Course Description In this course, we will explore the question of the actual and potential connections between democracy and education. Our focus of attention will be placed on a critical examination of democratic theory and its implications for the civic education roles and contributions of teachers, adult educators, community development practitioners, and community organizers. We will survey and deal critically with a range of competing conceptions of democracy, variously described as classical, republican, liberal, radical, marxist, neomarxist, pragmatist, feminist, populist, pluralist, postmodern, and/or participatory. Using narrative inquiry as a means for illuminating and interpreting contemporary practice, we will analyze the implications of different conceptions of democracy for the practical work of civic education.

Democracy and education.

The theme of the Internet and the public sphere now has a permanent place on research agendas and in intellectual inquiry; it is entering the mainstream of political communication studies. The first part of this presentation briefly pulls together key elements in the public sphere perspective, underscoring three main analytic dimensions: the structural, the representational, and the interactional. Then the discussion addresses some central themes in the current difficulties facing democracy, refracted through the lens of the public sphere perspective. In particular, the destabilization of political communication systems is seen as a context for understanding the role of the Internet: It enters into, as well as contributes to, this destabilization. At the same time, the notion of destabilization can also embody a positive sense, pointing to dispersions of older patterns that may have outlived their utility. Further, the discussion takes up obvious positive consequences that follow from the Internet, for ex...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10584600590933160

The Internet, Public Spheres, and Political Communication: Dispersion and Deliberation

Judith ‘Jack’ Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure sets itself the task of ‘dismantl[ing] the logics of success and failure with which we currently live’ (2011: 2). To do so it constructs what Halberstam calls a ‘silly archive’, which ranges from the animated cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants to Yoko Ono and Marina Abramović’s performance art to Elfride Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher. Failure, for Halberstam, is not to be avoided, as it offers insights, ways of being, forms of politics and paradigms of resistance to current hegemonies. Working within the realm of queer theory and cultural studies, the book strangely echoes the 1970s sentiments of punk refusal as well as the global gay liberationists’ call for the invention of revolutionary sexualities outside of familial relations. Its dismantling of failure aims to show how winning is currently predicated upon losers. The inequitable neo-liberal ideologies that constitute today’s winners and losers relies on a basic assumption: those who lose did not work hard enough and thus deserve their fate. Halberstam asks us to consider the justice in winning in a global economy whose winners – the 1 per cent – do take all, leave very little for the rest of us, and next to nothing for those at the bottom end of the economic hierarchy. With ‘low theory’, an approach adapted from Stuart Hall’s reading of Antonio Gramsci, Halberstam brings together an eccentric array of sources. Low theory, for Halberstam, aims broadly and looks to arrive at counter-hegemonic options that are widely accessible. He defines low theory as less beholden to a particular telos and, again citing Hall, sees it ‘not as an end onto itself but “a detour en route to something else”’ (Halberstam 2011: 15). In a book about failure, it follows that Halberstam envisions low theory as a means to eschew goal-oriented politics and social theories. It is ‘open’ to ‘unpredictable outcomes’ and is ‘adaptable, shifting, and flexible’ (2011: 16). Halberstam predicates his low theory on what Hall describes as Gramsci’s ‘open’ Marxism. According to Hall, Gramsci’s theories were derived from the application of Marxist ideas to the real political problems that he faced in life, not from a deterministic application of theory in service of a teleological political project. Halberstam inserts himself into this logic by envisioning an ‘open pedagogy’ that is similarly amenable to questioning, that is bottom-up in its perspective and that ‘detaches itself from prescriptive methods, fixed logics, and epistemes’; instead, it ‘orients us toward problem-solving knowledge or social visions of radical justice’ (2011: 16–17). A large part of Halberstam’s silly archive is animated and stopmotion movies of the past decade, designed, made and marketed for mass audiences, mainly comprising children. Halberstam calls these movies ‘Pixarvolt’, finding in the works of Pixar and DreamWorks recipes for collective rebellion against capitalist economies and power and, in short, a ‘revolt’ against the status quos of neo-liberal humanism. These films, Halberstam argues, are made for children, who he sees as kinds of failed subjects, people for whom the world is not designed, who are clumsy and frustrated with various forms of authority, who are ready and willing to view the world in new ways, and for whom a revolution is a promising option. In these films, Halberstam sees ‘a rich technological field for rethinking collectivities, transformation, identification, animality, and posthumanity’ (2011: 174). He notes that Pixarvolt’s plots usually revolve around a struggle between human and non-human creatures in relationships that ‘resemble what used to be called “class struggle,” and they offer numerous scenarios of revolt and alternatives to grim, mechanical, industrial cycles of production and consumption’ (Halberstam 2011: 29). Pixarvolt films also focus on escapes from captivity that culminate in utopian dreams of freedom, elements in which he finds neither childishness nor a trajectory towards adult freedom but the dreams and means of social transformation. Key to Halberstam’s analysis is the counter-intuitive connections he argues the films create between communitarian revolt and queer forms of embodiment. Pixarvolt films, Halberstam argues, can provide new modes of thinking and new models of family, parenting and sociality. ‘While many Marxist scholars have characterized and dismissed queer politics as “body politics,”’ Halberstam argues, ‘these films recognize that alternative forms of embodiment and desire are central to the struggle against corporate domination’ (2011: 29). Halberstam concedes that there are no guarantees that animated

The Queer Art of Failure

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Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera's Eye

Given its title, I was pleased to have the opportunity to review Marianne Hirsch’s new book. I had just finished reading Jan Gross’s Golden Harvest (2012). Gross took a seemingly innocent group pho...

The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust

The events of the 2008 election continue to spark prognostications that we live in a world that is postracial/feminist, and so on. At the 2009 NCA (National Communication Association) convention, a panel of communication scholars discussed how to approach questions of identity and communication over the next 5 years. Participants suggested ways to be critical of assertions of “post” and elaborated ways to encounter new dimensions of identification in an era of immense sociopolitical challenges. This forum revisits the exchanged dialogues among the participants at the roundtable and further explores the meaning of post- in post-America.

What Is This “Post-” in Postracial, Postfeminist… (Fill in the Blank)?

Communication as counterpublic

The authors investigate coming out and coming home as models of queer sexuality for contemporary Chinese queer subjects. Through semi-structured interviews with 13 Chinese queer subjects, the autho...

Coming out, coming home, coming with: Models of queer sexuality in contemporary China

Since June 2005, the Reverend Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) have conducted protests at funerals of U.S. military personnel killed in the War on Terror. Investigating a webring of military blogs, we conduct an analysis of vernacular responses to the WBC's protests. Articulation theory informs our analysis as we characterize the ideological work performed in vernacular responses to the protests. Bloggers' responses demonstrate that the WBC exposes ideological tensions involving freedom of speech and religious expression, enactments of citizenship, injustice in the justice system, and disciplined military bodies out of control.

Making Sense of ‘God Hates Fags’ and ‘Thank God for 9/11’: A Thematic Analysis of Milbloggers' Responses to Reverend Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church

This essay demonstrates how two U.S. zines produced from 1990 to 1999 by and for gay men with HIV/AIDS—Diseased Pariah News (DPN) and Infected Faggot Perspectives (IFP)—constitute counterpublics. I demonstrate how DPN and IFP constitute counterpublics through thematization of two important forms of difference—blood status (HIV-positive or HIV-negative), and political ideology. I then specify and elaborate primary modes of corporeal expressivity in the zines—the erotic/sexual and the grotesque—to demonstrate the work that each mode does for the counterpublics.

Counterpublicity and Corporeality in HIV/AIDS Zines

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