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A Review for the essay and Presentation: Arguments from the articles in the Kit on University and Popular culture

A Review for the essay and Presentation: Arguments from the articles in the Kit on University and Popular culture. University and Society Popular culture Intellectualism Anti-intellectualism. A university is an institution of higher education and of research, which

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A Review for the essay and Presentation: Arguments from the articles in the Kit on University and Popular culture

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  1. A Review for the essay and Presentation: Arguments from the articles in the Kit on University and Popular culture

  2. University and Society • Popular culture • Intellectualism • Anti-intellectualism

  3. A university is an institution of higher • education and of research, which • grants academic degrees. • University shapes intellectuals • Its tools: disciplines, professors, curricula, • Libraries, readings • Outcome: Shaping individual’s minds, • thoughts, professions and careers.

  4. Popular culture shapes public assumptions and opinions on Intellectuals. • e.g.: movies or Ads shape the popular images of professors, students, and schools.

  5. Intellectualism: • Content and methods of one who pursues knowledge in science and art.

  6. Anti-intellectualism • describes hostility towards, or a mistrust of intellectuals, and their intellectual pursuits. • expressed in various ways: e.g., attack on the merits of science, education, or literature

  7. Anti-intellectualism (contd.) • Reflects an attitude that simply takes "intellectualism" with a grain of salt • Assumes that intellectuals may be vain or narcissistic in their self-image, • “Common people” view intellectuals as a fallible human archetype.

  8. Where does it exist? • In every country • Most influential in USA • New England Puritan writer John Cotton wrote in 1642: • "The more learned and witty you bee, the more fit to act for Satan will you bee."

  9. Popular cultural representations: Movies, TV and other pop media • Dimitriadis, G (2006) : • Representations have cumulative power • Conversations privilege certain thought and discourses • Dimitriadis, G. (2006) 'On the Production of Expert Knowledge: Revisiting Edward Said's work on the intellectual', Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 27:3, 369 – 382.

  10. On university & Popular culture • Morrison (2000): University must examine, evaluate, posit and reinforce values. • Giroux (2002): Corporate culture has intruded into and taken over the university • Tsoukas: Popular public assumption is the authorities’ knowledges (i.e. information) give them the power to manage the society.

  11. On popular media: Winter, J (2002): The repercussions of the media concentration in Canada for the general public are the loss of editorial autonomy of each paper and its columnists. corporate headquarters, not the editors make news judgments. In this process, dissenting views are censored and repressed. Yang, M., et al.(2006): Media advertising affects consumers' purchase decisions might not only be conscious but unconscious. Characters’ use of brands and a story association with brands than brands placed in the background are recognized at higher levels of cognition. Andrejevic, M (2011): Relentless privatization of a publicly funded Internet as a public space has led to the commercial colonization that turned it into an economy based on surveillance. This power of surveillance manages & controls consumers in their behaviour on the web. Commercialization manipulates the social relations between the users and the commercial entity to control users’ access and to commercially benefit from tracking the public that empowered it.

  12. Uses of popular media for health monitoring: Bauer & Olsen (2009): monitoring and imaging of the body and digital databases – collect data on population health becomes surveillance in new ways. Surveillance modes: Panoptic, oligoptic and synoptic , together operate in medical observation. Techniques of surveillance monitors the individual patient’s body As it is deployed in making clinical decisions upon the medical evidence and in preventing health problems. Surveillance being inherent to diagnostics in the present times, it is a key mechanism in governing populations.

  13. Is Online learning a system for managing and controlling people according to the objectives, i.e., to regulate learning • Stricker et al. (2011): If Online learning combined with lecture in class may not increase students’ workload much, while improving their course performance • In contrast, several studies have shown that online learning may increase students’ workload, and may lead to a higher dropout rate of online learners (Carr, 2000; Dutton, Dutton, & Perry, 2002). • Is online learning a ‘disciplining’ or self-actualizing process? • Good achievement via self-regulated learning requires a strong will to learn and excellent learning skills (Torrano & González, 2004).

  14. Junco, R, et al 2011). Twitter communication, engagement, and the democratization of roles and relationships mobilized faculty to query students and more mutual conversations academic, co-curricular, and personal support

  15. Social Networking (popular media) as an educational tool: • Educational use of social networking technology in higher education (Hsiu-Ting Hung and Steve Chi-Yin Yuen) • SN facilitates: • development of classroom communities • strengthening students’ emotional connectedness • participants’ enhanced engagement and mutual support

  16. Hung & Yuen (cont’d) • Foucault: Discipline: People are regulated by instruments of power which organize their space (architecture) and time (schedule). • Hung & Yuen: Students’ perceptions of enhanced sense of classroom community were closely related to the information sharing function and the interaction function of the social media. • Foucault: Surveillance: A constant gaze controls the prisoners affecting not only what they do but how they see themselves • Hung & Yuen: Students’ perceptions of enhanced sense of classroom community were closely related to the information sharing function and the interaction function of the social media. • Foucault: Discourse: “Practices of obeying certain rules” • Hung & Yuen Social networking for building ‘community of learners’: sharing personal interests -This course site was fun and interesting-feel more connected and closer to them-expect to get feedback

  17. Kelly, P. et al (2007): Individualization, Normalization & Body shaped by knowledge/power • F’s ethical self formation through diversity of conduct: • Determination of ethical substance • Mode of subjection • Ethical work • Purpose of the ethical subject • A ‘Corporate Athlete’: normalized body; health of the body over the role of the mind; profile score of body fitness; corporate health is linked to employees’ health; freedom/ethics of self is practiced in pursuit of management devised (outsourced) goals; one becomes such a person through the discursive practices: being balanced, effective, regular.

  18. F’s Ethical self: F’s themes for Plagiarism/cheating Advanced Capitalist society: cut-throat competition, insecurities and uncertainties in the workplace. ‘Individualized’ worker/citizen: They have to exercise/practice their freedom in specific ways that conforms to the expectation of the market place F’s term ‘Conduct’: equivocal in nature- is it conformity to power as it suits one’s purpose or is it questioned as unethical Character (Sennett, R. (1998) cited in Kelly (2007)): loyalty, mutual commitment, ethical value of our desires and of our relations with others. How do we decide what is of lasting value in ourselves in a society that pushes immediate gratification? F’s process of formation of an ethical self.

  19. Judith Butler: • http://www.egs.edu/faculty/judith-butler/articles/foucault-and-the-paradox-of-bodily-inscriptions/ • Resist normative power • Gender Trouble: normalization is repeated performance – normative is repetition of the norm • Resist hierarchal binarism • e.g.: drag queens- better women (high normative feminism) compared to women • Subversion by changing a little each time you represent through disruption • Repetitions often fail to perfectly conform to the norms that inspire/require them. • How many of us fail to perform ideal (hetero, white, able-bodied, middle-class) masculinity or femininity? Even most hetero white able-bodied middle-class women fail to perform ideal femininity • In the potential for (intentionally or unintentionally) imperfect repetitions, that disciplinary power produces its own resistances.

  20. Truth is produced by institutions and by scientific discourses formulated in relation to these institutions • The state’s (or any organized) dominant economic and political structures control the production and transmission of the truth • We assume it is truth when it becomes ‘hardened into an unalterable form in the long baking process of history’ • http://jamintoo.multiply.com/recipes/item/70?&show_interstitial=1&u=%2Frecipes%2Fitem • F’s Genealogy’s role: • to connect different events according to ‘the emergence of different interpretations’ • to explain these different interpretations as a ‘perspective’ rather than a universal or transcendental truth. • Foucault utilizes genealogy to figure out the various practices applied on the body and the dominating powers that produce such practices.

  21. Foucault: • Constructing the Docile Bodies through Disciplines, the new political technology of the body (137) : • Cellular (located bodies in (spatial Enclosures) • Organic (Specified Repetitive activities) • Genetic (Trained and Timed in hard work of production) • Combinatory :Division of labourand organizing ranks & classes as units of production- Marx, Capital, vol. 1. 311-12) (Hierarchical Isolation) • COG-D of L THIERS • http://www.firstpost.com/topic/person/michel-foucault-docile-bodies-vs-college-soccer-video-FERxP_8qmJU-9332-3.html

  22. Source: http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/docile-bodies see examples on blogs • Cellular—Spatial manipulation of the body • Draw up tables • Cells, places, and ranks • Organic—Coded activities that are temporally established for the body to follow • Prescribe movements and schedules • Time-tables, monastic rituals, and following recipes • Genetic—Accumulation of time constituting ‘progress.’ • Impose exercises • Dictation, Homework, and Drills • Combinatory—Composition of forces to attain efficiency. • Arranges ‘tactics’ • “Knowledge of men, weapons, tensions, circumstances…”

  23. Explained another way: • Disciplined bodies, e.g., in prisons, the military, the corporate world and in schools. Modern Times (Chaplin US 1936), …Gattaca(Niccol US 1997), • Spatial division of individuals • Control of their activities, • Organization of individuals into groups • Coordination of these different groups

  24. Morrison (2000): How to resist docility: • (Cellular) University must teach students to examine their own values and those of society.spatial Enclosures • (Organic) Process: Interrogation of U’s purpose:Specified Repetitive • (Genetic) Students/ profs. must be encouraged to:Trained and Timed • do public volunteer service • debate readings and their political implications • do research for public good not private profit • interrogate complex ethical problems • (D of L): University’s role: Hierarchical Isolation • Guard civic freedoms through ensuring democratic practices • Examine social problems and individual responsibilities in establishing ethics/truth in behaviour

  25. Giroux: • Higher education • is seen as a commodity (C spatial Enclosures) • embodies value of market driven self interest (G Trained and Timed) • promotes consumer life styles (O Specified Repetitive activities) • produces market identity (G Trained and Timed) • lacks accountability & social responsibility (D of LHierarchical Isolation)

  26. Giroux: Corporate funding of and corporate culture in higher education: • Corporate control over what and how we learn/research in univ. reduces ability of the state and civil society spatial Enclosures (univ. not open to shape one’s self or social values) • Driven by profit motive - ‘applied’ (vs. ‘pure’) research Trained and Timed • Experiments at the cost of ethics Specified Repetitive activities • Advances vocational learning vs. pure knowledge Trained and Timed

  27. F’ s Savoir and Connaissance : • Savoir: (what we call real knowledge) • To know or to be known – to know as well as knowledge • e.g., a theorem, a continent, an atom, • It can be quite abstract or concrete • Such knowledge is not genuine if its object is nonexistent or false • It need not be the product of a reliable method or pedagogy • It need not be precise or fully justified • It can fall short of proof—a domain not of things known but of things to be known • Connaissance: relatively superficial mode of knowledge, • Grounded in incomplete information or incomplete research or knowledge of minimal degree • It could only be translated as cognition or learning or a body of learning or expertise • Tied to highly developed apparatuses of justification , modes of competence supported by well-crystallized apparatuses of background training. • A cognitive state is an effect of power

  28. Foucault ‘s biopower • It is a technology which appeared in the late eighteenth century for managing populations. • It incorporates disciplinary power. • Disciplinary power is about training the actions of individuals (their bodies) • Biopower is that of official organizations (the state or government) managing the society: births, deaths, reproduction and illnesses of a population. • Refer to the practice of modern states and their regulation of their subjects through "an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations.” (Foucault).

  29. Humphreys, A (2007): • Foucault’s examples of power/knowledge at work in mechanisms of discipline cf. in the science of marketing. Marketers’ use Internet tools to discipline consumers by individuating, surveying, and legitimizing their preferences • Documentation of every individual • Essentialize them using their past and present preferences to diagnosing future tendencies (psychoanalyst has expertise, “knowledge claim”, and thus power over his patient) • Mechanism of individuation by “wish list” i.e., consumer identity (classifying, organizing, and labeling them) for marketing analysis • Consumers living in our narcissistic culture want to be watched. Not paranoids as being seen in the Panopticon • In image culture, the embeddedness of the gaze i.e., gaze is internalized by controlling how consumers themselves see • Consumer insists that he then can reason and resist, e.g. Illegalities: Pilfering Versus File Sharing these forms of resistance from within occur in the form of practice, i.e.,ethics rather than morals.

  30. Foucault: Biopower constructs a Docile Body • Objectified Body • Controlled Body • Disciplined body • Discipline is the Technology of Power that turns the body docile. • Repetitive, trained: • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfFhuj1VONw

  31. Power shapes bodies into : (Foucault, Michel (1995). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.) • Objectified Body • From the Classical age : the body as object, a target of power - body is manipulated, shaped trained, made to obey and learn skills & rules - body is used, subjected and analyzed and manipulated • 2. Controlled Body: • Works individually in retail - Coercion is used to shape/ ‘improve’ movement, attitudes, gestures; Body’s modes and economy are tailored for efficient control through uninterrupted coercion • 3. Disciplined body: • The body is disciplined through surveillance and control in all aspects as to turn it docile. Discipline produces ‘pracitised bodies’ .

  32. Objectified Body • From the Classical age : the body as object, a target of power - body is manipulated, shaped trained, made to obey and learn skills & rules - body is used, subjected and analyzed and manipulated • Keller (2005):Ab/Normal Looking: Voyeurism and surveillance in lesbian pulp novels and US Cold War culture, Feminist Media Studies, 5 (2):177-195. • Popular culture is the space of homogenization - Stereotyping objectifies the matter, person and experience • Voyeurism controls the private, the sexual – Surveillance controls the public, the criminal, and political. • Bond & Playboy - Gaze, the voyeuristic eye, coding woman as its object [Popular culture is] the space of homogenization where stereotyping and the formulaic mercilessly process the material and experiences it draws into its web ... It is rooted in popular experience and available for expropriation at one and the same time ... [A]ll popular cultures ... are] bound to be contradictory ... site[s] (pp. 469-70) of strategic contestation. (Stuart Hall 1996, )

  33. 2. Controlled Body: (Foucault) • Works individually in retail - Coercion is used to shape/ ‘improve’ movement, attitudes, gestures; Body’s modes and economy are tailored for efficient control through uninterrupted coercion • Keller (2005): • Coercion through voyeurism: • Voyeurism in popular culture serves as a method for the dominant culture to control the Other • Voyeurism is also a desire to identify with the Other while simultaneously desiring to guard the boundary between self and Other • Inscribing the self : The gaze controls and punishes: We “come to know how we are constituted and who we are“ through the way we represent and imagine ourselves • Desires are both satiated and punished

  34. 3. Disciplined body: The body is disciplined through surveillance and control in all aspects as to turn it docile. Discipline produces ‘practiced bodies’ Disciplining a result of : Media systematically objectifies bodies – the public are socialized to assume an outsider’s view of their body. They learn to objectify themselves. Thus, surveillance and monitoring their appearance becomes a habit (“body Surveillance”) (Aubrey, 2006)

  35. Kelly, P. et al (2007): Individualization, Normalization & Body shaped by knowledge/power • F’s ethical self formation through diversity of conduct: • Determination of ethical substance • Mode of subjection • Ethical work • Purpose of the ethical subject • A ‘Corporate Athlete’: normalized body; health of the body over the role of the mind; profile score of body fitness; corporate health is linked to employees’ health; freedom/ethics of self is practiced in pursuit of management devised (outsourced) goals; one becomes such a person through the discursive practices: being balanced, effective, regular.

  36. Why Care of the Self? “In the abuse of power, one exceeds the legitimate exercise of one’s power and imposes one’s fantasies, appetites and desires on others…But one can see…that such a man is the slave of his appetites. And the good ruler is precisely the one who exercises his power as it ought to be exercised, that is, simultaneously exercising his power over himself”

  37. How Do We Care for the Self? “Freedom is the ontological condition of ethics. But ethics is the considered form that freedom takes when it is informed by reflection.” Ontological: the nature of being, existence, or reality

  38. ASKESIS – the exercises one practices that aid in the cultivation of an ethical self, particularly (but not limited to) acts of self-deprivation and introspection http://foucault.info/documents/parrhesia/foucault.DT5.techniquesParrhesia.en.html

  39. What is Enlightenment? “The critical ontology of ourselves must be considered not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it must be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits imposed upon us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.”

  40. “In the Apology, one sees Socrates presenting himself to his judges as the teacher of self-concern. He is the man who accosts passersby and says to them:” • “You concern yourself with your wealth, your reputation, and with honors, but you don’t worry about your virtue and your soul.”

  41. References: • Foucault, Michel. “The Thought of the Outside” The Essential Foucault. New York: The New Press, 1994. 423-441. • Foucault, Michel. “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom” Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. New York: The New Press, 1994. 281-301. • Foucault, Michel. “Technologies of Self” Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. New York: The New Press, 1994. 221-251. • Foucault, Michel. “What Is Critique?” The Essential Foucault. New York: The New Press, 1994. 263-278. • Foucault, Michel. “What is Enlightenment?” Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. New York: The New Press, 1994. 303-319. • Foucault, Michel. “Hermeneutic of the Subject” The Essential Foucault. New York: The New Press, 1994. 93-106.

  42. Globalization and commercialization of medical care (Turner, 2006) • Informationalknowledge systems and e-health • Increased power and dominance of bio-medical sciences • Combination of micro-biology and informational knowledge systems proffer new technologies for reproduction, selection of enhanced human traits and genetic engineering • Creation of free markets in body parts through popular media • Medical knowledge is not a product of ethical scientific research made up of the conventional procedures. • Power produces medical research and new knowledge as it is dominated by private corporations

  43. Turner: Hospital Three levels of this ‘spatialization’ of disease (Foucault, 1973) Disease ontologies are differentiated by resemblance and  analogy Disease is mapped onto the human body, moves from organ to organ, undergoes metamorphosis Specialization: a disease is circumscribed, medically invested, isolated, divided up into closed, privileged regions, or distributed throughout cure centres, arranged in the most favourable way’ (Foucault, 1973)  Contradictions between the medical ethic of curing the patient and the medical economy, which derives profit from the life-long maintenance of illness. Corporate & global medical systems transformed the professionalism i.e., medical dominance (state authorizes) and the consulting ethic (needs Public trust) -

  44. Azzarito (2010) • Surveillance: • The feminine docile body: ‘woman-as-Panopticon.’ • The power of the media as a surveillance mechanism presenting and reiterating ideals of high-status femininity. • The media defines and circumscribes the feminine body as a complement to and/or in opposition to the masculine body in normative ways.

  45. Azzarito (2010) (cont’d): Objectification: popular culture constructs unrealistic ideals of women’s bodies Normal/abnormal: normalizes stereotypes of race and gender Celebrating slenderness, lack of muscularity and athleticism. Dieting and fitness practices promoted in health, fitness and fashion magazines serve as technologies of the self for achieving ‘perfection,’ an unattainable, monodimensional notion of slenderness with its promise of ideal femininity

  46. Azzarito (2010) (cont’d) Discourse: media offers ever more important sites of pedagogizing girls’ construction of their bodies The Muslim girl’s body remains portrayed not only as a covered body, a ‘silent body,’ but also as an oppressed and constrained female physicality  Racial and other minorities are often misrepresented by the media, esp. in Hollywood movies

  47. Disciplining: Media can impact viewers to learn their values, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors as media content normalize models of these which then are disseminated as popular culture (see, Bandura, 1986, 1989, 1994, 2001). Popular views of normal/abnormal of : Who the girls/women are: What types of behaviors; What types of motivations; parents & the nature of relationships within families ‘House of certainty’ is set up for controlling gender related activities and physicality

  48. Dryburg & Fortin (2010) Ballet & Docile body: • Surveillance: • Idealized images of the body in media • ‘The ballet studio is a panoptic place,’ the barre as “backstage”, is a place of surveillance by instructors, and self-surveillance by dancers looking in the mirror. • Self-surveillance of the body as well as the adaptation of social behaviour. • The mirror encourages body surveillance and often reminds the dancer that her body does not match the ideal body type • Lateral surveillance manifests itself as competitive observation and comparison of appearance and habits between dancers

  49. Objectification • Audience ‘gaze’ of ‘physical appearance’, ‘beautiful lines’ and an ‘ideal body type’. • Body scrutinized more closely after being asked to shed some pounds • Under weight surveillance, dancers tend to think of themselves as a ‘mass of flesh’ (a blob) rather than as an artist

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