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Bill Brydon

Science as 'Horrible': Irreverent Deference in Science Communication - Science as Cultu... - 0 views

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    "Horrible Science is a popular UK-based brand of books, toys and magazines aimed at 7-11 year olds. At first sight, the term 'horrible' might be taken as embodying a critique of science and technology. However, a closer look reveals Horrible Science quite playfully twisting between positive and negative uses of the word, often transforming the latter into the former in the process. The horrible of Horrible Science is clearly signalled as fun. It is domesticated to undermine any sense of fear associated with its imagery. Moreover, the horrible of Horrible Science becomes related to an imagery of truth which is deferential to the work and social standing of the scientific community; it draws analogies between the horrible and science in terms of granting hardness, exclusivity, and even an intuitive closeness to nature. Horrible Science's cultural critique of science and technology, as much as they exist, are accommodated within a traditional discourse of celebrating scientific achievements and deferring to its expertise. By sampling more irreverent discourses, Horrible Science offers a way to excuse a type of earnest reverence, delight and excitement for science that had become unfashionable by the end of the twentieth century. It packages science for sale to a 'public' who want to enjoy science and be seen doing so, but who are also aware of the advantages of their outsider identity. In Horrible Science, an irreverent deference is a form of quite 'late modern' science communication, one that feels the need to show awareness of critique and counter-arguments if it to be trusted by its critically aware audiences."
Bill Brydon

HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES IN CRITICAL DIALOGUES WITH CULTURAL STUDIES - Cultural S... - 1 views

  • HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES IN CRITICAL DIALOGUES WITH CULTURAL STUDIES
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    "This article expounds on three central aspects necessary to comprehend the critical dialogue between the humanities and social sciences and Cultural Studies in Latin America: (1) The aesthetic and the critical versus the popular and the technocultural; (2) Transdisciplinarity and the clashes between the disciplines and (3) The displacement of literature in the redefinition of the 'Latin American' in the cultural theory of the 1980s in Latin America. This critical narrative reveals that the technocooperativity of the culture market demands that Cultural Studies leave aside knowledge of the negativity of the splitted, the errant and the lost. It corresponds to art and literature, to critical thinking, to reintroduce - in a minor key - the disorders of the unclassifiable in the world of the classified and the classifier. Only with the critical play of disobedient languages against the university technomarket can the resigned homology between the politics of governability, the administration of the social, the industrialization of the cultural and the professionalization of useful knowledge be bankrupted."
Bill Brydon

Race-conscious transnational activists with cameras: Mediators of compassion -- Mahrous... - 0 views

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    This article examines a Canadian transnational solidarity activist's efforts to publicize human suffering through visual documentation. The objectives are to examine some of the ways activists negotiate ethical dilemmas about spectatorship and a white/Wes
Bill Brydon

CULTURAL STUDIES AS LABOR OF NEGOTIATION IN HIGHER EDUCATION - Cultural Studies - 0 views

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    This paper will focus on an applied research initiative1 we are currently engaged in, which brings together academics (both from conventional institutions - the university, the research centers and undergraduate colleges - and from 'new and innovative institutional structures') with policy-makers and grant-making organizations. The initiative has to do with the entire field of higher education (India having one of the biggest higher education systems in the world), but interestingly it was incubated by the Center for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS). The painstaking process of the gestation of collaborative interdisciplinary themes/fields of research/teaching and the labor of negotiation with policy-makers and grantees in the field of higher education by a Cultural Studies centre is thus the focus of this paper. Called the Higher Education Cell, an important aspect of the initiative's genealogy is that it is based on (a) a critique of the existing disciplines and an attention to the birthing of 'new thematic/field specifics' as also (b) a critique of the research undertaken in mainstream institutions and an attention to new research methodologies. The Higher Education Cell is at present focusing on four major functions through which it plans to engage with the higher education sector. These functions are (i) Incubation of Research Initiatives, (ii) Institutional Collaborations, (iii) Documentation and Archiving, and (iv) Grant Development.
Bill Brydon

Global Subjects or Objects of Globalisation? The promotion of global citizenship in org... - 0 views

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    Sport for Development and Peace (sdp) has been adopted as a 'development tool' by Western development practitioners and a growing number of development organisations. Sport is frequently referred to as a 'global language' and used to promote international awareness and cross-cultural understanding-two key themes in global citizenship literature. In this paper I examine the language adopted by organisations promoting sdp-specifically, what sdp organisations say they do as well as the nature and implications of their discourses. Drawing on a large and growing body of literature on global citizenship and post-structuralism, and on post-colonial critiques, I argue that sdp narratives have the potential to reinforce the 'Othering' of community members in developing countries and may contribute to paternalistic conceptions of development assistance. In so doing, they weaken the potential for more inclusive and egalitarian forms of global citizenship. The article examines the discourse of sdp organisational material found online and analyses it in the context of broader sport and colonialism literature. The work of SDP organisations is further examined in relation to global citizenship discourse with a focus on the production- and projection-of global subjects, or objects of globalisation, and what this means for development 'beneficiaries'
Bill Brydon

The Promise of Play: A New Approach to Productive Play - 0 views

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    Games are woven into webs of cultural meaning, social connection, politics, and economic change. This article builds on previous work in cultural, new media, and game studies to introduce a new approach to productive play, the promise of play. This approach analyzes games as sites of cultural production in times of increased transnational mediation and speaks to the formation of identity across places. The authors ground their explorations in findings from ethnographic research on gaming in urban China. The spread of Internet access and increasing popularity of digital entertainment in China has been used as an indicator of social change and economic progress shaped by global flows. It has also been described as being limited by local forces such as tight information control. As such, gaming technologies in China are ideal to ask broader questions about digital media as sites of production at the intersection of local contingencies and transnational developments.
Bill Brydon

Classroom contradictions: Popular media in Ontario schools' literacy and citizenship ed... - 0 views

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    "In 2003, the Ontario Ministry of Education in Canada began promoting popular media as a pedagogical tool, especially for 'reluctant' readers. This 'pedagogy of the popular' is instituted within a critical media literacy framework that draws on the values and codes of multiculturalism to counter the consumerist messages students encounter in nontraditional texts. The model of civic citizenship promoted by the critical media literacy curriculum, however, fails in its ambitions to provide a counterweight to the neo-liberal model of consumer citizenship. Insofar as its critique is grounded in a multicultural politics of representation, Ontario's media literacy curriculum fails to deeply interrogate the social roots of conflict and discrimination. As a result, it only weakly challenges, and is unlikely to displace, the post-Keynesian-era model of citizenship education in which the values of universality and inclusiveness are subsumed to an ethos that naturalizes the practices and moral codes of the marketplace."
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