‘(Don’t) change the subject. You did it’: Media and schooling as violence
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 cons...
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Published in | Researching Violence, Democracy and the Rights of People pp. 131 - 141 |
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Format | Book Chapter |
Language | English |
Published |
Routledge
2010
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Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | 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. |
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ISBN: | 0415478782 9780415478786 0415478774 9780415478779 |
DOI: | 10.4324/9780203863602-18 |