Session Information
Contribution
Description: Media representations of ethnic others are often criticised as hegemonic machines of othering. By framing the other as spectacle and by indigenizing cultural identity (e.g. isolating it from the socio-historico-political) context, media images contribute to the naturalization and normalization of hegemony. This paper records theoretical and empirical moments from a university program which attempts to rupture 'othering' by introducing post-graduate teacher students to the technologies of video editing. Reckoning with cultural artefacts (e.g., Disney or media representations of ethnic minorities) as raw material rather than as readymades-digitalizing representations and restructuring video clips, re-contextualizing images in a political context which the industry of the spectacle eliminates, and re-inserting them in new non-linear narratives-the students were able to comprehend how devices of selection produce rather than represent otherness. At the same time, however, the paper documents the dilemmas the teachers faced as they employed themselves the devices of selection-framing-representation. On the one hand, the spectacle had to be contested for the purpose of de-aestheticizing otherness and exposing in a raw form the violence and the claim for justice. On the other hand, however, the spectacle continued to appeal to the producers as a seductive device for representing the other in ways that met the audience's habits of cinematic perception and offered them familiar pleasures of the image. Intertextuality, non-linear narrative, parody and pastiche were some of the postmodern tropes in enduring (rather that resolving) the tension between representation and deconstruction of cultural difference.
Methodology: Participatory ethnographyDiscourse analysisPhilosophy
Conclusions: 1. Most European Policy Documents on Education stress the need for intercultural understanding. This goal is often translated into educational practices that promote the recognition of others and their visibility in curricula. Such practices, however, can slide into forms of orientalism and cultural stereotyping which reproduce relationships of hegemony. The paper suggests that intercultural teacher education should also address the construction of difference and cultivate forms of critical media literacy. It also suggests that the culture that needs to be studied is not the culture of the other (e.g. the culture of the place of origin in the case of immigrants) but the culture of representation through which intercultural sensitivity is often mediated. 2. One of the core goals of media literacy is the understanding of media. Intercultural education incorporates such skills in the critique of media stereotypes or racist images. The project discussed in the paper suggests ways to expand the scope of intercultural media literacy by engaging educators in the production of short documentaries and forcing them to address dilemmas which sensitize them to the violence implicated in any form of representation.
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