139 research outputs found
Keeping Up With Atari: Neoliberal Expectations in Early Electronics Advertising
No full textDuring the early 1980s, ad campaigns framed purchasing and using emerging consumer electronics as tools for accessing, what Lauren Berlant called, ‘the good life.’ Computers, video games, VCRs, and cassette players might help consumers cultivate a neoliberal, upwardly mobile, and implicitly white, lifestyle. This paper explores early personal computer and home console video game advertisements as a cultural discourse that framed emerging technology through normative gendered, raced, and classed everyday lifestyles in an American context. The central case study is the early 1980s televisual ad campaign for the Atari 2600 system, featuring the “Have You Played Atari Today?” jingle. The campaign was widely viewed and is representative of contemporaneous marketing approaches. The ad’s allusion to time management both reinforced broader neoliberal paradigms and enacted a gendered slippage between labour and leisure. This paper draws from feminist critical theory approaches and uses textual analysis to understand the ways that electronic advertisements appealed to late capitalist social attitudes
Is professional development a solitary or a collegial experience?
No full textDeposited with permission of the author. © 2003 Myrna Allan.There exists a consensus about the importance, but little else, of the ongoing professional education of teachers. The professional development of teachers is often seen by teachers to be a purely private matter serving self-improvement and/or career advancement. Equally often it is assumed to be essentially collegial concerned with improved school responses to redefined social expectations. Little is known about how, at the intersection of personal interactions and social necessities, truth is constructed by teachers about the significance of professional development exercises. This ontological research investigated the influence of the community of practice in signifying professional development of teachers' professional identity formation. It is a proximal influence that has been largely neglected in the literature on professional development. The case studies conducted here of science teachers in a rural secondary school initially assumed that certain types of autonomy and collegiality, together with differing workplace conditions have a more positive influence on teachers' professional development than others. The use of teacher portfolios in professional development reporting was investigated as institutional scaffolding for facilitating the sharing of insights from often remote professional development experiences, and as a means of improving communication within the science department.Positioning theory, as a tool in discursive psychology, was used to analyse professional development experiences as narrated by four colleagues in conversations with the author
A fluidez de Yuxin: uma poética da alma selvagem
No full textDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Comunicação e Expressão, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Literatura, Florianópolis, 2013.Ao estudar o percurso da representação do índio na literatura brasileira, percebemos que nossa tradição literária, ao abordar essa temática, sofreu influência de uma cultura estrangeira, construindo assim uma imagem do índio em que seu elemento autóctone figurou como representação de padrões e valores morais específicos e estranhos para si. Diante desse cenário, o objetivo desta dissertação é partir do romance Yuxin (2009), de Ana Miranda, para o diálogo com outras obras literárias, tendo como enfoque a linguagem, e a maneira como a autora se utilizou dela para elaborar essa narrativa. Ana Miranda procurou (re)criar um texto performático da cultura indígena, que, em sua poética, contenha uma dicção pessoal e única, carregada de sons, pausas e gestos para dar voz a um povo e contar uma história que questiona pontos de vista de ordem social, política e estética, como também as noções que temos daquilo que é sagrado. A narrativa propõe uma fluidez que parte já de seu título, pois o sentido semântico de yuxin não é estático, pelo contrário, escapa sempre das tentativas de torná-lo concreto, uma vez que é substância fluida, que não se deixa aprisionar. Assim, também essa textualidade nos escapa se a considerarmos apenas em seus aspectos formais, pois é no nível da percepção, daquilo que é fugidio e fugaz, que Yuxin encontra seu sentido. Propomos, então, uma leitura sobre a poética de Yuxin que promova reflexões tecidas a partir de relações entre xamanismo, perspectivismo, musicalidade e pensamento primitivo, já que essas questões se encontram imersas na narrativa e configuram seus arranjos de enunciação. Partindo dessa discussão, percebemos que a questão básica subjacente ao romance pode ser compreendida como uma exclamação de alteridade. Ao enunciar essa voz outra, da figura autóctone e suas relações com o espaço, o texto de Ana Miranda, juntamente com outras narrativas literárias que compartilham da proposta de dar voz ao outro que outrora foi calado, coopera para que se promova um questionamento do lugar de marginalização que os povos ameríndios enfrentam e as fronteiras simbólicas que lhes são impostas como herança do processo de colonização, impulsionando um deslocamento que reconfigura o imaginário coletivo. O discurso literário tem, assim, a capacidade de recriar e reinventar tanto o mito, quanto a história e a memória. Abstract : By studying the trajectory of the representation of Indians in the Brazilian literature, we realized that our literary tradition, concerning to this theme, was influenced by a foreign culture, thereby building up an image of the Indian in his native element figured as representation of standards and specific moral values strange to himself. Given this scenario, the goal of this dissertation is to set forth from the Ana Miranda's novel Yuxin (2009) to the dialogue taken with other literary works, having the language as an approach, and the way the author used it to establish her narrative. Ana Miranda sought to (re)create a performative text of indigenous culture, which, in his poetics, contains a personal and unique diction, full of sounds, pauses and gestures to give voice to a people and tell a story that questions the views of social, political and aesthetic, as well as the notions we have of what is sacred. The narrative proposes a fluidity that comes from the title itself, because the semantic meaning of yuxin is not static, on the contrary, always escapes attempts to make it concrete, since it is fluid substance, which cannot be trapped. Thus, also this textuality eludes us if we consider only its formal aspects, whereas it is at the level of perception, that which is elusive and fleeting, that Yuxin finds its meaning. We propose a reading of Yuxin?s poetics that promotes reflections woven from relations between shamanism, perspectivism, musicality and primitive thought, as these issues are immersed in the narrative and configure their arrangements of enunciation. From this discussion, we realized that the basic issue underlying the novel can be understood as an exclamation of alterity. By stating this other voice, from the autochthonous figure and its relationship with space, the text of Ana Miranda, along with other literary narratives that shares the proposal to give voice to the other that was once silenced, cooperates to promote a questioning of the marginalization place that Amerindian peoples face and the symbolic boundaries imposed on them as a legacy of the colonization process, driving a shift that reconfigures the collective imaginary. The literary discourse thus has the ability to rebuild and reinvent both the myth as history and memory
Ordinary Electronic: Emerging Technology, Gender, and Everyday Life in Popular Culture, 1980-1995
No full textOrdinary Electronic: Emerging Technology, Gender, and Everyday Life in Popular Culture, 1980-1995
No full textMatchmaker: Emerging Technology and 1980s Narrative Television
No full textIn 1987, 227 and Family Ties both aired episodes named “Matchmaker(s).” Both episodes focus on the possibilities and limitations of electronically facilitated matchmaking. In 227, Rose dresses up and puts on an aloof act for her video date tape. Although she and her match like each other, he too has put on various airs to seem more appealing. In Family Ties, Alex’s attempts to use a computer program to find his sister Mallory a date among eligible men on his college campus is ultimately a failure—despite the fact that Mallory and her date seem perfectly paired on paper. Through an analysis of these narratives, I explore how gendered and raced expectations of romantic love, sex, and dating are reproduced through and in tension with emerging consumer electronics.
Hyperbolic and hyper masculine case studies like Videodrome or Neuromancer are often synonymous with the electronic era. In keeping with the theme of reinvention, this paper urges us to re-consider how popular television targeted toward women, families, and people of colour was a significant, albeit overlooked, forum for discussions about everyday and even mundane relationships with emerging technology during the 1980s. Drawing on Aubrey Anable, Mar Hicks, Ruha Benjamin, and Laine Nooney, I position these episodes as extensions of earlier intersections between technology and dating culture. Then, I argue that these episodes offer primary source perspectives for the ongoing ways that technology plays a role in our everyday intimate encounters
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