Critical Pedagogy
"'Critical pedagogy considers how education can provide individuals with the tools to better themselves and strengthen democracy, to create a more egalitarian and just society, and thus to deploy education in a process of progressive social change. Media literacy involves teaching the skills that will empower citizens and students to become sensitive to the politics of representations of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and other cultural differences in order to foster critical thinking and enhance democratization. Critical media literacy aims to make viewers and readers more critical and discriminating readers and producers of texts.
'Critical media pedagogy provides students and citizens with the tools to analyze critically how texts are constructed and in turn construct and position viewers and readers. It provides tools so that individuals can dissect the instruments of cultural domination, transform themselves from objects to subjects, from passive to active. Thus critical media literacy is empowering, enabling students to become critical producers of meanings and texts, able to resist manipulation and domination.'"
(Douglas Kellner)
Douglas Kellner, "Multiple Literacies and Critical Pedagogies" in Revolutionary Pedagogies - Cultural Politics, Instituting Education, and the Discourse of Theory, Peter Pericles Trifonas, Editor, Routledge, 2000
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Symbolic Control Through Appropriation Of Local Stories
Paula Gilligan (The Criminal in the Academy: Practice Based Research as a Form of Theft)
For socially engaged [theatre] practitioners, the relationship with the academy is worth examining. The radical element of the practice becomes appropriated by the academy and is removed from the domain of public cultures to be re-packaged in endless academic texts as art and high-culture for bourgeois spectator/student. The work thus becomes an instrument of the domination and symbolic violence the practitioner might have initially sought to resist. The function of the academy in relation to practice in the cultures of late-capitalism is even more complicated. Non-Western film-makers, who come to the attention of Western critics, have found that their films, in spite of initially being conceived as local stories in local languages or as critiques of imperialism and colonisation (such as Sembene?s Fort Thoyard) are only circulated on the Western cultural festival and art-house circuit. Their knowledge that their main audience is the Western academy, and not the local or national public, eventually becomes reflected in their practice. Aesthetic ideology, disseminated by both practitioners and academics/critics, is the key practice by which such work is converted from use-value to exchange value.
CONTRIBUTOR
The Constellations ProjectSHARE
Regulation Through Discourses/Practices
"The prison operates through the production of norms to divide the population into prisoners and non-prisoners. Since the goal of the prison is to return prisoners to the status of non-prisoners, there must be a criterion, one carefully and comprehensively elaborated, to recognise the non-prisoner, the prisoner, and the developmental stages in the change from the one to the other. There must also be a detailed regimen to effectuate the change. There must finally be a method or system of keeping track of the change in each prisoner. Foucault borrows from Bentham the term Panopticon (one who sees all) to denote the entire apparatus of defining the norm, disciplining the negative term, observing the change from the negative to the positive and studying the whole process so that it can be perfected. But there is a difference. For Bentham the Panopticon was an artifice that deflected the criminal's mind from the irrationality of transgression to the rationality of the norm. It imposed social authority on the prisoner in a constant, total manner. The prisoner's actions could be monitored by guards at any time but without his ever knowing it. The prisoner would, in Rousseau's phrase, be forced to be free. With no escape or reprieve from the Panoptical eye, the prisoner would accept the authority of the norm with its rational system of pleasures and pains. For Foucault the task is to see the system as an imposition of a structure of domination, not as a rational, humanist intention.As we know, the Panopticon, evaluated on the standards of liberal and Benthamite theory, is a failure. Foucault's aim is to grasp the workings of the Panopticon outside the liberal framework: if it does not reform prisoners, what does it do? What are the effects of the social text of the prison, of Panoptical discourse? His argument is that the prison, in the context of a liberal capitalist society that celebrates the anarchy of the marketplace, the chaos of free monads pursuing infinite wants, the rationality of the unhindered subject - the prison in this world imposes the technology of power, the "micropolitics" of the norm. In capitalist society, regulation takes the form of discourses/practices that produce and reproduce the norm. The school, the asylum, the factory, the barracks to greater or lesser degrees and with considerable variation all imitate the Panopticon (see figures overleaf). In modern society power is imposed not by the personal presence and brute force of a caste of nobles as it was in earlier times but by the systematic scribblings in discourses, by the continual monitoring of daily life, adjusting and readjusting ad in finitum the norm of individuality. Modern society may be read as a discourse in which nominal freedom of action is canceled by the ubiquitous look of the other. It may be interpreted semiologically as a field of signs in which the metadiscourse of the Panopticon is reimposed everywhere, even in places in which it is not installed. We may suggest that the free individual requires a repressed other, a sort of external super-ego, an absent father if only to guarantee his or her freedom."
(Mark Poster pp.90-91)
Poster, Mark. 1990 The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. ISBN: 0745603262
CONTRIBUTOR
The Constellations ProjectSHARE
