‘(Don’t) change the subject. You did it’: Media and schooling as violence

• Published in: Researching Violence, Democracy and the Rights of People pp. 131 - 141
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge 2010
• Subjects: Saddam Hussein’s Capture; Tv; Critical Media Literacy; Strong Interaction; Audible Silences; Militaristic Foreign Policy; Radical Reform Movement; Perceptual Categories; Foundational Motives; Strong; School’s Lack; Cultural Segregation; Media Apparatuses; Freedom Writers; Guernica; Non-stop; Smokeless Tobacco; Handgun Availability; Coloniality Of Power; Latent Content; Dead Poets Society; North; School Violence; California High School
• ISBN: 0415478782; 9780415478786; 0415478774; 9780415478779
• DOI: 10.4324/9780203863602-18

Paraskeva’s purpose in this chapter is “to disclose the interplay between media and schooling”. He sees this as “part of an intricate process of meaning making” that is “deeply rooted within a politics of common sense”. For him, this politics of common sense naturalizes and domesticates “social constructions such as violence in such a way that the border ‘violence/nonviolence’ becomes profoundly blurred”. In this case, he proposes that there is a “need to see both media and schools as violence” and draws upon discussions in relation to the US, South Africa and Portugal to show how violence has to be situated within particular social formations that are pervaded by class, race, gender, economic and cultural segregation. The aim, he says, is not to change the subject but to try to understand one of the foundational motives of school violence. He is concerned with the “lack of relevance and dehumanized pedagogies found in schools”. In the media, he argues:We are facing a particular form of ideological control that is profoundly related to what Bourdieu (1996) calls a ‘show and hide’ strategy. That is to say, “[paradoxically] television can hide by showing” (Bourdieu ibid: 19), since journalists (and neither Bourdieu (ibid) nor I are claiming an essentializing position here) “select very specific aspects [of a given event] as a function of their particular perceptual categories, the particular way they see things [categories] that are the product of education, history; [in other words] they used [specific] [eye] glasses” (Bourdieu ibid: 19). Thus, as Fiske and Hartley (1998: 17-21) highlight, since “television is a human construct and the job that it does is the result of human choice, cultural decisions and social pressures”, reading television is being radically aware of its “manifest [and] latent content”. In essence, one should be aware that in the tension between “giving news vs. giving views” (Bourdieu ibid: 42), the mainstream media aligns with the latter.