Media Representation of Identity and Social Issues in the Series Wednesday

BLURB FOR TOTAL PROP MAILER Total Propaganda moves the study of propaganda out of the exclusive realm of world politics into the more inclusive study of popular culture, media, and politics. All the participatory functioning elements of the society are aspects of membership in the popular culture. Thus, the values of popular music, media, politics, debates over social issues, and even international trade become everyday propaganda to which everyone may relate. To emphasize the necessity for new thinking about propaganda, Edelstein creates the concepts of the new propaganda and the old, and he devises a language of uninyms to convey their meanings more quickly. Oldprop is characteristic of mass cultures and utilizes totalitarian methods of conflict, hegemony, minimization, demonization, and exclusiveness to achieve its goals. By contrast, newprop is created by members of the popular culture to allow them to engage in accomodation, enhance the individual, and promote inclusiveness. Shifts in the old and the new propaganda are tracked across social issues such as race, religion, sexuality, gender, gun control, and the environment, as well as in fashion, politics, advertising, sports, media, and politics. Central to the concept of total propaganda is that it is not simply additive; it is the product of new energies that are produced by the fusing of propaganda in such related forums as music, art, advertising, sports and politics. It is these synergies, and their production of new energies, that make total propaganda greater than the sum of its parts. Edelstein concludes that the most important distinction that should be drawn between mass culture and popular culture is its text; i.e., its propaganda. In a popular culture, everyone creates and consumes propaganda; in a mass culture almost everyone consumes it but only a few create it. This formulation offers new ways to discuss power and ideology in media texts. As an example, where once the least informed and the least educated were the most subject to propaganda, now the most informed and most educated often are the first to create propaganda and the first to consume it. FORMER BLURB COPY.......It is widely recognized that the mass media provide us with ample information which we use to construct some sense of the world around us. It is not as widely recognized that consumers of media messages are active in this constructive process, making meanings that are sensible to them in particular life circumstances. The media target a younger, more media savvy generation who are more likely to be participants in the messages than members of any previous generation. This participatory aspect of new media is central to what the author defines as the new propaganda. Although critical and cultural theories are often prohibitive for undergraduate students, the author's formulation offers an accessible way to discuss power and ideology in media texts. Without using the critical discourse, he provides compelling arguments that power and ideology are created and maintained through the active participation of audience members. The conceptualization of the old and new propagandas helps move the study of propaganda out of the realm of world politics into the study of popular culture. The author views all of the participatory functioning of the society as aspects of membership in a more embracing popular culture. This point of view recognizes that the mass media are extremely important forces in the consumer's construction of reality and that they are no longer exclusive channels for disseminating the messages of the powerful elites. Instead, the media -- particularly the new media -- are accessible to and used frequently by less powerful members of society -- children, ethnic minorities, and marginal members of society -- to create realities that more satisfactorily fulfill their needs. NEW BLURB COPY FOR GENERAL CATALOGS... Total Propaganda is a fresh answer to the question of the inclusiveness of the popular culture. It demonstrates how the values of popular music, media, politics, debates over social issues, and international trade have become everyday propaganda to which everyone relates in some way. Edelstein demonstrates that the most important distinction that can be drawn between mass culture and popular culture is its text (i.e., its propaganda). In a popular culture, everyone creates and consumes propaganda, whereas in a mass culture, almost everyone consumes but only a few create it. This book presents a new language of propaganda that makes it possible to draw comparisons between mass and popular cultures. The language is used to observe shifts in propaganda across various social issues -- race, religion, sexuality, gender, gun control, the environment, print and broadcast media, new technologies, and politics. It also examines fashion, advertising, sports, and lobbying. Total Propaganda is not defined only quantitatively; it mirrors the synergies that have come about in every social and political realm and the energies that these synergies produce. As such, the sum of total propaganda is greater than the sum of its parts.

Total Propaganda

Ethical, social, and cultural issues related to clinical genetic testing and counseling in low- and middle-income countries: a systematic review

Self-Directed Growth is a valuable map to the no-man’s land where education, philosophy, adult-development, and counseling meet. This is the trackless waste that we usually encounter when we try to explore the relation between learning and personal meaning. The book helps the student wrestle with issues of identity, knowledge, change, and purpose. Betteryet, it does so in a clear sequence of steps that keep the student on track. With the average” student today being more and more likely to be beyond the traditional college age, this map of the territory of self-directed learning is long overdue. Too many of its would-be competitors err either by being about adult education,” while leaving out anything for learners themselves, or by being cookbooks full of recipes for how to throw off the past or dive into the future, while leaving out the critical process of learning. Robertson’s book will be used in many ways. Self-directed learners, either inside an educational institution or outside, will use it to launch themselves on journeys of self-discovery. Groups of them, working under the guidance of a mentor, will use it as a text for exciting new kinds of courses. And teachers will use it as a guide to reorienting their own efforts away from implanting content and toward developing students.

The Walking Dead and Gothic Excess: The Decaying Social Structures of Contagion

Purpose: This research examines postmodernism's influence in social and political change and its relationship to popular culture. It examines how postmodernism changed media studies, cultural anthropology, gender studies, and youth culture. This study seeks to address gaps in our knowledge by analyzing how postmodern notions promote a more flexible cultural analysis and challenge traditional identity and representation theories. Materials and Methods: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, and Angela McRobbie are among the postmodernists and cultural theorists explored in the book. Ethnographic, empirical, political, feminist, and cultural studies are used to study popular culture's evolution. This multidisciplinary research examines fashion, media, and moral panics in current youth culture to analyse cultural shifts. Findings: Postmodernism makes individuals doubt their beliefs, which fractures and changes their identities, according to the research. It concludes that cultural studies must remain flexible and unrigorous to address current social and political issues. The study shows that postmodernism has changed youth culture, media consumption, and gender relations. Additionally, it examines how famous cultural theorists have affected postmodernism and mainstream media discourse. Implications to Theory, Practice and Policy: Cultural studies must evolve to keep up with postmodern society's changing dynamics, according to study. It claims that empirical and interdisciplinary research are needed to understand cultural changes. It also invites cultural experts to investigate popular culture more openly and flexibly and reevaluate feminist theory in postmodern contexts.

Practices of branding, promotion, and persona have become dominant influences structuring identity formation in popular culture. Creating an iconic brand identity is now an essential practice required for politicians, celebrities, global leaders, and other public figures to establish their image within a competitive media landscape shaped by consumer society. This dissertation analyzes the construction and circulation of Vivienne Westwood, Barack Obama, and Pope Francis as iconic brand identities in contemporary media and consumer culture. The content analysis and close textual analysis of select media coverage and other relevant material on key moments, events, and cultural texts associated with each figure deconstructs the media representation of Westwood, Obama, and Pope Francis. The brand identities of Westwood, Pope Francis, and Obama ultimately exhibit a unique form of iconic symbolic power, and exploring the complex dynamics shaping their public image demonstrates how they have achieved and maintained positions of authority. Although Westwood, Obama, and Pope Francis initially were each positioned as outsiders to the institutions of fashion, politics, and religion that they now represent, the media played a key role in mainstreaming their image for public consumption. Their iconic brand identities symbolize the influence of consumption in shaping how issues of public good circulate within public discourse, particularly in regard to the economy, health care, social inequality, and the environment. Westwood, Obama, and Pope Francis are also texts used to promote the institutions they represent, and it is this aspect of their public image that illuminates the inherent contradictions between individual and institution underlying their brand identities. Interrogating the iconic identities of Westwood, Obama, and Pope Francis reveals how it is the labour and strategy behind the brand that creates meaning in consumer culture. Westwood, Obama, and Pope Francis are important figures for analysis because their iconic brand identities transcend the foundations of fashion, politics, and religion, and more significantly, demonstrate how branding as a promotional strategy is not unique to any particular realm or institution but a technique utilized by public figures regardless of the celebrity or elite status associated with their position.

This book offers readers opportunities to explore the most common universal themes taught in secondary English Language Arts classrooms using contemporary young adult literature. Authors discuss adolescence and adolescent readers, young adult literature and its possibilities in the classroom, and ways to teach thematic analysis. The book provides context, traditional approaches to teaching and examples of thematic explorations of each of the chosen themes. Chapters include developed teaching instructional units to study three universal themes: a journey of self-discovery; good vs. bad, right vs. wrong, and making difficult choices, and developing positive self-perception. Each instructional unit includes rationale, essential questions and objectives, calendar plans for up to six weeks, examples of introductory, reading and discussing, and enrichment activities and assessments. The activities target academic skills for ELA curricula and create safe spaces for exploring topics of identity struggles and personal growth complicated by social issues, all of which adolescents face today. Each instructional chapter suggests a wide range of additional texts and resources for theme explorations.

T H E J E W I S H QUA R T E R LY RE V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 4 (Fall 2004) 694–709 Reading the Popular in American Jewish Studies LAURENCE ROTH MICHAEL IMMERSO. Coney Island: The People’s Playground. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002. Pp. viii Ⳮ 199. LAWRENCE J. EPSTEIN. The Haunted Smile: The Story of Jewish Comedians in America. New York: PublicAffairs, 2001. Pp. xxii Ⳮ 356. Heeb: The New Jew Review. Spring 2003. The Plotz Retrospective. The Philadelphia Museum of Jewish Art at Congregation Rodeph Shalom, Philadelphia. April 25–August 17, 2003. Michael Immerso’s and Lawrence J. Epstein’s wide-ranging histories help crystallize a number of trends, and problems, in contemporary scholarship on the popular arts in American and American Jewish life. Both books attempt to convey to a broad readership a compelling story about the rise and fall of a popular phenomenon. Both are ‘‘celebrations’’ of those phenomena, and examples of how such popular scholarship— scholarship aimed primarily at lay readers—is informed and legitimated by the recent boom in the theory and criticism of mass culture, popular culture, the vernacular, and the everyday. Such upbeat interpretations appeal to America’s current fascination with its commodities and with the mundane bric-a-brac of its modern life, as well as with its entertainments and entertainment-delivery systems. Call these stories cultural solipsism in the face of global turbulence and instability, or call them a critical rereading and unpacking of American identities and cultural hegemony, in either case they now have a market value as high as any Britney Spears collectible on eBay. Much fun can be had in lampooning this publishing trend—witness the humor column in the October 6, 2003, issue of the New Yorker that The Jewish Quarterly Review (Fall 2004) Copyright 䉷 2004 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved. READING THE POPULAR—ROTH 695 offered mock book reviews of historical studies of vanilla (The Flavor That Changed the World), pet cats (The House Cat That Changed the World), and wallets (The Pocket Lint That Changed the World). But for those of us interested in how questions of race, class, ethnicity, gender, politics, and religion intersect with our readings of the everyday and our consumption of the popular arts, satires such as this are instructive. They remind us that, in light of the current obsession with everything popular, we must pay careful and close attention to the culturally specific ways in which representations of individual and collective identities are being shaped and reshaped, told and retold, in the popular arts. This is especially true when that process is examined in books like Immerso’s and Epstein’s histories. For the importance of those histories is that they illustrate to readers why popular and mass culture are the dominant social-construction engines in modern America. In both these books we are invited to contemplate how the boundaries and bridges between individuals and collectives—and between past, present, and future—are conjured and reinterpreted in the popular and mass-culture realms. Andreas Huyssen persuasively argues that it is through the media and information technologies embedded in these realms that ‘‘the sense of lived time is being renegotiated in our contemporary cultures of memory.’’1 This transformation of the human perception of time, space, and identity erupts into the popular imaginary in movies like Christopher Nolan’s Memento or Darren Aronofsky’s Pi, and spills over into a cultural need for the sorts of reassurances and solutions provided by the popular arts. For scholars of American Jewish popular culture and literature, books such as Epstein’s and Immerso’s, and ‘‘alternative’’ publications such as Heeb and Plotz: The Zine for the Vaclempt, offer an opportunity to consider how American Jewish studies is an important site of struggle over two questions: How best to unravel the scope and power of American popular and mass culture, and who constitutes the audience for that project. Jeffrey Melnick takes up these questions in a recent review essay, when he outlines what scholarship in American Jewish studies ought to look like if it aspires to be a relevant mode of contemporary inquiry...

This chapter presents a pedagogical approach to fostering respectful and inclusive student relations. Rather than a narrow focus on managing or controlling students, this approach enables a broad and located view of student behaviour that seeks to develop and extend students’ understandings of themselves and others. A key premise here is that many ‘misbehaviours’ in classrooms are associated with issues of identity and power and, in particular, the ways in which conventional classrooms and teacher–student relations tend to render students with little power or agency. Acting out or against this positioning as a means of asserting a sense of power or legitimacy is often at the root of disruptive or harmful behaviours. Thus, it is contended here that beginning to transform such behaviours necessitates an environment where students are accorded a voice and where they are supported to reflect critically on issues of power and identity in connected and meaningful ways. The chapter explores these issues with reference to the practices of ‘Rachel’, the deputy principal of a working-class secondary school in Queensland. Her practice is theorised drawing on the Productive Pedagogies model – a model designed as a meta-language for teachers to reflect on ways that they can integrate social justice issues within, rather than separate to, the pedagogical process. Given that boys continue to perpetuate the lion’s share of disciplinary transgressions in schools, the focus in this chapter is on issues of masculinity.

International Handbook of Research in Arts Education

The Curious Transformation of Boy to Computer

The popularity of Korean pop (K-Pop) culture can be seen through the growth of a massive fan base without age restrictions, and is currently the largest in the music and entertainment industry. K-Pop fans who occupy a fandom are known as K-Popers. This present study explains the representation of identity in essence, as according to Hall - is related to the use of language, and represents a “blurring” of meaning by a cultural industry aiming for commercialisation. The result of this research shows the process of blurring meaning by talent agencies that produce K-Pop idols as the main product that represent them by carrying important values that will be adapted and consumed by fans with strong loyalty and emotional connection. The agency is a cultural business industry that sells its “products” such as K-Pop idols that they have introduced to fans, and refers to their “existence” that is consumed by fans. This study used a virtual ethnographic approach with data collection techniques through participant observation and interviews. Each of these main products has its own unique concept as every fan will feel special and exclusive as K-Pop music is a sense of "individuality" developed by the K-Pop culture and industry. Based on the results of observations on Instagram, we can find various types of fans to describe how they adapt the meaning that is sold by the agency through the products they sell. Keywords: Popular culture, K-Pop idol, identity, culture industry, identity representation.

In this article, Cameron McCarthy takes us to the terrain of the new dynamics taking place in the U.S. racial order at the end of the century. These developments are powerfully articulated in the aggravated representation of racial identities in popular discourses. Specifically, McCarthy alerts us to the new ideological configurations in our popular culture and civic life that foreground the dangerous expansion of identity politics into the white suburbs and the triumphant prosecution of middle-class morality in the discourses of popular culture and public policy. McCarthy describes a broad pattern of racial instability, racial recoding, and racial incorporation taking place in American society as we enter the twenty-first century. Drawing on the theories of identity formation in the writings of C.L.R. James and Friedrich Nietzsche, McCarthy argues that the contemporary electronic media—particularly, film and television—play a critical role in the production, coordination, and channeling of suburban resentment and retributive morality onto their central target: the depressed inner city.

Straipsnyje, remiantis istoriniais pavyzdžiais, protesto grupių Femen ir Pussy Riot atvejais, meno grupių Voina ir Zmena veiklos analize, kalba­ma apie vaizdingų pranešimų manifestacijos, reprezentacijos ir skaitmeninio paskirstymo santykį. Meniškumo mažėjimas ir protesto akcijų rengimas sie­kiant bent iš dalies patenkinti politikos vartotojų geismus ir iš jų kylančius poreikius šiandien derinamas su pilietiniais ir komerciniais siekiniais vienu metu. Meniškumo supaprastėjimas iki elementaraus gatvės, darbininkiško meno, iki populiarių vaizdų pasiūlos, kuri kartu tenkina ir politikos paklau­są socialiniuose tinkluose, dera su didėjančia skaitmeninių technologijų ir pranešimų sklaida. Straipsnyje teigiama, kad ne tiek komunikaciniai veiks­mai, kaip manė J. Habermasas, kiek komercinis ir politinis juslumo ir este­zio paskirstymas – tai aprašė J. Ranciere’as, bei menamai laisvas vartojimas veikia vartotojiškas-pilietines nuostatas. Naujasis komunikacinis, vartotojiš­kas-pilietinis sąmoningumas priklauso nuo skaitmeninėje erdvėje platinamų turinio, kalbos, sukeliamos euforijos, kurią šiuolaikinės kūrybinės ir infor­macinės industrijos išlaiko, reprodukuoja komerciniais tikslais, o ne norėda­mas atitikti specifinius moralinius ar politinius idealus. Tuo galima paaiškinti Femen iš dalies antifeministinį elgesį, nuolatinį apsinuoginimą, komercinį bendradarbiavimą, kuris lemia pilietinį pasirinkimą. Kritinis mąstymas ir lyderystė masinio paskirstymo ir vartojimo atveju yra ne vieno ideologinio naratyvo išpažinimas ir kitų atmetimas, o keleto skirtingų pasakojimų ar vi­zualių siužetų atitikimas. Taip yra sukuriama laisvės, kritiškumo, revoliu­cingumo iliuzija. Kaip priešybė paskirstomajai-spektakliškai manipuliacijai nagrinėjami performatyvaus išcentrinimo ir skaitmeninio kūrybinio situacio­nizmo veiksmai, kuriuos iš dalies atitinka Pussy Riot atvejis. Vis dėlto Voina ir Zmena meno grupių veiklos analizė rodo, kad nekomercinis protestas, be kryptingo informacijos paskirstymo ir sąveikos su masine paklausa elektro­niniuose tinkluose, yra mažai efektyvus. Todėl straipsnio pabaigoje aptaria­ma pasipriešinimo taktika, apie kurią kalbėjo situacionistai (G. Debord’as, R. Vaneigeimas) ar postsituacionistai (J. Boudrillard’as), šiuolaikinio pa­skirstymo kritikai (J. Ranciere’as). Straipsnyje diskutuojama apie kūrybinių situacijų sudarymą ir nekomerciškumą naudojantis skaitmeninėmis erdvėmis ir komercinio paskirstymo analogais.