The ActivateT.O. Speaker Series, Border Crossing, and Public Media

• Published in: Canadian journal of communication Vol. 42; no. 1; pp. 149 - 152
• Main Author: Weafer, Miles
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Toronto University of Toronto Press 01.01.2017
• Subjects: Activists; Antidotes; Art exhibits; Audiences; Beliefs; Borders; Boundaries; Classrooms; College campuses; College students; Colleges & universities; Communication; Conferences; Critical thinking; Cultural centers; Cultural identity; Cultural instruction; Culture; Donations; Graduate students; Graduate studies; Innis, Harold; Language teaching methods; Learning; Mass media; Media; Native women; Pedagogy; Political activism; Self instruction; Separation; Social justice; Students; Women; Workshops
• ISSN: 0705-3657; 1499-6642
• DOI: 10.22230/cjc.2017v42n1a3096

ActivateT.O. was not a part of our classroom learning; rather, it materialized as a project of self-education by graduate students who participate in, organize, or attend the speaking events. Our series was premised on the recognition that Toronto's universities, and the work emerging from them, cannot be wholly separated or abstracted from the struggles and possibilities that animate graduate students' lives and intersect with their learning. The ActivateT.O. series can be framed according to [Henry Giroux]'s (2006) model of "border pedagogy," a teaching practice focused on crossing physical and cultural borders, and on decentring and remapping socially organized rules, regulations, and identities. Central to border pedagogy is a contextualization of learning amidst historically specific conditions and struggles, and an affirmation of student voices and experiences that challenge "the separation of school knowledge from the experience of everyday life" (Giroux, 2006, p. 62). Canadian economic historian and communication scholar Harold Innis identified decades ago the role of extensive, centrally managed media in marginalizing diverse knowledge and experiences. Attentive to the ways specific, material forms of communication contribute to particular institutionalized forms of power and knowledge, Innis' dialectical, materialist account of media is particularly useful for highlighting the progressive, disruptive role and effects of communication and cultural practice emerging in marginalized spaces and communities. Innis' (1951) distinction between geographically extensive, centrally managed ("space-biased") media and durable, expressive, localized forms of ("time-biased") media provides a way to evaluate the progressive potential of the public dialogue we aspire to facilitate at our events. Judith Stamps (1999) stresses Innis' characterization of the oral tradition and dialogue, which continue to be marginalized by spatially extensive, centrally managed media, as "the key antidote" (p. 63) to modernity's rigidly defined, visually biased, and short-sighted system of beliefs and communicative practices. While Innis does not share Giroux's focus on the socio-historical context of individuals' self-identification and self-expression, Innis is attentive to the relations of imperial, economic, and cultural centres to marginalized communities and cultural practices. Innis, Stamps (1995) argues, "intended to show that the germs of new knowledge emerged at the margins of older systems, always accompanied by new, rival media" (p. 79). Cognizant of this dynamic, we have worked to prioritize dialogue and to draw on the lived experience of speakers and audiences in order to advance or produce such "rival media" (Stamps, 1995, p. 79). While many of our ActivateT.O. speakers addressed changing transmission practices, the speaker series itself, however, hardly constitutes new media. Keeping in mind Giroux's border pedagogy, communication is not progressive or subversive simply because it is high-tech; rather, a pedagogical process that crosses the boundary between academic work and daily life, and contextualizes both according to relations of power, rivals the status quo as it affirms learners' voices, critically engages their experiences, and contributes to "a public language rooted in commitment to social transformation" (Giroux, 2006, p. 61). The subversive "public language" to which Giroux aspires resonates with Innis' formulation of "public media": media that can potentially "offset the alienating impact of mass media" ([Liora Salter], 1981, p. 193) by responding to the needs, aspirations, experience, and explanation systems of those who produce and use it. Public media, like border pedagogy, aims to overcome conceptual and practical borders-specifically, the separation of production from audience relations that "[serves] to cut the public off from a collective sense of its own reality" (p. 206).