Group items tagged

"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."

"This paper contrasts the notion of 'independent learning' as perceived by two informant groups at a UK institution of higher education: (1) teachers, educators and providers of education and (2) their students or 'consumers' of education. Both informant groups are staff and students studying in a culture different to that of their first education. They are identified in their receiving institution as 'international', or have identified themselves as such. The experience of transition into a UK University was explored with both informant groups, through interviews and focus groups, over a cycle of two years. 'Independent learning' as rhetoric and practice emerged for both groups as an issue in their transition from familiar to unfamiliar learning culture. Three key insights emerged. Firstly, a mismatch is identified between teacher perceptions and student interpretation of 'independent learning' expectations and practice. Secondly, it emerges that student experience of the learning culture is in a state of continuous flux, evolving between first arrival and end of programme through cycles of bafflement and empowerment. Finally, both students and teachers identify a number of strategies for dealing with this experience of 'transitional' independence. The paper concludes by recommending a notion of 'phased scaffolding' that might inform educational practice and by reflecting on the implications for the educator in revisiting received educational discourse from the perspective of participants negotiating a second learning culture."

"This article aims to report a single case study of how an Islamic boarding school (pesantren) in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, prepared students for a multicultural Indonesia. Despite negative portrayal by the Western media about increasing Islamic radicalism in some pesantren, many pesantren are in fact transforming into modern Islamic institutions, incorporating the teaching of democratic values and practices, endorsing civil society and community development, and inculcating cultural/religious diversity and tolerance in students. Using schoolyard and classroom ethnographies, along with in-depth interviews and focus group discussions (FGD) with teachers and students, the study found that classroom and non-classroom practices of the pesantren promote the development of multicultural education. Several subjects within both curriculum developed by the government and curriculum developed by pesantrens discuss a considerable number of issues that relate to cultural and religious diversity, tolerance, citizenship and democracy. The non-classroom practices of pesantren offer invaluable and intensive experiences for students to socialise with peers from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. However, challenges remain for the kyai (the pesantren's great leader) and other leaders, such as teachers' lack of competency, unclear multicultural objectives in both the pesantren's curricula and the pesantren's traditions, and unequal relations among students and among teachers. These challenges must be overcome to further develop education for cultural diversity."

"Comparative research in multilingual urban primary schools indicates that the pedagogical and political goals of schooling may operate at cross-purposes. Classroom observations and teacher interview-discussions were conducted in classes for immigrant children in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where the language of instruction is French, and in classes in Pretoria, Gauteng Province, South Africa, where children from many different language backgrounds are taught in English. Two main themes emerged: (1) pedagogically, effective teacher-learner communication can break down when teachers are unaware of the roles that language and culture play in second language classrooms; (2) politically, efforts to assimilate learners into new socio-cultural/political contexts sometimes take precedence over sound pedagogical practice, such as drawing on the linguistic and cultural repertoire that learners bring to the classroom. This ongoing qualitative research underlines the importance of preparing pre-service and in-service teachers for the linguistic and cultural diversity they are bound to encounter in their classrooms, and of deepening their understanding of the influence of such diversity on the teaching-learning process."

"The cultural complexity of student populations presents major challenges for contemporary schooling in Western migrant nations such as Australia. While this has much to do with the diverse linguistic and ethnic backgrounds of students, other differences such as socio-economic status, family histories and gender add to this complexity. Yet, the complexities of education are not only a function of the cultural and social diversity of the student population. There are vast differences in students' educational and physical capital which are related but not reducible to these diversities. Complexity is inherent in the culture and philosophy of schooling; the processes of becoming literate, numerate and learning how to learn. While students have diverse needs, there are common skills that must be acquired, skills that are requisite for effective social participation in contemporary globalized societies. The challenge for education, and for dealing with complexity in any field, is to avoid being reductionist in the process. This article explores approaches to navigating these complexities in educational policy and practice, highlighting the ways in which simplistic understandings can prove problematic and yet, how certain forms of complexity reduction are necessary in achieving goals of educational access and equity."

Postcolonial theory, with its interpretations of race, racialization, and culture, offers us a set of powerful analytic tools to meet the epistemological challenge of giving voice to subjugated knowledges and the capacity to address and uncover social relationships within organizations. In particular, it opens up new ways of framing issues within organizational practices, enabling us to imagine new possibilities and practices. This paper suggests that the integration of postcolonial perspectives into cross-cultural management and its theorizing enhances and enriches its discursive import. The paper also attempts to sketch out a methodology to ground the intricate relationship between culture, practice, and organizations.

"In his article, "Globalization, Pedagogical Imagination, and Transnational Literacy," Ezra Yoo-Hyeok Lee explores the juncture of comparative literature, globalization and postcolonial studies as to how creative writers, literary critics, and cultural theorists respond to globalization and its challenges. Arjun Appadurai expounds that globalization has demanded new research conceptualization and invention in academia. Subsequently, Lee investigates methods through which educators and scholars in comparative literature take up such a demand. In turn, Lee proposes a transnational literacy which offers a responsible form of cultural explanation, through which to explore the interrelations between the national and the postcolonial or global paradigms, both emergent as frames of current cultural change. Lee also offers a close reading of critical works by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Diana Brydon, and David Damrosch to elaborate on the concept of transnational literacy and to consider ways of circumnavigating around Eurocentrism in comparative literary and cultural studies."

"Drawing on the case of Taiwan, this article looks at high-skilled migration from the West to Asia. I explore how Western high-skilled migrants exert agency to negotiate their positions as non-citizens, privileged others and professional workers. I have coined the term 'flexible cultural capital conversion' to describe how English-speaking Westerners convert their native-language skills, as a form of global linguistic capital, into economic, social and symbolic capitals. Their privileged positions are nevertheless mediated and constrained by their class, nationality, race/ethnicity and gender. In the global context, whiteness is marked as a visible identity and the 'superior other'. Such cultural essentialism functions as a double-edged sword that places white foreigners in privileged yet segregated job niches. Their flexibility in capital conversion and transnational mobility is territory-bound. Many experience the predicament of 'cultural ghettoisation' in the global South, and they often face grim job prospects on returning home to the North."

"It has long been a matter of concern that Indigenous students, as a group, do less well educationally than their non-Indigenous counterparts. Despite the evidence to support the fact that if students and their cultures are not acknowledged, they tend to be less engaged in schooling than those students whose cultures are presented as the norm. Indigenous studies are apt to be at the margins of the curriculum. In this article, therefore, a case is made for teaching Indigenous studies through a comparison of the author's home state of Western Australia with Montana-one of the few states in the United States to have mandated the teaching of Indian culture and history and to tease out lessons that could be learned because the teaching of Indigenous studies is a matter of social justice; indeed, it is a matter of urgency."

"This paper considers the intersection of Aboriginal traditions surrounding photography and the use of new technologies as both a research tool and a community resource. Over recent decades Australian cultural institutions have radically altered their management of photographic archives in response to changing political and intellectual circumstances - especially Indigenous advocacy. A sense of moral obligation has become the arbiter of new cultural protocols that have moved far beyond legal provisions for protecting intellectual property. Experiments with new digital tools attempt to understand and balance the role of photographs of Aboriginal people within Indigenous and Western knowledge systems. However, cultural protocols rely significantly upon representations of "remote" Aboriginal communities in northern Australia that emphasize difference and reify practices that may in fact be fluid, and overlap with Western values. In the aftermath of colonialism, photographs are important to Aboriginal communities, especially in southern Australia, not merely as an extension of tradition, but also in the context of colonial dispossession and loss. As a form of Indigenous memory the photographic archive may address the exclusions and dislocations of the recent past, recovering missing relatives and stories, and revealing a history of photographic engagement between colonial photographers and Indigenous subjects."

"This article contends that the effectiveness of Postcolonial Studies in the Brazilian Academy is inseparable from an understanding of the singularity of Portuguese colonization in Brazil, responsible for the ethnic and cultural formation of the country and for many of the forms taken by its social and economic development, from colonial and monarchic days to the present. Since postcolonial criticism illuminates and is illuminated by the cultural production of the past and present, in the comparison and confrontation of the different colonial systems and their aftermath, Postcolonial Studies may substantially contribute to the research on identity and other crucial issues-in the Brazilian case, notably the problematic of the so-called minority discourses, native cultures and the Afro-descendant legacy vis-à-vis the European heritage."

This article argues for a more systematic and integrated approach to the cultural dimension within English language education in a globalized world, with the concept of culture taking on an affectively related and process-oriented meaning. To this end, it suggests an approach for the development of the ability to decenter from cultural norms and behavior that previously have been taken for granted, within a social constructivist framework of learning. The study from which the article is drawn was conducted through action research in an EFL (English as a foreign language) classroom during the three final years of basic education within the Swedish-medium educational system in Finland.

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.

In recent decades there have been various calls for a pedagogical revolution in universities to address a new technology-savvy generation of students. These developments have been met with concern about the postmodern relativizing of educational achievement and accusations of the 'dumbing down' of course content. Moving beyond such culture war divisions between orthodox and progressive worldviews, this article outlines how reference to popular culture and utilization of its styles can result in student re-engagement with traditional learning materials and formats. Drawing on focus group interviews with students from an introductory sociology class that incorporated a specifically designed DVD, we outline the individual and societal benefits of a de-differentiated pedagogy that combines traditional rationalist education with more playful forms of learning that directly link with students' life-worlds.

The popularity of visual literacy may have resulted, in part, from some school authorities rushing the process of determining school curriculum. This article argues that the haste is reflective of pressure placed on educational discourse to conform to neo-liberal reforms of the sector, and is not the result of a careful and complex debate within the education community. In Australia, such reform has contributed to the erosion of visual art as a discrete subject in the general curriculum. The article accounts for the fact that the lack of careful debate may be due to art educators rehearsing tired arguments for retaining the place occupied by visual art, which smack of sentimentality. The author examines the conceptualisation of visual art at a cultural and theoretical level, and argues that by considering the function art has traditionally played in relation to conceptions of human subjectivity, we may disclose the marginalisation of visual art as a signal of much larger threats to political and economic structures in democratic society. The article considers whether the absorption of 'art' within a broader preference for visual communication, graphic design, or design and technology, is symptomatic of a long-term cultural stagnation.

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.

An enhanced pedagogy, informed by the contemporary Jungian idea of the cultural complex, may help reveal the invisible cultural prohibitions in transformative learning environments. In this article, transformative learning as individual knowledge and capa

This essay focuses on the cultural literacy that popular songs of lament in the Philippines in the1970s and 1980s created and depended on and discusses the way this cultural literacy contributed to the popular revolt against the dictatorship in 1986. I fo

Engaging the term rhetoricity, which refers both to Cultural Literacy as text and cultural literacy as concept, Cook claims that the most productive pedagogical component of Hirsch's proposal-the sophisticated rhetorical sensibility on which the entire co

Many UK universities offer degree programmes in English Language specifically for non-native speakers of English. Such programmes typically include not only language development but also development in various areas of content knowledge. A challenge that arises is to design courses in different areas that mutually support each other, thus providing students with a coherent degree programme. In this article, I will discuss a Bachelor of Arts programme involving Cultural Studies and Translation, as well as English Language and Linguistics. I will offer a rationale for a course in critical text analysis, which is offered in the final year of the programme. It is intended to promote language development and cultural awareness as well as skills of linguistic analysis and critical thinking.