Centre for the Study of Children, Youth and Media
Institute of Education
University of London
Do We Really Need Media Education 2.0? Prospects for Media Literacy Education in the Age of Participatory Media
The widespread dissemination of inexpensive and accessible digital tools for media production has led to the emergence of more participatory forms of media, such as online gaming, blogging and social networking. In this presentation, I will be assessing the implications of these developments for the practice of media education, both in and beyond schools. Some have argued that these new media require a paradigm shift, not merely in the curriculum of media education, but also in its pedagogy. They suggest that we should be embracing the new forms of creativity that are provided here, and moving beyond outdated critical perspectives. While I would agree that media educators should be exploiting the possibilities of these new media, I will also argue that they raise important ethical, political and cultural questions that should not be effaced or ignored. We should not merely romanticise these developments as a form of technologically-driven democratisation, or simply celebrate the opportunities for ‘informal learning' that they appear to provide. Media education cannot afford to lose sight of the need for critical analysis; and to this extent, over-excited calls for ‘media education 2.0' are at least premature, if not positively misguided.
David Buckingham directs the
Centre for the Study of Children, Youth and Media at the Institute of Education, London University. His research focuses on young people's interactions with electronic media, and on media education. He is currently working on two major research projects, about the everyday use of video camcorders and about the role of the internet in young people's civic participation. His most recent books are Beyond Technology: Children's Learning in the Age of Digital Culture (Polity, 2007); Global Children, Global Media; Migration, Media and Childhood (with Liesbeth de Block, Palgrave, 2007) and Youth, Identity and Digital Media (edited, MIT Press, 2008).
Department of Educational Policy Studies
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
United States of America
Re-reading class, re-reading cultural studies, re-reading tradition: Neo-Marxist nostalgia and the remorselessly vanishing pasts
In this presentation, Cameron McCarthy assesses the status of the concepts of tradition and class within contemporary cultural studies literature on the industrial working class. He maintains, in part, that these terms have been deployed within a center-periphery thesis and a field-bound ethnographic framework by cultural studies scholars pursuing a sub-cultural studies approach. Within this framework, “Britishness” has been the silent organizing principle defining metropolitan working class traditions and forms of cultural resistance. British cultural studies proponents have therefore pursued the study of class and culture as a localized, nation-bound set of interests. This has placed cultural studies in tension with postcolonial subjectivities often reduced, as they have been in the classic works of Paul Willis’s Learning to Labor and Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style, to the metonymic “Pakis” (referring to recent Asian immigrants) and “Jamaicans” (referring to West Indians). McCarthy theorizes against the grain of the textual production of the working class within cultural studies scholarship insisting that recent films such as The Full Monty, Billy Eliot, and Bend It Like Beckham, and the literary works of Kazuo Ishiguro, (Remains of the Day), Jeanette Winterson (Sexing the Cherry), George Orwell (Shooting an Elephant), George Lamming (The Emigrants), Samuel Selvon (The Lonely Londoners), among others—offer a more complex story of class identities in the age of globalization and transnationalism.
Cameron McCarthy teaches mass communications theory and cultural studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is University Scholar and Communications Scholar in the Department of Educational Policy Studies. Cameron also holds appointments in the Institute of Communications Research and in the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois. He has been a visiting scholar and lecturer at Jesus College, the University of Cambridge, York University, The University of Western Ontario, The University of Newcastle, Monash University, the University of Salamanca, Spain, and the University of Queensland. He has published widely on topics related to postcolonialism, problems with neoMarxist writings on race and education, institutional support for teaching, and school ritual and adolescent identities in journals such as Harvard Educational Review , Oxford Review of Education, The British Journal of the Sociology of Education, among many others. Cameron has authored or co-authored many books, such as: Race and Curriculum (Falmer Press, 1990), Multicultural Curriculum: New Directions for Social Theory, Practice and Policy (Routledge, 2000), and Reading and Teaching the Postcolonial: From Baldwin to Basquiat and Beyond (Teachers College Press, Columbia University, 2001). With his graduate students, Cameron has published a number of books such as Foucault and Cultural Studies entitled, Foucault, Cultural Studies and Governmentality (SUNY Press, 2003) and Race, Identity and Representation in Education (Routledge, 2005). Last year he co-edited the collection, Globalizing Cultural Studies, which is now out from Peter Lang (2007). His latest book (co-edited with Cathryn Teasley of the University of A Coruña, Galicia) is Transnational Perspectives On Culture, Policy, And Education: Redirecting Cultural Studies In Neoliberal Times (Peter Lang, 2008). With Angharad Valdivia, Cameron is co-editor of the “Intersections in Communication and Culture” book series that is published by Peter Lang and the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois. Last academic year (2007-2008), Cameron was a distinguished visiting professor in the Department of English and Communications Studies at the Saint Louis University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain.
Media and Cultural Studies
School of International Liberal Studies
Waseda University, Tokyo
Pedagogic Uses of Popular Culture: Towards Media and Cultural Citizenship as Transnational Learning Process
This paper will discuss the possibility and pitfalls of using popular culture for the enhancement of cross-border dialogues. While the intensification of media culture flows have significantly deepened mutual understandings and sympathetic relationships among people in East Asia, it is still questionable to what extent such connections are actually socio-culturally inclusive and dialogic, as they tend to be administered by the marketing logic of (multinational) media and cultural industries as well as by the discursive power of “brand nationalism” that contains cross-border connections in an exclusive inter-national framework. To further the potential of pedagogic uses of popular culture, it will be suggested, we need to collaboratively develop a transnational project of media and cultural citizenship as reciprocal learning process.
Koichi Iwabuchi is professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the School of International Liberal Studies, Waseda University. He worked for a TV company in Tokyo for ten years as director and producer of news and infotainment programs before he attained a PhD in Australia. His main research interests are media and cultural globalization, East Asian media connections, nationalism and multicultural politics. He is currently working on media and cultural citizenship. His recent English publications include Recentering Globalization: Popular culture and Japanese transnationalism (Duke University Press, 2002) . He is also editor of Feeling Asian Modernities: Transnational consumption of Japanese TV dramas (Hong Kong University Press, 2004) and co-editor of Rogue Flows: Trans-Asian cultural traffic (Hong Kong University Press, 2004) and East Asian Pop Culture: Analysing the Korean Wave (Hong Kong University Press, 2008).
The Emotional Geographies of Popular Culture: Implications for Pedagogy
When we advocate the use of popular culture in the classroom, do we give sufficient consideration to the links between the pleasure, power and politics of the popular? Indeed, do we sufficiently consider the full emotional field associated with popular culture — its scapes of abjection, its scapes of amusement and the vast interiority that runs between them? And, have we sufficiently considered the emotional geographies of the popular? This address will explain why we need to consider these questions and in so doing will offer some conceptual resources for thinking about their implications for education in increasingly globalising places.
Jane Kenway has a long history in the education system in Australia. She has taught in both primary and secondary, country and city schools, but for most of her career she has been a teacher and researcher in various universities in Australia. She is currently a Professor in the Education Faculty at Monash University. Her research expertise is in the politics of educational change in the context of wider social, cultural and political change. Her new jointly edited book is entitled Globalising the Research Imagination (Routledge, in press). Her most recent jointly written books are Masculinity Beyond the Metropolis (Palgrave, 2006), Haunting the Knowledge Economy (Routledge 2006) and Consuming Children: Education-Advertising-Entertainment (Open University Press, 2001). Her other jointly edited books are Innovation and Tradition: the Arts and Humanities in the Knowledge Economy (2004) and Globalising Education: Policies, Pedagogies and Politics (2005) (both Peter Lang, New York).
School of Journalism and Communication
Chinese University of Hong Kong
Visual Ethnography in Popular Culture Research: a Methodological and Pedagogical Experiment in a Toy Factory, a Disco bar and a Publishing House
The presentation will focus on the challenges of doing visual ethnography and some preliminary applications of the method for educational purposes. The method of visual ethnography will be introduced by a series of ethnographic projects entitled “lifestyle factories”. The term “lifestyles factory” is used as a theoretical metaphor to understand the logic of popular culture in urban China. The toy factory project, conducted in 2003, examines how rural migrants acquire work and spend culture in Dongguan; the disco bar project, conducted in 2004, examines the nightlife of the rising middle class in Shenzhen; the Trends Corporation project, conducted in the summer of 2007, examines the impacts of lifestyle magazines in China.
Eric Ma is professor of the School of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has authored Culture, Politics and Television in Hong Kong (Routledge, 1999) and co-authored Hong Kong, China: learning to belong to a nation (Routledge, 2008). His publications appear in journals such as Cultural Studies, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Social Text, Positions, Gazette, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Visual Anthropology, etc. He has also written and edited more than 15 books in Chinese on the popular culture of Hong Kong.
Professor of Teacher Education
College of Education
California State University
Long Beach , United States
Hybridity and Third Space in Classrooms: Linking Popular Culture Texts to Literacy Learning and Teaching
This presentation will argue for a critical need to create a hybrid and third space in classrooms where students' literacy experiences with popular culture texts are recognized, valued, and integrated into the school curriculum. The argument builds on the changing definition of literacy and literacy instruction, a New Literacy Studies perspective, literacy-embedded nature of popular culture texts, and research conducted in the past decade in English-speaking countries that documents a connection between popular culture texts and students' literacy knowledge, skills, and strategies. Along with this argument, I will present examples of teachers' infusing popular culture texts into the literacy curriculum, illustrating how teaching with such texts can transcend traditional literacy instruction and engage students in meaningful, relevant learning experiences.
Shelley Hong Xu is a Professor of Teacher Education at the College of Education in California State University, Long Beach, United States. She teaches literacy, research, and technology courses in the doctoral, master's, and teacher credential programs. Her research area focuses on various genres of popular culture texts and integration of popular culture texts into literacy instruction. Her publications in this area include the book Trading Cards to Comic Strips: Popular Culture Texts and Literacy Learning in Grades K-8 ( International Reading Association, 2005), articles in Language Arts, New England Reading Association Journal, and book chapters in several edited books. She has worked with classroom teachers on their infusion of popular culture texts into literacy curriculum in the past eight years. She was the essay book review editor for Reading Research Quarterly, and has served on the editorial review board for Reading Research Quarterly, Journal of Literacy Research, Yearbook of the National Reading Conference, Reading Teacher, and Journal of Educational Research. She is currently the Publications Chair for the National Reading Conference.
