Introduction to Rethinking Popular Culture and Media

I have mixed feelings about the scope of Elizabeth Marshall and Özlem Sensoy's introduction to Rethinking Popular Culture and Media.   If I want to locate the tension as a set of processes within myself, I can do that.   My religious identity and divinity education both lead me to accept a degree of acculturation by individuals and groups with traditional life orientation. At the same time  I want to resist having  modern or post-modern secular pre-suppositions order the narrative and set of priorities in such a manner as to find solutions that minimize the collective wisdom of narratives, institutions and communities that have been around much longer than the modern American-German hybrid research university model and its acceptable set of answers.  

If t ambivalent message in that there is a post-modern approach that leaves certain dimensions of life off of the table or at least does not bring them to the forefront of the discussion on how to have a critical method in Malala  

In light of my concerns examining he five point plan of the book that the authors introduce as a method of inquiry and action is necessary.  

Part 1: Study the Relationship Among Corporations, Youth, and Schooling

Who can argue with this foundational strategy?   I can only do it by expanding the scope of the study even though it does risk making a bit of an intellectual maze.   Why only corporations, youth and schooling?     Why not family structure and mediating institutions (churches, labor unions, NGO's, Boys and Girls clubs) also?   Corporations today hope to brand, that is own, the young person in her or his environment.  How is the young person, though vulnerable, still in many cases empowered?   How is it that Malala exists?   What positive and negative movements of mediating institutions and other local groupings have contributed to a young woman having such a profound sense of self that she can resist such cultural forces?   Isn't it a reduction to start only with three different stakeholders: students themselves, the school/education process and corporate players in a world that is much more complex than  those three dimensions?  

Their identification of the problem is stated in a rather critically detached manner that identifies the problem.  And what a problem it is.   The corporate influence is already so entrenched in public education in North America we take it as a natural order of being.  if our 99 state legislatures are beholden also to these same powers we must identify the stranglehold as opposed to identifying this as a profound crisis that indicates rapid cultural decay.  

Part 3: Examine Race, Class, Gender, Sexuality and Social Histories in Popular Culture and Media

 By all means!  But does this not call for an immediate identification of exclusion and naming how disordered and inverted society is?  Critical questions should be asked and students should be encouraged to think on their own but is it not pressing that shaking things up in perception  is a way that initiates work on  what they set up as part five Take Action for a Just Society?    

Inversion is necessary immediately.  We don't see things until they are turned upside down.   Betty Edwards tells us we can't really draw Igor Stravinsky until we see him upside down  http://everydayadrawing.com/2013/01/31/drawing-picasso-igor-stravinsky-upside-down/.


Jean Vanier, founder of L'Arche, tells us through his fifty years of experience that we must see the weak (mentally disabled, physically disabled) for what they are and come to be in vulnerable communion with them to actually understand them and ourselves as actually weak and vulnerable persons who live under the reciprocally deterministic illusions of our continual power, competence, and independence.   http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/becoming-human-jean-vanier/1100191764?ean=9780809145874

A recent feature on This American Life has recently done same to help us be open to inversion when the lie is named and unpacked, for instance "blind people can't do those sorts of things"  http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/544/batman 

And finally,  let inversion recast our whole culture.   Recall Horace Mitchell Miner's Body Ritual Among the Nacirema.   http://www.ohio.edu/people/thompsoc/Body.html   New pieces like this need to be written so as to expose our collective narcissism which the English understand that when either culture or counterculture takes place on this side of the Atlantic, it is Americans who continually take themselves too seriously.   

I know I probably am more on the same page as these two authors than I admit here but this approach has certainly been more adrenaline filled and helped me to survive to post at 11:12PM local time.