator is based on what I curate, right?”“. M/C Journal 18, Nr. 4 (11.08.2015). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1005.

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In 2011 The Economist alerted us to the claim that “digital data will flood the planet.” The exponential increase in data such as e-mails, Tweets and Instagram pictures underpins claims that we are living in an age of ‘infoglut’ (Andrejevic) and information superabundance (Internet Live Stats). Several years earlier, Shirky posed this as an issue not of “information overload” but of “filter failure” (Asay). Shirky’s claim suggests that we should not despair in the face of unmanageable volumes of content, but develop ways to make sense of this information – to curate. Reflecting on his experiences of curating the Meltdown Festival, David Byrne addressed the emergence of everyday curating practices: “Nowadays, everything and everyone can be curated. There are curators of socks, menus and dirt bike trails […] Anyone who has come up with a top-ten list is, in effect, a curator. And anyone who clicks ‘Like’ is a curator.” Byrne’s comments on socks and top ten lists captures how curating can be personal. In their discussion of curating as a new literacy practice, Potter and Gilje highlight how “as well as the institutional and professional contexts for such work through the centuries and across cultures, many people have made personal collections of texts and artefacts that have stood for them in the world” (123). The emergence of easily, and often freely, available content curating tools is linked to practices of accessible curating (Good). There has been a proliferation of content curating platforms and tools. Notwithstanding that accessibility and everyday usage are often the hallmark of content curating (for example, see Villi on social curating and user-distributed content), this article specifically focuses on content curating as a service. Defining the content curator as “someone who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online”, Bhargava in 2009 described content curating as the next big social media job of the future. Popova stresses the importance of authorship and approaching curating as a “form of creative labor in and of itself” and identifies content curators as “human sense-makers” in a culture of “information overload”. By addressing curating ‘content for others’ rather than other curatorship practices such as ‘content for me’ and ‘content about me’, we aim to offer insights into the professional and commercial practices of content curating. Through connecting autoethnographic research with academic literature on the concept of ‘cultural intermediaries’, we identify two ways of understanding professional content curating - connected cultural intermediation, and curating literacies. Researching Content Curators as Creative Labour In his introduction to Curation Nation, Rosenbaum suggests that there is “both amateur and professional curation, and the emergence of amateur or prosumer curators isn’t in any way a threat to professionals” (3). Likewise, we do not see a threat or tension between amateur and professional curating. We are, though keen to address ‘professional’ strategic content curating for an intended audience as a notable difference and departure. To generate detailed insights into the role of the professional content curator we employed an autoethnographic approach. Holt’s review of the literature and his own experiences of autoethnography provide a helpful overview: “autoethnography is a genre of writing and research that connects the personal to the cultural, placing the self within a social context” (2). Specifically, we focus on Couzins’ personal experiences of content curating, his professional practices and his ‘cultural milieu’ (Reed-Danahay). Couzins was a business-to-business journalist for 17 years before starting a content and communications agency that: helps organisations tell their story through curated and created stories; runs a media brand for corporate learning, which features curated content and a weekly curated e-mail; designs and delivers massive open online courses on the Curatr platform (a social learning platform designed for curating content). The research and writing process for our analysis was informed by Anderson’s approach to analytical autoethnography, and from this we stress that Couzins is a full member of the research setting. Our focus on his experiences also resonates with the use of first-hand narratives in media industries research (Holt and Perren). Following preliminary exchanges, including collaborative note taking and face-to-face conversations, Ashton created an interview schedule that was then reviewed and revised with Couzins. This schedule was used as the basis for a semi-structured interview of around 90 minutes. Both authors transcribed and coded the interview data. Through thematic analysis we identified and agreed on five codes: industry developments and business models; relationships with technologies; identifying and sharing information sources; curating literacies; expertise and working with/for clients. This research paper was then co-written. As a conversation with only two participants, our account runs up against the widely stated concern associated with autoethnography of observing too few cultural members and not spending enough time with others (Coffey; Ellis, Adams and Bochner). However, we would argue that the processes of dyadic interviewing underpinned by self-analysis provides accessible and “useful stories” (Ellis, Adams and Bochner). Specifically, Anderson’s five features helped to guide our research and writing from documenting personal experience and providing insider perspectives, to broader generalisation and “theoretical development, refinement, and extension” (387). Indeed, we see this research as complementing and contributing to the large scale survey research undertaken by Liu providing excerpts on how “technology bloggers and other professionals explain the value of curating in a networked world” (20). The major theme emerging from the interview exchange, perhaps not unexpectedly, is how professional content curating revolves around making sense of specific materials. In acting as a bridge between the content and publications of some and its reception by others, literature on cultural intermediaries was identified as a helpful conceptual pointer. The relevance of this concept and literature for exploring professional content curators is illuminated by Smith-Maguire and Matthews’ comments that “cultural intermediaries impact upon notions of what, and thereby who, is legitimate, desirable and worthy, and thus by definition what and who is not” (552). The process of curating content necessarily involves judgements on what is deemed to be desirable and worthy for clients. Scholarship on cultural intermediaries was explicitly explored in the interview and co-writing stages, and the following covers some of the meeting points between our research and this concept. Content Curators as Cultural Intermediaries: Taste, Expertise and Value The concept of cultural intermediaries has been explored by academics in relation to a range of industries. This paper does not necessarily seek to add content curators to the expanding list of occupations analysed through the cultural intermediaries’ lens. There are though a range of questions and prompts from studies on cultural intermediaries helpful for understanding the ways in which content is made sense of and circulated. Smith-Maguire and Matthews’s 2012 article ‘Are We All Cultural Intermediaries Now?’ is particularly helpful for connecting content curating with debates on cultural intermediaries. They consider how cultural intermediaries “effect other’s orientation” (552), and the question they pose is directly relevant for thinking through distinctions in curating ‘for/about me’ and ‘for others’. The following statement by Couzins on a client relationship with a private membership network provides a useful account of what the job of content curating involves: Each week I curate a set of articles or videos on hot topics that have been identified by network members. Once I have identified suitable content I upload links to their website, including a reading time and a short summary. These two elements serve to help members decide whether or not to read it and when to read it. For example, if they have a short train journey they might have time to read a ten-minute article. All articles are tagged so that the curated links become a deeper resource over time and members are alerted by e-mail each week when new links have been published. The reference to “suitable content” highlights how the curator can shape a narrative by intentionally deciding what to keep in and what to leave out. Beyond this choice of what the client is directed to, there is also the importance of the “short summary” and thus how this curated content is packaged and made sense of by the curator for the client. McFall, in her contribution to the Cultural Intermediaries Reader, offers a specific lens for examining the distinctive filtering practice of content curators as acts of ‘economization’. McFall outlines how economization “involves the work of ‘qualifying’ behaviours, organizations and institutions as economic. This is positioned in contrast to the idea that there is some kind of mystery “x-factor” which defines things as inherently economic” (46). McFall explains how “things are rendered (i.e. they become) economic through the actions of producers, governments, research organisations, media, consumers, and so forth. Economization allows for the ways things may, throughout their life cycle, move in and out of being economic” (46). Whilst McFall’s comments recognise how things may be rendered economic through, for example, a ‘top ten list’, we want to specifically examine what this rendering looks like with the ‘professional’ content curator. The act of filtering is one of rendering, and the content that is curated and shared (whether it be articles, videos, links, etc.) becomes economic within this specific context. Whilst there are many organisations that would provide the regular service of producing curated content, two distinctive approaches were revealed in our exchange. The first approach we identify concerns content curating as connected cultural intermediation, and the second approach we identify concerns facilitating curating literacies and co-creation with clients. Connected Cultural Intermediation Connected cultural intermediation refers to how content curators can connect with their own clients and with producers of content. As the following explores, these connections are built around being explicit and open about the content that curators identify and how they filter it. Being open with producers of content was important as these connections could lead to future opportunities for Couzins to identify content for his clients. Couzins addresses the connections he makes in terms of transparency, stating: “you just need to have some more transparency around you as the curator, like who you are, who you represent, why you are doing it, and the scope of what you are looking at.” Part of this involves identifying his impact and influences as a taste-shaper. Couzins remarks, “I'm creating a story […] but my point of view will be based on my interest in what I bring to the curating process.” Transparency was further presented as a part of the process in which judgements and validations are made: “My reputation as a curator is based on what I curate, right? So therefore it has to be as sound as it can be, and I try to be as dispassionate as I can be about this.” These comments capture how transparency is integral for how Couzins establishes his reputation as a content curator. Couzins promotes transparency in content usage by alerting content producers to where content is curated: I also share on Twitter, so they [producers] know it's been shared because they are included in the retweets, for example. I would tell some people that I've linked to their stuff as well, and sometimes I would also say "Thank you," to so and so for linking to that. It's like thanking my supply chain, if you like. Because it's a network. The act of retweeting also operates as a means to develop connections with producers of content. As well as indicating to producers that content is being used, Couzins’ reference to the “supply chain” indicates the importance he invests in establishing connections and the wide circulation of curated content. One approach to content curating as a commercial practice could be to limit access and create a “pay wall” style scenario in which the curated content can only be accessed after a payment. Curated materials could be sent directly to e-mail or uploaded to private websites. For Couzins however, it is access to the flows of content and the connections with others that underpin and enable his content curating commercial practice. It is important for Couzins that curated content is available to the producers, clients and more publicly through his free-to-access website and Twitter feed. The earlier reference to reputation as a curator in part concerned being dispassionate and enabling verification through open and explicit acknowledgements and links. This comment also addresses generating a reputation for “sound” information. The following comments pick this up and point to the need for engaging with different sources: “I have got my own bubble that I operate in, and it's really challenging to get out of that bubble, bring new stuff in, or review what's in there. I find myself sharing stuff quite a lot from certain places, sometimes. You've got to work at that. It's hard.” Working hard to escape from the bubble was part of Couzins’ work to build his reputation. Acknowledging producers is both a way for Couzins to promote transparency around his filtering and a way to foster new sources of content to escape the bubble: “I do build some relationships with some of the producers, because I get to know them, and I thank them, and I say, ‘That's really good,’ so I have a lot of relationships with people just through their content. But it's not a commercial relationship.” Whilst Couzins suggests there may not be a commercial relationship with the producers of content, economic significance can be seen in two ways. Firstly, moving outside of the ‘bubble’ can help the content curator make more diverse contributions and establish a reputation for this. Secondly, these connections can be of benefit to content producers as their material further circulates. Whilst there is no payment to the content producer, Couzins directs this curated content to clients and does not restrict wider public access to it in this curated form. McFall’s comments on economization stress the role of cultural intermediaries in the life cycle of how things “move in and out of being economic.” With content curating there is a ‘rendering’ of content that sees it become significant in new contexts. Here, the obvious relationship may be between Couzins and his clients. The references to transparent relationships and thanking the ‘supply chain’ show that relationships with content producers are also crucial and that the content curator needs to be continually connecting. Curating Literacies and Co-Creation In the earlier discussion of cultural intermediaries we addressed framing and how judgements can shape legitimacy, desirability and worth. With the content curating cultural intermediary practices under discussion here, a different perspective is possible in which subject specialist knowledge and expertise may not necessarily be the primary driver behind clients’ needs. The role of the content curator as cultural intermediary here is still in the rendering of content. However, it does not specifically involve the selecting content but guiding others in the framing and circulation of content. Where the concern of the client is finding appropriate ways to share the materials that they identify, then the content curator may not need subject-specialist knowledge. Here the interest in the content curating service is on the curating processes and practices, rather than content knowledge. Couzins’ account revealed that in some cases the intermediary’s role is not about the selection of material, but in the framing of material already selected by clients for wider engagement: “People internally will decide what to share and tell you why it’s worth looking at. Basically, it’s making them look like they know what they’re talking about, building their credibility.” The content curator role here does not concern selecting content, but offering guidance on how to frame it. As such, there remains a crucial “rendering” role in which the content selected by clients becomes meaningful through the guidance and input of the professional content curator. Our interview exchange also identified another scenario of relationships in which the content curator has little involvement in either selecting or framing content. Part of the commercial activity explored in our interview included supporting staff within a client’s company to showcase their expertise and knowledge through both selecting and framing content. Specifically, as Couzins outlines, this could be undertaken as a bespoke face-to-face service with in-house training: I helped one client put a curation tool into their website enabling them to become the curators. I spent a lot of time talking to them about curation and their role as curators. We split curation into topics of interest – based on the client’s area of expertise - which would be useful both internally for personal/professional development and externally for business development by sharing content relevant for their customers. In this respect, the service provided by the content curator involves the sharing of their own curatorial expertise with clients in order that clients may undertake their own curatorial practice. There is for the client a similar concern with enhancing their social reputation and profile, but this approach stresses the expertise of clients in identifying and responding to their own content curating needs. In part this emphasis on the client’s selection of material is about the challenges of establishing and maintaining legitimacy as a content curator across several fields: “You can't begin to say you're an expert when you are not, because you'll be found out.” More than this though, it was an approach to content curating literacy. As Couzins state, “my view is that if people with the domain expertise have an interest in doing this […] then they should be doing it themselves. If you gave it to me I hold the keys to all your knowledge. Why would you want that?” The content curator and client exchange here is not restricted to gathering interests and then providing content. This scenario sees content curating as accessible, but also sees the curator in their continued role as cultural intermediary--where expertise is about mediation more than content. Returning to McFall’s comments on rendering as how things “move in and out of being economic”, our second understanding of content curating intermediaries directs attention away from what the things/content are to instead how those things move. Conclusion Set within debates and transformations around content and information abundance and filtering, this paper explored how the practices of filtering, finding, and sharing at the heart of content curating have much in common with the work of cultural intermediaries. Specifically, this paper identified two ways of understanding commercial content curating. Firstly, content curating involves the rendering of content, and the ability to succeed here relies on developing connections outside the curator-client dynamic. Secondly, professional content curators can approach their relationships with clients as one of facilitation in which the expertise of the content curating cultural intermediary does not rest with the content, but on the curating and the intermediating. References Anderson, Leon. “Analytical Autoethnography.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 35.4 (2006): 373-395. Andrejevic, Mark. Infoglut: How Too Much Information Is Changing the Way We Think and Know. London: Routledge, 2013. Asay, Matt. “Problem Is Filter Failure, Not Info Overload.” CNet Jan. 2009. 1 Jun. 2015 ‹http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/shirky-problem-is-filter-failure-not-info-overload/›. Bhargava, Rohit. “Manifesto for the Content Curator: The Next Big Social Media Job of the Future?” 2009. 2 June 2015. ‹http://rohitbhargava.typepad.com/weblog/2009/09/manifestoDforDtheDcontentDcuratorD theDnextDbigDsocialDmediaDjobDofDtheDfutureD.html›. Byrne, David. “David Byrne: A Great Curator Beats Any Big Company’s Algorithm.” New Statesman June 2015. 8 June 2015. ‹http://www.newstatesman.com/2015/05/man-versus-algorithm›. Coffey, Paul. The Ethnographic Self. London: Sage, 1999. The Economist. “Drowning in Numbers.” 2011. 4 June 2015 ‹http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/11/big-data-0›. Ellis, Carolyn, Adams, Tony E. and Bochner, Arthur P. “Autoethnography: An Overview.” Forum: Qualitative Social Research 12.1 (2011). Good, Robin. “Content Curation Tools Supermap.” Pearl Trees Apr. 2015. 4 June 2015 ‹http://www.pearltrees.com/robingood/content-curating-supermap/id5947231›. Holt, Jennifer, and Alisa Perren. “Introduction: Does the World Really Need One More Field of Study?” Media Industries: History, Theory, and Methods. Eds. Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. 1-16. Holt, Nicholas, L. “Representation, Legitimation, and Autoethnography: An Autoethnographic Writing Story.” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 2.1 (2003): 1-22. Internet Live Stats. 5 June 2015 ‹http://www.internetlivestats.com/one-second/›. Krysa, Joasia. Curating Immateriality: The Work of the Curator in the Age of Network Systems. New York: Autonomedia, 2006. Liu, Sophia B. “Trends in Distributed Curatorial Technology to Manage Data Deluge in a Networked World.” Upgrade: The European Journal for the Informatics Professional 11.4 (2010): 18-24. Matthews, Julian, and Jennifer Smith-Maguire. “Introduction: Thinking with Cultural Intermediaries.” The Cultural Intermediaries Reader. Eds. Julian Matthews and Jennifer Smith-Maguire. London: Sage, 2014. 1-11. McFall, Liz. “The Problem of Cultural Intermediaries in the Economy of Qualities.” The Cultural Intermediaries Reader. Eds. Julian Matthews and Jennifer Smith-Maguire. London: Sage, 2014. 42-51. Popova, Maria. “In a New World of Informational Abundance, Content Curation Is a New Kind of Authorship.” Nieman Lab June 2011. 6 Jun 2015 ‹http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/06/maria-popova-in-a-new-world-of-informational-abundance-content-curation-is-a-new-kind-of-authorship/›. Potter, John, and Øystein Gilje. “Curatorship as a New Literacy Practice.” E-Learning and Digital Media 12.2 (2015): 123-127. Reed-Danahay, Deborah. Auto/Ethnography. New York: Berg, 1997. Rosenbaum, Steve. Curating Nation: How to Win in a World Where Consumers Are Creators. New York: McGraw-Hill Professional, 2011. Smith-Maguire, Jennifer, and Julian Matthews. “Are We All Cultural Intermediaries Now?” European Journal of Cultural Studies 15.5 (2012): 551-562. Sun, Will. “Introducing LinkedIn Elevate: Helping Companies Empower Their Employees to Share Content.” Apr. 2015. 29 May 2015 ‹http://blog.linkedin.com/2015/04/13/elevate/›. 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Rodriguez, Aleesha, und Amanda Levido. „“My Little Influencer”“. M/C Journal 26, Nr. 2 (25.04.2023). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2948.

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Introduction Wooden toys have been a staple in many family homes. Even LEGO's iconic plastic building blocks had humble beginnings as wooden toys (Lauwaert). Arguably, the materiality of wooden toys evokes normative feelings of nostalgia for a simpler past, where the uncomplicated nature of the wooden product provided the space for all sorts of imaginative play. It is through this lens that we find the adaptation of wooden toys into playsets that emulate particular vocations, like a doctor's kit and a carpenter's toolbox, an interesting entry point to consider the boundary of what is an acceptable toy within the contemporary wooden toy genre. And it is the blurry nature of this boundary, as exemplified by public outcry regarding a wooden vlogger set that had a ringlight, which is the subject of this article. In Australia in May 2022, global supermarket chain Aldi released a set of wooden toys for children aged 3+ based on various technologies used in contemporary jobs in the creative industries (Wannis). These ‘futuristic’ role-play toy sets (Kanna)—which sat alongside more ‘traditional’ vocation sets about transport, cooking, and manufacturing—included a wooden laptop set, a DJ set, and a vlogger set. The vlogger set came with a rope-like ringlight on a tripod, a wooden point-and-shoot camera, mobile phone device, and remote microphone with a receiver (see fig. 1 & 2). The wooden vlogger set replicates the real-life experience of using a ringlight, a round, donut-like light that often attaches to a recording device or a tripod to create an even lighting effect. The ringlight has become a symbol of content creation on social media and the Influencer industry—a cultural practice and line of work that often evokes negative connotations (Abidin, "Aren’t These"). And we see these negative connotations evidenced through an instance of public criticism on social media about the wooden vlogger set, which stands as a proxy for more significant concerns about children and digital media. Fig. 1 & 2: Outer box of wooden vlogger set, sold at Aldi in May 2022. (Photo by authors.) First shared as a story on Instagram by a private account, a follower and journalist then re-shared an image of the box for the wooden vlogger set to Twitter with the caption ‘it’s a no for me’. Many public comments under this tweet agreed with the original poster’s sentiment, calling the toy ‘exploitative’ and ‘dire’, exclaiming ‘wtf [what the fuck]’ and ‘absolutely not’. Other comments mocked the toy by joking ‘like and subscribe’ and rebranded it as ‘my little influencer’; a take on the popular 1980s toy series My Little Pony. This public opposition to the wooden vlogger set stands out as an interesting case study to interrogate how the convergence of wooden toys with contemporary technologies (re)surfaces moral panic regarding children and digital media. The wooden vlogger set, and specifically the symbolism of the toy ringlight, forms the basis of a case study into how digital technologies provoke moral panic about children’s (future) media practices. We highlight in this article that while moral panic about young people and their relationship with new media is a longstanding practice, the development of new media technologies—including the ringlight which is used to aid digital media production—evokes what Marwick calls technopanic, that is, exaggerated fears about young people's online practices which result in the denial or removal of access to said technologies. While we take the stance that content creation on social media is a valid and valuable practice, in this article we highlight how toys like the wooden vlogger set continue to be met with trepidation from some adults due to their connections with taking selfies and the Influencer industry on social media—as evidenced by the social media comments mentioned above. Furthermore, we argue in this article that these technopanics, evidenced by the public outcry on social media to the wooden vlogger set, obscure the opportunity that toys that replicate digital media technologies can afford, such as developing media literacy through playful, offline, and analogue ways. In the first section of the article, we argue that the toy ringlight acts as a proxy for media practices that endorses young children spending time online in ways that some consider problematic. We argue that these fears are an illustration of technopanic. In the second section of the article, we argue how the toy ringlight offers children a way to connect with imagined futures (and the present) by mimicking the everyday media practices they see elsewhere—through their families, media consumption, and popular culture. Studies have shown how children’s play can sometimes be based on popular culture, including television programs (Marsh and Bishop). We argue that as children today watch content creators on YouTube Kids and their parents use technology, they are learning about everyday media practices. The wooden vlogger set offers a way for children to explore those practices. We conclude the article by advocating that opposition to the wooden vlogger set is misdirected energy, as the critical skills of media literacy can be nurtured precisely through play with toys like the ringlight and wooden vlogger set. Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Children! The public outcry over this wooden vlogger set is another example of moral panic regarding children and their participation with the media. Moral panic is defined as an overreaction to a perceived social problem; they are often temporal, in the sense of being short-lived, and the media are known as a driving factor that reproduces and compounds the supposed concerns (Critcher; Hall). Historical illustrations of moral panics are known to involve youths and youth culture with the example of ‘mod and rockers’ in the 1960s (Cohen), ‘youth gangs’ in the 1980s (Zatz), and more recently, the ‘Tide-Pod Challenge’ that conjured panic about youths eating dishwashing pods for clout on social media (Sleight-Price et al.). By framing public opposition to the wooden vlogger set as an example of moral panic, we aim to draw attention to the media ecology which this toy signifies, and critically unpack the ways in which it plays into longstanding concerns about children and new media. To critically examine the moral panic about the vlogger set, we first draw attention to the vocation imitated through the wooden toy: a vlogger. The term ‘vlogger’ stands for ‘video-blogger’, a dominant form of user-created content shared on social media platforms like YouTube, that centres on recording the ‘ordinary’ aspects of one's life (Burgess and Green). It is important to underscore that engaging in practices of vlogging does not inherently mean that this is one's vocation, as a person can vlog as a hobby or creative outlet. But the more contemporary term associated with being a vlogger, that is, an ‘Influencer’, muddles the conception of what it means to vlog due to the increasing platformisation of cultural production (Duffy et al.). An Influencer is an ordinary Internet user who has accumulated “a relatively large following on blogs and social media through the textual and visual narration of their personal lives and lifestyles” who then “monetise their following by integrating advertorials into their blog or social media posts” (Abidin, "Aren’t These" 3). Advertorials—a term that combines ‘advertising’ and ‘editorial’—are the “highly personalised, opinion-laden promotions of products/services that Influencers personally experience and endorse for a fee” (Abidin, "Micro­microcelebrity" par. 3). The increasing commercialisation of content creation on digital media platforms has been met with criticism regarding the erosion of authenticity (Arriagada and Bishop). This is because Influencers are seen to adapt their media practices, and arguably part of themselves, to fit the logics of the platform, such as producing particular types of content to increase views, like taking ‘selfies’. One of the key signifiers of vlogging or being an Influencer on social media is ‘the selfie’, a self-made image of oneself, for which the ringlight plays a central role. Ringlights are used “to take brighter, clearer, high-resolution photographs” or videos, wherein the “even” lighting avoids casting “unsightly shadows” on faces and bodies (Abidin, "Aren’t These" 12). It is this utility of the ringlight that evokes conceptions that dismiss posting selfies as “frivolous and self-absorbed” (Tiidenberg and Gómez Cruz 78). Selfies have been argued as promoting “negative feminine stereotypes” such as “feminine vanity and triviality” as they are seen to be performative of particular conceptions around beauty (Burns 1716-1718). As such, Abidin argues in “‘Aren’t These Just Young, Rich Women Doing Vain Things Online?’: Influencer Selfies as Subversive Frivolity”, drawing on the work of Dobson and Coffey, that selfies anchor moral panics over the safety and wellbeing, particularly of women, online. Again, while we take the stance that no value judgement ought to be cast towards the use of ringlights in touching up appearances, as lighting is often used as a tool in both everyday and commercial media production, we argue that the toy ringlight brings forth these anxieties around vanity for some adults. The toy ringlight manifests these grievances about Influencers and, specifically, child influencers. Controversy about child influencers or ‘kidfluencers’ continues to fuel debate about the presence and exploitation of children in online media entertainment. A media practice known as “sharenting”, where parents share footage of their children as they grow up online (Blum-Rose), means that children can amass large followings on social media and become “micro-microcelebrities” (Abidin, "Micromicrocelebrity"). Notably, one of the public comments in opposition to the wooden vlogger set situated their grievance in the fact that the toy is designed for children aged 3+; as though the toy advocates for the notion of kidinfluencers—a prospect framed in the comment as inherently problematic. While the existence of kidfluencers is complex in nature—as both rewarding and challenging outcomes surmount from the practice—concerns about children’s privacy and online exploitation experiences dominate the issue. The problematic nature of child influencers is exemplified through notorious cases such as YouTube channel DaddyOFive, where the children’s reactions to ‘pranks’ were exploited for views (Leaver and Abidin). And issues regarding children promoting products or services online are raised through examples such as child unboxing videos on YouTube (Craig and Cunningham). Concerns regarding child influencers understandably call for greater consideration of how children participate with online media practices. It is essential to critically examine exploitative commercialisation practices and champion children’s right to privacy (Livingstone et al.; Verdoodt et al.). At the same time, it is important to remember that not all media produced by children, or by parents with children, are inherently harmful. The notion that children have this innate innocence that needs protection from the media is an established trope known to spur moral panic. Panic around mass media and their ‘bad’ influence on youth and youth culture, including children, is not a new phenomenon (Springhall). For example, media theorist Neil Postman famously argued in the 1980s that the “new media environment, with television at its centre, is leading to the rapid disappearance of childhood” (286). It is an argument that suggests that children’s increasingly mediated lives through communication technologies ‘force’ them to live in an ‘adult’s world’; thus eroding their childhood. We argue that the toy ringlight in the wooden vlogger set stimulates this same type of thinking, as though playing with the toy will ‘force’ children into the ‘adult world’ of social media production—which is not exclusively true. Through this lens, we also extend our argument that the opposition to the toy is not only a moral panic but, specifically, a technopanic. Panics occur when adults begin to be excluded from the ways young people engage with the media (Leick). The toy ringlight—as a proxy to ‘unsavoury’ new media practices—thus taps into a generational concern. A concept that helps explain this phenomenon is what Marwick calls a technopanic. Technopanics relies on the idea that harm will come to children through the use of new media technologies, and thus a justification is made to restrict access. In this way, the potential benefits of engaging with new media technologies, like the toy ringlight, are ignored in favour of focussing on the negative and exaggerated harms the media cause (Buckingham). This opposition fails to recognise that as technologies and media practices emerge, there are new risks but also new opportunities for children (Livingstone). Developing Media Literacy through the Toy Ringlight Ringlights are now prolific, not only among Influencers or those involved in social media production. Interest in ringlights has grown considerably since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, with searches for the term rising dramatically in March 2020 (Google Trend for ‘Ring Light’). Although the toy ringlight in the wooden vlogger set is not digital, in that there are no electronic components and it does not connect to any networks, there are opportunities for the toy to help children develop digital media literacy understandings from an early age through playful exploration. Above, we have discussed how adults perceive the toy ringlight and how it mirrors the everyday and commercial media practices of adults, which can be confronting for some. Here, we examine how children could explore the toy ringlight through play. Children learn about technology through everyday familial practices (Plowman and Stevenson). Those children without access to a ringlight in their everyday life will likely treat the toy differently from what the toy creators anticipated. However, children who share technology practices with their families (e.g. seeing parents use a ringlight for Zoom meetings) or learn these through popular culture (e.g. seeing ringlights used by their favourite content creators on YouTube Kids) will have a different set of practices more closely aligned to the intended use of a toy ringlight to play and experiment with. Ringlights are part of the fabric of everyday life for many people and their use is not inherently positive or negative. Instead, they contribute to our increasingly complex media practices. Toys and everyday tools provided across different aspects of children’s lives offer ways to engage with and transfer knowledge of cultural and everyday experiences (Sheina et al.). The ringlight as an object can provide opportunities for children to play with the material practices of media production in ways that reflect the cultural experiences and practices they are part of. Bird contends that technologies, including non-working technologies such as old keyboards and phones, provide children with opportunities to engage with concepts related to the digital, as they bring to life experiences they have observed through imaginative play. We argue that the toy ringlight is situated within the concept of converged play, where the boundary between digital and non-digital play has blurred significantly (Marsh; Wood et al.). The material and the digital can be attended to when we consider how young children engage in play (Marsh et al.). Through play with material objects, like the wooden vlogger set and the toy ringlight, children engage with their worlds and learn the processes, practices, and concepts of media production. Pretend play can support children’s exploration of digital ideas (Vogt and Hollenstein) as they learn to communicate and tell stories. In a media production sense, Buckingham says that children and young people can deepen their understanding of the media by imitating media forms and styles. Playing with technology can serve similar purposes to playing with traditional toys (Robb and Lauricella). Similarly, we argue that children playing with toys that replicate social media production, such as the wooden vlogger set, are also developing early understandings of media literacy. As young children tell stories, play, and communicate with friends through new digital technologies, they develop an understanding of the media. Media literacy, the ability to critically engage with the media in our everyday lives (Australia Media Literacy Alliance), develops over time (Potter). The toy ringlight does not have to be positioned as problematic as per the technopanic we described earlier. Instead, it offers opportunities for children to explore and reflect on the key concepts of media literacy: technologies, institutions, representations, languages, audiences, and relationships. There are two scenarios where the concept of technologies could be central to children's play using the wooden vlogger set and toy ringlight. Firstly, the toy has multiple components that work together. Children can explore how the camera, light and lapel microphone connect to the device. They can consider if they need all these components and play the different roles required to operate the technology. Secondly, by incorporating the toy into their play, children can develop understandings of the role of digital technology in their lives and how it impacts or shapes media practices. Technologies allow or prevent certain choices from being made (Lüders; Williamson). The wooden vlogger set operates similarly, although children can use the toy outside of these constraints, resulting in forms of disruption. The practices of engaging with media technologies can be bound socially and culturally (du Gay et al.), and through materials (Burnett and Merchant); as children, the wooden vlogger set, and their context come into relation with each other. While the technology is visible to children and adults in this case, working in conjunction with the notion of using technology is the idea of how we use technology to distribute or share our media productions. This refers to the concept of institutions, which offers a lens for how to examine the business of the media and who benefits from media production and distribution—including media platforms—politically, socially, and economically (Alvarado). The inclusion of the small device that looks like a mobile phone in the wooden vlogger set hints at the toy privileging sharing and distribution practices. The various app icons painted on the wooden toy phone provide an opportunity for children to play with the idea of sharing their productions with others. Some children might play with ideas of uploading their productions to YouTube or other social media platforms if that is something they have been exposed to, integrating the digital and non-digital. Media productions do not exist in a technological vacuum. We use media technologies to communicate meaning and tell stories—we (re)present people, places, events, and ideas for a range of purposes (Masterman) through the construction of codes and conventions (Buckingham). Through incorporating the wooden vlogger set into their play, children can experiment with different media forms and representations, where they might, for instance, depict characters (e.g. heroes or villains), locations (e.g. school, the supermarket or space), events (e.g. going to the hairdresser or making food), and simple ideas (e.g. it is cold in winter). While some children may create imaginative worlds where the toy ringlight is part of a wider dramatic story, as per the examples just provided, there are also opportunities for children to act out and produce different forms of media, for example a television show. Children often draw on popular culture understandings to practise and re-enact scenarios (Gillen et al.; Merchant). In doing this, children play with the part of a narrative and consider how media texts are constructed, an important aspect of media languages. As they play with media production ideas, children can decide who might view their content and how they can ensure their audience understands their message—essentially playing with how to encode and decode texts (Morley). As they engage in dramatic play, children might also show different understandings of popular culture texts they enjoy, offering insights into how children understand media productions aimed at their age group, including those produced by child influencers. The wooden vlogger set, most importantly, is a material through which children can consider the relationships between media producers and their audiences (Dezuanni). This brings us to the crux of where we believe the outrage about the wooden vlogger set and toy ringlight lies. The toy ringlight normalises ideas around children developing relationships through and with the media—perhaps as an Influencer or perhaps as a casual vlogger. But the toys of today may not even prepare children for the cultural practices of tomorrow. Thus, while the outcry towards the wooden vlogger set and toy ringlight is just another cycle of moral panic about youth and emerging technologies, we hope that by positioning the toy as an opportunity for media literacy education, the discussion can move forward. Acknowledgement This research was supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child through project number CE200100022. References Abidin, Crystal. "Micromicrocelebrity: Branding Babies on the Internet." M/C Journal 18.5 (2015). 25 Apr. 2023 <https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1022>. ———. “‘Aren’t These Just Young, Rich Women Doing Vain Things Online?’: Influencer Selfies as Subversive Frivolity.” Social Media and Society 2.2 (2016). 25 Apr. 2023 <https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305116641342>. 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Nairn, Angelique, und Deepti Bhargava. „Demon in a Dress?“ M/C Journal 24, Nr. 5 (06.10.2021). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2846.

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Introduction The term monster might have its roots in the Latin word monere (to warn), but it has since evolved to have various symbolic meanings, from a terrifying mythical creature to a person of extreme cruelty. No matter the flexibility in use, the term is mostly meant to be derogatory (Asma). As Gilmore puts it, monsters “embody all that is dangerous and horrible in the human imagination” (1). However, it may be argued that monsters sometimes perform the much-needed work of defining and policing our norms (Mittman and Hensel). Since their archetype is predisposed to transgressing boundaries of human integrity (Gilmore), they help establish deviation between human and in-human. Their cognition and action are considered ‘other’ (Kearney) and a means with which people can understand what is right and wrong, and what is divergent from appropriate ways of being. The term monster need not even refer to the werewolves, ogres, vampires, zombies and the like that strike fear in audiences through their ‘immoral, heinous or unjust’ appearance or behaviours. Rather, the term monster can be, and has been, readily applied as a metaphor to describe the unthinkable, unethical, and brutal actions of human beings (Beville 5). Inadvertently, “through their bodies, words, and deeds, monsters show us ourselves” (Mittman and Hensel 2), or what we consider monstrous about ourselves. Therefore, humans acting in ways that deviate from societal norms and standards can be viewed as monstrous. This is evident in the representations of public relations practitioners in media offerings. In the practice of public relations, ethical standards are advocated as the norm, and deviating from them considered unprofessional (Fawkes), and as we contend: monstrous. However, the practice has long suffered a negative stereotypical perception of being deceptive, and with public relations roles receiving less screen time than shows and films about lawyers, accountants, teachers and the like, these few derogatory depictions can distort how audiences view the occupation (Johnston). Depictions of professions (lawyers, cops, journalists, etc.) tend to be cliché, but our contention is that fewer depictions of public relations practitioners on screen further limit the possibility for diverse depictions. The media can have a socialising impact and can influence audiences to view the content they consume as a reflection of the real world around them (Chandler). Television, in particular, with its capacity to prompt heuristic processing in audiences (Shurm), has messages that can be easily decoded by people of various literacies as they become immersed in the viewing experiences (Gerbner and Gross). These messages gain potency because, despite being set in fictional worlds, they can be understood as reflective of the world and audiences’ experiences of it (Gerbner and Gross). Tsetsura, Bentley, and Newcomb add that popular stories recounted in the media have authoritative power and can offer patterns of meaning that shape individual perceptions. Admittedly, as Stuart Hall suggests, media offerings can be encoded with ideologies and representations that are considered appropriate according to the dominant elite, but these may not necessarily be decoded as preferred meanings. In other words, those exposed to stories of monstrous public relations practitioners can agree with such a position, oppose this viewpoint, or remain neutral, but this is dependent on individual experiences. Without other frames of reference, it could be that viewers of negative portrayals of public relations accept the encoded representation that inevitably does a disservice to the profession. When the representations of the field of public relations suggest, inaccurately, that the industry is dominated by men (Johnston), and women practitioners are shown as slick dressers who control and care little about ethics (Dennison), the distortions can adversely impact on the identities of public relations practitioners and on how they are collectively viewed (Tsetsura et al.). Public relations practitioners view this portrayal as the ‘other’ and tend to distance the ideal self from it, continuing to be stuck in the dichotomy of saints and sinners (Fawkes). Our observation of television offerings such as Scandal, Flack, Call My Agent!, Absolutely Fabulous, Sex and the City, You’re the Worst, and Emily in Paris reveals how television programmes continue to perpetuate the negative stereotypes about public relations practice, where practitioners are anything but ethical—therefore monstrous. The characters, mostly well-groomed women, are shown as debased, liars and cheaters who will subvert ethical standards for personal and professional gain. Portrayals of Public Relations Practitioners in Television and Media According to Miller, the eight archetypical traits identified in media representations of public relations practitioners are: ditzy, obsequious, cynical, manipulative, money-minded, isolated, accomplished, or unfulfilled. In later research, Yoon and Black found that television representations of public relations tended to suggest that people in these roles were heartless, manipulative bullies, while Lambert and White contend that the depiction of the profession has improved to be more positive, but nonetheless continues to do a disservice to the practice by presenting female workers, especially, as “shallow but loveable” (18). We too find that public relations practitioners continue to be portrayed as morally ambiguous characters who are willing to break ethical codes of conduct to suit the needs of their clients. We discuss three themes prevalent as popular tropes in television programmes that characterise public relations practitioners as monstrous. To Be or Not to Be a Slick and Skilful Liar? Most television programmes present public relations practitioners as slick and skilful liars, who are shown as well-groomed and authoritative, convinced that they are lying only to protect their clients. In fact, in most cases the characters are shown to not only believe but also advocate to their juniors that ‘a little bit of lying’ is almost necessary to maintain client relationships and ensure campaign success. For example, in the British drama Flack, the main character of Robyn (played by Anna Paquin) is heard advising her prodigy “just assume we are lying to everyone”. The programmes also feature characters who are in dilemma about the monstrous expectations from their roles, struggling to accept that that they engage in deception as part of their jobs. However, most of them are presented as somewhat of an ugly duckling or the modest character in the programme, who is not always rational or in an explicit position of power. For example, Emily from Emily in Paris (played by Lily Collins), while working as a social media manager, regularly questions the approaches taken by the firm she works for. Her boss Sylvie Grateux (played by Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu), who embodies the status quo, is constantly disapproving of Emily’s lack of sophisticated self-presentation, among other aspects. In the episode ‘Faux Amis’, Sylvie quips “it’s not you personally. It’s everything you stand for. You’re the enemy of luxury because luxury is defined by sophistication and taste, not emilyinparis”. Similarly, in the first episode of Call My Agent!, Samuel Kerr (played by Alain Rimoux), the head of a film publicity firm, solves the conundrum faced by his anxious junior Gabriel (played by Grégory Montel) by suggesting that he lie to his client about the real reason why she lost the film. When a modestly dressed Gabriel questions how he can lie to someone he cares for, Samuel, towering over him in an impeccable suit and a confident demeanour, advises “who said anything about lying? Don’t lie. Simply don’t tell her the truth”. However, the subtext here is that the lie is to protect the client from unnecessary hurt and in doing so nurtures the client relationship. So, it lets the audience decide the morality of lying here. It may be argued that moral ambiguity may not necessarily be monstrous. Such grey characters are often crafted because they allow audiences to relate more readily to themselves by encouraging what Hawkins refers to as mental play. Audiences are less interested in the black and white of morality and veer towards shows such as Call My Agent! where storylines hone in on the need to do bad for the greater good. In these ways, public relations practitioners still transgress moral standards but are less likely to be considered monstrous because the impact and effect on others is utilitarian in nature. It is also interesting to note that in these programmes physical appearance is made to play a crucial role in showcasing the power and prestige of the senior public relations practitioner. This focus on attire can tend to further perpetuate unfavourable stereotypes about public relations practitioners being high income earners (Grandien) who are styled with branded apparel but lacking in substance and morals (Fröhlich and Peters). Promiscuous Women The urge to attract audiences to a female character can also lead to developing and cementing unfavourable stereotypes of public relations practitioners as uninhibited women who live on blurred lines between personal and professional. These characters are not portrayed as inherently bad, but instead are found to indulge in lives of excess. In her definition of the monstrous, Arumugam suggests that excess and insatiable appetites direct the monster’s behaviour, and Kearney outlines that this uncontainable excess is what signals the difference between humans and others. Such excess is readily identifiable in the character of Patsy Stone (played by Joanna Lumley) in Absolutely Fabulous. She is an alcoholic, regularly uses recreational drugs, is highly promiscuous, and chain-smokes throughout the series. She is depicted as prone to acting deceptively to maintain her vices. In Flack, Robyn is shown as regularly snorting cocaine and having sex with her clients. Those reviewing the show highlight how it will attract those interested in “its dark, acidic sense of humour” (Greene) while others condemn it because it emphasises the “depraved publicist” trope (Knibbs) and call it “one of the worst TV shows ever made” even though it is trying to highlight concerns raised in the MeToo movement about how men need to respect women (McGurk). Female characters such as Robyn, with her willingness to question why a client has not tried to sleep with her, appear to undermine the empowerment of the movement rather than support it, and continue to maintain the archetypes that those working in the field of public relations abhor. Similarly, Samantha Jones (played by Kim Cattrell) of Sex and the City is portrayed as sexually liberated, and in one episode another character describes Samantha’s vagina as “the hottest spot in town: it’s always open”. In many ways Samantha’s sexual behaviour reflects a post-feminist narrative of empowerment, agency, and choice, but it could also be read as a product of being a public relations practitioner frequenting parties and bars as she rubs shoulders with clients, celebrities, and high-profile businesspeople. To this end, Patsy, Samantha, and Robyn glamourise public relations and paint it as simply an extension of their liberated and promiscuous selves, with little care for any expectation of professionalism or work ethic. This is also in stark contrast to the reality, where women often tend to occupy technical roles that see much of their time spent in doing the hard yards of publicity and promotion (Krugler). Making Others Err Public relations practitioners are not just shown as being morally ambiguous themselves, but often quite adept at making others do deceitful acts on their behalf, thus nonchalantly oppressing others to get their way. For example, although lauded for elevating an African-American woman to the lead role despite the show maintaining misrepresentations of race (Lambert), the main character of Olivia Pope (played by Kerry Washington) in the television programme Scandal regularly subverts the law for her clients despite considering herself one of the “good guys” and wearing a “white hat”. Over the course of seven seasons, Olivia Pope is found to rig elections, plant listening devices in political figures’ offices, bribe, threaten, and conduct an affair with the President. In some cases, she calls on the services of her colleague Huck to literally, and figuratively, get rid of the barriers in the way of protecting her clients. For example, in season one’s episode Crash and Burn she asks Huck to torture a suspect for information about a dead client. Her willingness to request such actions of her friend and colleague, regardless of perceived good motivations, reinforces Mittman’s categorisation that monsters are identified by their effect and impact on others. Here, the impact includes the torturing of a suspect and the revisiting of psychological trauma by Huck’s character. Huck struggles to overcome his past as a killer and spends much of the show trying to curb his monstrous tendencies which are often brought on by PR woman Olivia’s requests. Although she is sometimes striving for justice, Olivia’s desire for results can lead her to act monstrously, which inadvertently contributes to the racist and sexist ideologies that have long been associated with monsters and perceptions of the Other. Across time and space, certain ethnic groups, such as those of African descent, have been associated with the demonic (Cohen). Similarly, all that is feminine often needs to be discarded as the monster to conform to the patriarchal order of society (Creed). Therefore, Olivia Pope’s monstrous behaviour not only does a disservice to representations of public relations practitioners, but also inadvertently perpetuates negative and inaccurate stereotypes about women of African American descent. Striving to be Ethical The majority of public relations practitioners are encouraged, and in some cases expected, to conform to ethical guidelines to practice and gain respect, admiration, and in-group status. In New Zealand, those who opt to become members of the Public Relations Institute of New Zealand (PRINZ) are required to abide by the association’s code of ethics. The code stipulates that members are bound to act in ways that serve public interests by ensuring they are honest, disclose conflict of interests, follow the law, act with professionalism, ensure openness and privacy are maintained, and uphold values of loyalty, fairness, and independence (PRINZ). Similarly, the Global Alliance of Public Relations and Communication Management that binds practitioners together identifies nine guiding principles that are to be adhered to to be recognised as acting ethically. These include obeying laws, working in the public’s interest, ensuring freedom of speech and assembly, acting with integrity, and upholding privacy in sensitive matters (to name a few). These governing principles are designed to maintain ethical practice in the field. Of course, the trouble is that not all who claim to practice public relations become members of the local or global governing bodies. This implies that professional associations like PRINZ are not able to enforce ethics across the board. In New Zealand alone, public relations consultants have had to offer financial reparations for acting in defamatory ways online (Fisher), or have been alleged to have bribed an assault victim to prevent the person giving evidence in a court case (Hurley). Some academics have accused the industry of being engaged in organised lying (Peacock), but these are not common, nor are these moral transgressors accepted into ethical bodies that afford practitioners authenticity and legitimacy. In most cases, public relations practitioners view their role as acting as the moral conscience of the organisations they support (Schauster, Neill, Ferrucci, and Tandoc). Furthermore, they rated better than the average adult when it came to solving ethical dilemmas through moral reasoning (Schuaster et al.). Additionally, training of practitioners through guidance of mentors has continued to contribute to the improved ethical ratings of public relations. What these findings suggest is that the monsters of public relations portrayed on our television screens are exaggerations that are not reflective of most of the practice. Women of Substance, But Not Necessarily Power Exploring the role of women in public relations, Topic, Cunha, Reigstad, Jele-Sanchez, and Moreno found that female practitioners were subordinated to their male counterparts but were found to be more inclined to practice two-way communication, offer balanced perspectives, opt to negotiate, and build relationships through cooperation. The competitiveness, independence, and status identified in popular media portrayals were found to be exhibited more by male practitioners, despite there being more women in the public relations industry than men. As Fitch argues, popular culture continues to suggest that men dominate public relations, and their preferred characteristics end up being those elements that permeate the media messages, regardless of instances where the lead character is a woman or the fact that feminist values of “loyalty, ethics, morality, [and] fairness” are advocated by female practitioners in real life (Vardeman-Winter and Place 333). Additionally, even though public relations is a feminised field, female practitioners struggle to break the glass ceiling, with male practitioners dominating executive positions and out-earning women (Pompper). Interestingly, in public relations, power is not just limited due to gender but also area of practice. In her ethnographic study of the New Zealand practice, Sissons found that practitioners who worked in consultancies were relatively powerless vis-à-vis their clients, and often this asymmetry negatively affected the practitioner’s decision-making. This implies that in stark contrast to the immoral, glamourous, and authoritative depiction of public relations women in television programmes, in reality they are mired by the struggles of a gendered occupation. Accordingly, they are not in fact in a position to have monstrous power over and impact on others. Therefore, one of the only elements the shows seem to capture and emphasise is that public relations is an occupation that specialises in image management; but what these shows contribute to is an ideology that women are expected to look and carry themselves in particular ways, ultimately constructing aesthetic standards that can diminish women’s power and self-esteem. Conclusion Miller’s archetypes may be over twenty years old, but the trend towards obsequious, manipulative, and cynical television characters remains. Although there have been identifiable shifts to loveable, yet shallow, public relations practitioners, such as Alexis Rose on Schitt’s Creek, the appeal of monstrous public relations practitioners remains. As Cohen puts it, monsters reveal to audiences “what a member of that society can become when those same dictates are rejected, when the authority of leaders or customs disintegrates and the subordination of individual to hierarchy is lost” (68). In other words, audiences enjoy watching the stories of metaphorical monsters because they exhibit the behaviours that are expected to be repressed in human beings; they depict what happens when the social norms of society are disturbed (Levina and Bui). At the very least, these media representations can act, much as monster narratives do, as a cautionary tale on how not to think and act to remain accepted as part of the in-group rather than being perceived as the Other. As Mittman and Hensel argue, society can learn much from monsters because monsters exist within human beings. According to Cohen, they offer meaning about the world and can teach audiences so they can learn, in this case, how to be better. Although the representations of public relations in television can offer insights into roles that are usually most effective when they are invisible (Chorazy and Harrington), the continued negative stereotypes of public relations practitioners can adversely impact on the industry if people are unaware of the practices of the occupation, because lacking a reference point limits audiences’ opportunities to critically evaluate the media representations. This will certainly harm the occupation by perpetuating existing negative stereotypes of charming and immoral practitioners, and perhaps add to its struggles with gendered identity and professional legitimacy. References Absolutely Fabulous. Created by Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French. 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McQuillan, Dan. „The Countercultural Potential of Citizen Science“. M/C Journal 17, Nr. 6 (12.10.2014). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.919.

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What is the countercultural potential of citizen science? As a participant in the wider citizen science movement, I can attest that contemporary citizen science initiatives rarely characterise themselves as countercultural. Rather, the goal of most citizen science projects is to be seen as producing orthodox scientific knowledge: the ethos is respectability rather than rebellion (NERC). I will suggest instead that there are resonances with the counterculture that emerged in the 1960s, most visibly through an emphasis on participatory experimentation and the principles of environmental sustainability and social justice. This will be illustrated by example, through two citizen science projects that have a commitment to combining social values with scientific practice. I will then describe the explicitly countercultural organisation, Science for the People, which arose from within the scientific community itself, out of opposition to the Vietnam War. Methodological and conceptual weaknesses in the authoritative model of science are explored, suggesting that there is an opportunity for citizen science to become anti-hegemonic by challenging the hegemony of science itself. This reformulation will be expressed through Deleuze and Guattari's notion of nomadic science, the means through which citizen science could become countercultural. Counterculture Before examining the countercultural potential of citizen science, I set out some of the grounds for identifying a counterculture drawing on the ideas of Theodore Roszak, who invented the term counterculture to describe the new forms of youth movements that emerged in the 1960s (Roszak). This was a perspective that allowed the carnivalesque procession of beatniks, hippies and the New Left to be seen as a single paradigm shift combining psychic and social revolution. But just as striking and more often forgotten is the way Roszak characterised the role of the counterculture as mobilising a vital critique of the scientific worldview (Roszak 273-274). The concept of counterculture has been taken up in diverse ways since its original formation. We can draw, for example, on Lawrence Grossberg's more contemporary analysis of counterculture (Grossberg) to clarify the main concepts and contrast them with a scientific approach. Firstly, a counterculture works on and through cultural formations. This positions it as something the scientific community would see as the other, as the opposite to the objective, repeatable and quantitative truth-seeking of science. Secondly, a counterculture is a diverse and hybrid space without a unitary identity. Again, scientists would often see science as a singular activity applied in modulated forms depending on the context, although in practice the different sciences can experience each other as different tribes. Thirdly, a counterculture is lived as a transformative experience where the participant is fundamentally changed at a psychic level through participation in unique events. Contrast this with the scientific idea of the separation of observer and observed, and the objective repeatability of the experiment irrespective of the experimenter. Fourthly, a counterculture is associated with a unique moment in time, a point of shift from the old to the new. For the counterculture of the 1960s this was the Age of Aquarius. In general, the aim of science and scientists is to contribute to a form of truth that is essentially timeless, in that a physical law is assumed to hold across all time (and space), although science also has moments of radical change with regard to scientific paradigms. Finally, and significantly for the conclusions of this paper, according to Roszak a counterculture stands against the mainstream. It offers a challenge not at the level of detail but, to the fundamental assumptions of the status quo. This is what “science” cannot do, in as much as science itself has become the mainstream. It was the character of science as the bedrock of all values that Roszak himself opposed and for which he named and welcomed the counterculture. Although critical of some of the more shallow aspects of its psychedelic experimentation or political militancy, he shared its criticism of the technocratic society (the technocracy) and the egocentric mode of consciousness. His hope was that the counterculture could help restore a visionary imagination along with a more human sense of community. What Is Citizen Science? In recent years the concept of citizen science has grown massively in popularity, but is still an open and unstable term with many variants. Current moves towards institutionalisation (Citizen Science Association) are attempting to marry growth and stabilisation, with the first Annual General Meeting of the European Citizen Science Association securing a tentative agreement on the common principles of citizen science (Haklay, "European"). Key papers and presentations in the mainstream of the movement emphasise that citizen science is not a new activity (Bonney et al.) with much being made of the fact that the National Audubon Society started its annual Christmas Bird Count in 1900 (National Audubon Society). However, this elides the key role of the Internet in the current surge, which takes two distinct forms; the organisation of distributed fieldwork, and the online crowdsourcing of data analysis. To scientists, the appeal of citizen science fieldwork follows from its distributed character; they can research patterns over large scales and across latitudes in ways that would be impossible for a researcher at a single study site (Toomey). Gathering together the volunteer, observations are made possible by an infrastructure of web tools. The role of the citizen in this is to be a careful observer; the eyes and ears of the scientist in cyberspace. In online crowdsourcing, the internet is used to present pattern recognition tasks; enrolling users in searching images for signs of new planets or the jets of material from black holes. The growth of science crowdsourcing is exponential; one of the largest sites facilitating this kind of citizen science now has well in excess of a million registered users (Zooniverse). Such is the force of the technological aura around crowdsourced science that mainstream publications often conflate it with the whole of citizen science (Parr). There are projects within citizen science which share core values with the counterculture as originally defined by Roszak, in particular open participation and social justice. These projects also show characteristics from Grossberg's analysis of counterculture; they are diverse and hybrid spaces, carry a sense of moving from an old era to a new one, and have cultural forms of their own. They open up the full range of the scientific method to participation, including problem definition, research design, analysis and action. Citizen science projects that aim for participation in all these areas include the Extreme Citizen Science research group (ExCiteS) at University College London (UCL), the associated social enterprise Mapping for Change (Mapping for Change), and the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (Public Lab). ExCiteS sees its version of citizen science as "a situated, bottom-up practice" that "takes into account local needs, practices and culture". Public Lab, meanwhile, argue that many citizen science projects only offer non-scientists token forms of participation in scientific inquiry that rarely amount to more that data collection and record keeping. They counter this through an open process which tries to involve communities all the way from framing the research questions, to prototyping tools, to collating and interpreting the measurements. ExCiteS and Public Lab also share an implicit commitment to social justice through scientific activity. The Public Lab mission is to "put scientific inquiry at the heart of civic life" and the UCL research group strive for "new devices and knowledge creation processes that can transform the world". All of their work is framed by environmental sustainability and care for the planet, whether it's enabling environmental monitoring by indigenous communities in the Congo (ExCiteS) or developing do-it-yourself spectrometry kits to detect crude oil pollution (Public Lab, "Homebrew"). Having provided a case for elements of countercultural DNA being present in bottom-up and problem-driven citizen science, we can contrast this with Science for the People, a scientific movement that was born out of the counterculture. Countercultural Science from the 1970s: Science for the People Science for the People (SftP) was a scientific movement seeded by a rebellion of young physicists against the role of US science in the Vietnam War. Young members of the American Physical Society (APS) lobbied for it to take a position against the war but were heavily criticised by other members, whose written complaints in the communications of the APS focused on the importance of scientific neutrality and the need to maintain the association's purely scientific nature rather than allowing science to become contaminated by politics (Sarah Bridger, in Plenary 2, 0:46 to 1:04). The counter-narrative from the dissidents argued that science is not neutral, invoking the example of Nazi science as a justification for taking a stand. After losing the internal vote the young radicals left to form Scientists and Engineers for Social and Political Action (SESPA), which later became Science for the People (SftP). As well as opposition to the Vietnam War, SftP embodied from the start other key themes of the counterculture, such as civil rights and feminism. For example, the first edition of Science for the People magazine (appearing as Vol. 2, No. 2 of the SESPA Newsletter) included an article about leading Black Panther, Bobby Seale, alongside a piece entitled “Women Demand Equality in Science.” The final articles in the same issue are indicators of SftP's dual approach to science and change; both the radicalisation of professionals (“Computer Professionals for Peace”) and the demystification of technical practices (“Statistics for the People”) (Science for the People). Science for the People was by no means just a magazine. For example, their technical assistance programme provided practical support to street health clinics run by the Black Panthers, and brought SftP under FBI surveillance (Herb Fox, in Plenary 1, 0:25 to 0:35). Both as a magazine and as a movement, SftP showed a tenacious longevity, with the publication being produced every two months between August 1970 and May/June 1989. It mutated through a network of affiliated local groups and international links, and was deeply involved in constructing early critiques of nuclear power and genetic determinism. SftP itself seems to have had a consistent commitment to non-hierarchical processes and, as one of the founders expressed it, a “shit kicking” approach to putting its principles in to practice (Al Weinrub, in Plenary 1, 0:25 to 0:35). SftP criticised power, front and centre. It is this opposition to hegemony that puts the “counter” into counterculture, and is missing from citizen science as currently practised. Cracks in the authority of orthodox science, which can be traced to both methodologies and basic concepts, follow in this paper. These can be seen as an opportunity for citizen science to directly challenge orthodox science and thus establish an anti-hegemonic stance of its own. Weaknesses of Scientific Hegemony In this section I argue that the weaknesses of scientific hegemony are in proportion to its claims to authority (Feyerabend). Through my scientific training as an experimental particle physicist I have participated in many discussions about the ontological and epistemological grounds for scientific authority. While most scientists choose to present their practice publicly as an infallible machine for the production of truths, the opinions behind the curtain are far more mixed. Physicist Lee Somolin has written a devastating critique of science-in-practice that focuses on the capture of the institutional economy of science by an ideological grouping of string theorists (Smolin), and his account is replete with questions about science itself and ethnographic details that bring to life the messy behind-the-scenes conflicts in scientific-knowledge making. Knowledge of this messiness has prompted some citizen science advocates to take science to task, for example for demanding higher standards in data consistency from citizen science than is often the case in orthodox science (Haklay, "Assertions"; Freitag, "Good Science"). Scientists will also and invariably refer to reproducibility as the basis for the authority of scientific truths. The principle that the same experiments always get the same results, irrespective of who is doing the experiment, and as long as they follow the same method, is a foundation of scientific objectivity. However, a 2012 study of landmark results in cancer science was able to reproduce only 11 per cent of the original findings (Begley and Ellis). While this may be an outlier case, there are broader issues with statistics and falsification, a bias on positive results, weaknesses in peer review and the “publish or perish” academic culture (The Economist). While the pressures are all-too-human, the resulting distortions are rarely acknowledged in public by scientists themselves. On the other hand, citizen science has been slow to pick up the gauntlet. For example, while some scientists involved in citizen science have commented on the inequality and inappropriateness of orthodox peer review for citizen science papers (Freitag, “What Is the Role”) there has been no direct challenge to any significant part of the scientific edifice. I argue that the nearest thing to a real challenge to orthodox science is the proposal for a post-normal science, which pre-dates the current wave of citizen science. Post-normal science tries to accommodate the philosophical implications of post-structuralism and at the same time position science to tackle problems such as climate change, intractable to reproducibility (Funtowicz and Ravetz). It accomplishes this by extending the domains in which science can provide meaningful answers to include issues such as global warming, which involve high decision stakes and high uncertainty. It extends traditional peer review into an extended peer community, which includes all the stakeholders in an issue, and may involve active research as well as quality assessment. The idea of extended peer review has obvious overlaps with community-oriented citizen science, but has yet to be widely mobilised as a theoretical buttress for citizen-led science. Prior even to post-normal science are the potential cracks in the core philosophy of science. In her book Cosmopolitics, Isabelle Stengers characterises the essential nature of scientific truth as the ability to disqualify and exclude other truth claims. This, she asserts, is the hegemony of physics and its singular claim to decide what is real and what is true. Stengers traces this, in part, to the confrontation more than one hundred years ago between Max Planck and Ernst Mach, whereas the latter argued that claims to an absolute truth should be replaced by formulations that tied physical laws to the human practices that produced them. Planck stood firmly for knowledge forms that were unbounded by time, space or specific social-material procedures (Stengers). Although contemporary understandings of science are based on Planck's version, citizen science has the potential to re-open these questions in a productive manner for its own practices, if it can re-conceive of itself as what Deleuze and Guattari would call nomadic science (Deleuze; Deleuze & Guattari). Citizen Science as Nomadic Science Deleuze and Guattari referred to orthodox science as Royal Science or Striated Science, referring in part to its state-like form of authority and practice, as well as its psycho-social character. Their alternative is a smooth or nomadic science that, importantly for citizen science, does not have the ambition to totalise knowledge. Nomadic science is a form of empirical investigation that has no need to be hooked up to a grand narrative. The concept of nomadic science is a natural fit for bottom-up citizen science because it can valorise truths that are non-dual and that go beyond objectivity to include the experiential. In this sense it is like the extended peer review of post-normal science but without the need to be limited to high-risk high-stakes questions. As there is no a priori problem with provisional knowledges, it naturally inclines towards the local, the situated and the culturally reflective. The apparent unreliability of citizen science in terms of participants and tools, which is solely a source of anxiety, can become heuristic for nomadic science when re-cast through the forgotten alternatives like Mach's formulation; that truths are never separated from the specifics of the context and process that produced them (Stengers 6-18; 223). Nomadic science, I believe, will start to emerge through projects that are prepared to tackle toxic epistemology as much as toxic pollutants. For example, the Community Based Auditing (CBA) developed by environmental activists in Tasmania (Tattersall) challenges local alliances of state and extractive industries by undermining their own truth claims with regards to environmental impact, a process described in the CBA Toolbox as disconfirmation. In CBA, this mixture of post-normal science and Stenger's critique is combined with forms of data collection and analysis known as Community Based Sampling (Tattersall et al.), which would be recognisable to any citizen science project. The change from citizen science to nomadic science is not a total rupture but a shift in the starting point: it is based on an overt critique of power. One way to bring this about is being tested in the “Kosovo Science for Change” project (Science for Change Kosovo), where I am a researcher and where we have adopted the critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire as the starting point for our empirical investigations (Freire). Critical pedagogy is learning as the co-operative activity of understanding—how our lived experience is constructed by power, and how to make a difference in the world. Taking a position such as nomadic science, openly critical of Royal Science, is the anti-hegemonic stance that could qualify citizen science as properly countercultural. Citizen Science and Counterculture Counterculture, as I have expressed it, stands against or rejects the hegemonic culture. However, there is a strong tendency in contemporary social movements to take a stance not only against the dominant structures but against hegemony itself. They contest what Richard Day calls the hegemony of hegemony (Day). I witnessed this during the counter-G8 mobilisation of 2001. Having been an activist in the 1980s and 1990s I was wearily familiar with the sectarian competitiveness of various radical narratives, each seeking to establish itself as the correct path. So it was a strongly affective experience to stand in the convergence centre and listen to so many divergent social groups and movements agree to support each other's tactics, expressing a solidarity based on a non-judgemental pluralism. Since then we have seen the emergence of similarly anti-hegemonic countercultures around the Occupy and Anonymous movements. It is in this context of counterculture that I will try to summarise and evaluate the countercultural potential of citizen science and what being countercultural might offer to citizen science itself. To be countercultural it is not enough for citizen science to counterpose participation against the institutional and hierarchical aspects of professional science. As an activity defined purely by engagement it offers to plug the legitimacy gap for science while still being wholly dependent on it. A countercultural citizen science must pose a strong challenge to the status quo, and I have suggested that a route to this would be to develop as nomadic science. This does not mean replacing or overthrowing science but constructing an other to science with its own claim to empirical methods. It is fair to ask what this would offer citizen science that it does not already have. At an abstract level it would gain a freedom of movement; an ability to occupy Deleuzian smooth spaces rather than be constrained by the striation of established science. The founders of Science for the People are clear that it could never have existed if it had not been able to draw on the mass movements of its time. Being countercultural would give citizen science an affinity with the bottom-up, local and community-based issues where empirical methods are likely to have the most social impact. One of many examples is the movement against fracking (the hydraulic fracturing of deep rock formations to release shale gas). Together, these benefits of being countercultural open up the possibility for forms of citizen science to spread rhizomatically in a way that is not about immaterial virtual labour but is itself part of a wider cultural change. 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