Edward Said ile ‘oryantalizm’e dair…

MakaleProf. Dr. Sut Jhally (University of Massachusetts Amherst): Geleceğin bilim adamları XX. yüzyılın son çeyreğinin entelektüel tarihine dönüp baktığında, Columbia Üniversitesi Profesörü Edward Said’in çalışmaları “çok önemli ve etkili” olarak tanımlanacaktır. Özellikle Said’in 1978’de yayımladığı “Oryantalizm” adlı kitabı son derece önemli sayılacaktır. Bu eser, Ortadoğu araştırmaları alanında devrim yaratmış ve Postkolonyal teori gibi tamamıyla yeni araştırma alanları oluşturmanın yanısıra İngilizce, Tarih, Antropoloji, Siyaset Bilimi ve Kültür Araştırmaları gibi birçok alanı etkilemiştir. Bu kitap 26 dile tercüme edilmiş olup birçok üniversite ve yüksekokulun ders müfredatında yer almaktadır. Ayrıca son otuz yılın en çok tartışılan ve yoğun münazaralar ve ihtilafları ateşleyen ilmi kitaplardan biridir. ‘Oryantalizm’ kitabı, bizim örneğin Ortadoğu’da hiç bulunmamış ve oradan hiç kimseyle tanışmamış olmamıza rağmen, orada yaşayan insanların nasıl inandığı ve nasıl davrandıkları hakkında peşinen bir düşünceye nasıl sahip olduğumuz sorusuna cevap vermeye çalışıyor. Daha genel olarak ‘Oryantalizm’ kitabı, bize farklı gözüken insanları yani yabancıları nasıl olup da ten rengi sebebiyle anlamlandırabildiğimiz sorusunu soruyor

Fetishism and the social value of objects.

The idea of the fetish has a particular presence in the writings of both Marx and Freud. It implies for these two theorists of the social, a particular form of relation between human beings and objects. In the work of both the idea of the fetish involves attributing properties to objects that they do not 'really' have and that should correctly be recognised as human. While Marx's account of fetishism addresses the exchange-value of commodities at the level of the economic relations of production, it fails to deal in any detail with the use-value or consumption of commodities. In contrast Freud's concept of the fetish as a desired substitute for a suitable sex object explores how objects are desired and consumed. Drawing on both Marx and Freud, Baudrillard breaks with their analyses of fetishism as demonstrating a human relation with unreal objects. He explores the creation of value in objects through the social exchange of sign values, showing how objects are fetishised in ostentation. This paper argues that while Baudrillard breaks with the realism characteristic of Marx's and Freud's analyses of fetishism, he does not go far enough in describing the social and discursive practices in which objects are used and sometimes transformed into fetishes. It is proposed that the fetishisation of objects involves an overdetermination of their social value through a discursive negotiation of the capacities of objects that stimulates fantasy and desire for them

Design Features of a Professional Development Program in Digital Literacy

The authors introduce readers to three design features of the University of Rhode Island\u27s Summer Institute in Digital Literacy, a 42‐hour, weeklong professional learning experience in digital literacy for educators, librarians, college faculty, and other adult learners. The program is explicitly designed to promote reflection on one\u27s motivations for advancing digital literacy, deepen appreciation for collaborative inquiry, and focus on how educators and learners (not machines) personalize learning. Evidence of how these themes are developed through practice illustrates the design philosophy that is embedded in the program. Digital media platforms, texts, and technologies enable pedagogical practices that put learners and teachers at the center of an increasingly networked social world, but these approaches also require respect for diverse perspectives, deliberative dialogue, and collaborative inquiry to bring them into the mainstream educational practice of schools, libraries, universities, and communities

Consumption caught in the cash nexus.

During the last thirty years, ‘consumption’ has become a major topic in the study of contemporary culture within anthropology, psychology and sociology. For many authors it has become central to understanding the nature of material culture in the modern world but this paper argues that the concept is, in British writing at least, too concerned with its economic origins in the selling and buying of consumer goods or commodities. It is argued that to understand material culture as determined through the monetary exchange for things - the cash nexus - leads to an inadequate sociological understanding of the social relations with objects. The work of Jean Baudrillard is used both to critique the concept of consumption as it leads to a focus on advertising, choice, money and shopping and to point to a more sociologically adequate approach to material culture that explores objects in a system of models and series, ‘atmosphere’, functionality, biography, interaction and mediation

Re-presenting the Paralympics: (contested) philosophies, production practices and the hypervisibility of disability

Studies that have engaged para-sport broadcasting, particularly through a narrative lens, have almost exclusively relied on textual and/or content analysis of the Paralympic Games as the source of cultural critique. We know far less about the decisions taken inside Paralympic broadcasters that have led to such representations. In this study – based on interviews with senior production and promotion staff at the UK’s Paralympic broadcaster, Channel 4 – we provide the first detailed examination of mediated para-sport from this vantage point. We explore the use of promotional devices such as athletes’ backstories – the “Hollywood treatment” – to both hook audiences and serve as a vehicle for achieving its social enterprise mandate to change public attitudes toward disability. In so doing, we reveal myriad tensions that coalesce around representing the Paralympics; with respect to the efforts made to balance the competing goals of key stakeholders and a stated desire to make the Paralympics both a commercial and socially progressive success

Representations of sport in the revolutionary socialist press in Britain, 1988–2012

This paper considers how sport presents a dualism to those on the far left of the political spectrum. A long-standing, passionate debate has existed on the contradictory role played by sport, polarised between those who reject it as a bourgeois capitalist plague and those who argue for its reclamation and reformation. A case study is offered of a political party that has consistently used revolutionary Marxism as the basis for its activity and how this party, the largest in Britain, addresses sport in its publications. The study draws on empirical data to illustrate this debate by reporting findings from three socialist publications. When sport did feature it was often in relation to high profile sporting events with a critical tone adopted and typically focused on issues of commodification, exploitation and alienation of athletes and supporters. However, readers’ letters, printed in the same publications, revealed how this interpretation was not universally accepted, thus illustrating the contradictory nature of sport for those on the far left

Teaching Domestic Violence in the New Millennium: Intersectionality as a Framework for Social Change

This article describes an intersectional approach to teaching about domestic violence (DV), which aims to empower students as critical thinkers and agents of change by merging theory, service learning, self-reflection, and activism. Three intersectional strategies and techniques for teaching about DV are discussed: promoting difference-consciousness, complicating gender-only power frameworks, and organizing for change. The author argues that to empower future generations to end violence, educators should put intersectionality into action through their use of scholarship, teaching methods, and pedagogical authority. Finally, the benefits and challenges of intersectional pedagogy for social justice education are considered

Biosemiotics, politics and Th.A. Sebeok’s move from linguistics to semiotics

This paper will focus on the political implications for the language sciences of Sebeok’s move from linguistics to a global semiotic perspective, a move that ultimately resulted in biosemiotics. The paper will seek to make more explicit the political bearing of a biosemiotic perspective in the language sciences and the human sciences in general. In particular, it will discuss the definition of language inherent in Sebeok’s project and the fundamental re-drawing of the grounds of linguistic debate heralded by Sebeok’s embrace of the concept of modelling. Thus far, the political co-ordinates of the biosemiotic project have not really been made explicit. This paper will therefore seek to outline 1. how biosemiotics enables us to reconfigure our understanding of the role of language in culture; 2. how exaptation is central to the evolution of language and communication, rather than adaptation; 3. how communication is the key issue in biosphere, rather than language, not just because communication includes language but because the language sciences often refer to language as if it were mere “chatter”, “tropes” and “figures of speech”; 4. how biosemiotics, despite its seeming “neutrality” arising from its transdisciplinarity, is thoroughly political; 5. how the failure to see the implications of the move from linguistics to semiotics arises from the fact that biosemiotics is devoid of old style politics, which is based on representation (devoid of experience) and “construction of [everything] in discourse” (which is grounded in linguistics, not communication study). In contrast to the post-“linguistic turn” idea that the world is “constructed in discourse”, we will argue that biosemiotics entails a reconfiguration of the polis and, in particular, offers the chance to completely reconceptualise ideology

Digital prosumption labour on social media in the context of the capitalist regime of time

So-called social media such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Weibo and LinkedIn are an expression of changing regimes of time in capitalist society. This paper discusses how corporate social media are related to the capitalist organization of time and the changes this organization is undergoing. It uses social theory for conceptualizing changes of society and its time regime and how these changes shape social media. These changes have been described with notions such as prosumption, consumption labour, play labour (playbour) and digital labour. The paper contextualizes digital labour on social media with the help of a model of society that distinguishes three subsystems (the economy, politics, culture) and three forms of power (economic, political, culture). In modern society, these systems are based on the logic of the accumulation of power and the acceleration of accumulation. The paper discusses the role of various dimensions of time in capitalism with the help of a model that is grounded in Karl Marx’s works. It points out the importance of the category of time for a labour theory of value and a digital labour theory of value. Social media are expressions of the changing time regimes that modern society has been undergoing, especially in relation to the blurring of leisure and labour time (play labour), production and consumption time (prosumption), new forms of absolute and relative surplus value production, the acceleration of consumption with the help of targeted online advertising and the creation of speculative, future-oriented forms of fictitious capital