The DoD\u27s Cultural Policy: Militarizing the Cultural Industries

In pursuit of this Special Issue’s goal to “push the traditional boundaries of cultural policy studies,” this article conceptualizes the US Department of Defense (DoD) as a cultural policy agency. All cultural policy is goal-oriented and aims to act within and have effects upon “the cultural.” Cultural policy scholars examine how State agencies, policies, and regulations act upon to influence: the cultural industries; cultural texts; and, national identities and citizen-subjects. Although the US Federal government has no official cultural policy agency like Canada (the Department of Heritage) or France (the Ministry of Culture), this article conceptualizes the DoD—one of the largest US Federal government agencies—as a cultural policy agency and explores how it uses cultural policy to act within and upon the cultural field. It presents a study of one important DoD cultural policy agency (the Public Affairs Office’s Special Assistant for Entertainment Media) and one significant DoD cultural policy doctrine (DoD Instruction 5410.16 DoD Assistance to Non-Government, Entertainment-Oriented Media Productions). This particular DoD cultural policy formation acts upon the cultural field, and in effect, supports and legitimizes the current and ongoing militarization of the cultural industries, popular culture and national identity

The MOOC: Rhetoric, Political Economy and the Value of Technological Citizenship

This paper offers a critical political-economy of the promise and disappointment of the for- profit Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) in higher education. Our goal is to encourage awareness, dialogue, and reflexivity about the gap between the rhetoric and reality of the MOOC in higher education and to highlight and interrogate the persuasive and profit power interests served by “the rhetoric of the MOOC.” To this end, the first section outlines our critical approach and defines some key concepts: “the rhetoric of technology,” “the political- economy of edu-tech” and “the public sphere.” The second section highlights the MOOC’s rhetorical promises and real disappointments. The third section contextualizes the “rhetoric of the MOOC” with regard to the persuasive and profit power interests it serves, and then evaluates this rhetoric with regard to the norms and values of the public sphere. We argue this rhetoric is a promotional discourse that is a poor guide to public deliberation and decision making about the role of technology in higher education. In closing, we propose the ideal and practice “technological citizenship” to encourage policy-makers, administrators, professors and students to have more democratic dialogue about educational technology, so that they, not the rhetoric of educational technology and the industry that sells it, can design the future of higher education

The Alt-right's Discourse on "Cultural Marxism": A Political Instrument of Intersectional Hate

This article analyzes the history, production, circulation, and political uses of the alt-right’s discourse about cultural Marxism in the context of the right-wing populist Trump presidency, the rise of fascist movements in the United States and worldwide, and the politics of intersectional hate. RésuméCet article analyse l’histoire, la production, la circulation et les utilisations politiques du discours de la droite alternative sur le marxisme culturel dans le contexte de la présidence populiste de droite de Donald Trump, de la montée des mouvements fascistes aux États-Unis et dans le monde entier et de la politique de haine intersectionnelle

The DoD's Cultural Policy: Militarizing the Cultural Industries

In pursuit of this Special Issue’s goal to “push the traditional boundaries of cultural policy studies,” this article conceptualizes the US Department of Defense (DoD) as a cultural policy agency. All cultural policy is goal-oriented and aims to act within and have effects upon “the cultural.” Cultural policy scholars examine how State agencies, policies, and regulations act upon to influence: the cultural industries; cultural texts; and, national identities and citizen-subjects. Although the US Federal government has no official cultural policy agency like Canada (the Department of Heritage) or France (the Ministry of Culture), this article conceptualizes the DoD—one of the largest US Federal government agencies—as a cultural policy agency and explores how it uses cultural policy to act within and upon the cultural field. It presents a study of one important DoD cultural policy agency (the Public Affairs Office’s Special Assistant for Entertainment Media) and one significant DoD cultural policy doctrine (DoD Instruction 5410.16 DoD Assistance to Non-Government, Entertainment-Oriented Media Productions). This particular DoD cultural policy formation acts upon the cultural field, and in effect, supports and legitimizes the current and ongoing militarization of the cultural industries, popular culture and national identity

Reality TV’s Embrace of the Intern

In the preface to a seminal exposé of the “intern nation,” Ross Perlin (2012) writes, “reality TV truly embraces the intern” (xii). This article describes and analyzes how 20 reality TV intern job ads for 19 different reality TV studios represent the work of interns and internships in the capitalist reality TV industry. By interrogating how the job postings depict the work that reality TV studios expect interns to do, the skills that TV studios expect interns to possess as a prerequisite to considering them eligible for mostly unpaid positions, the asymmetrical power relations between studios and interns, and the studios’ utilization of “hope” for a career-relevant experience to recruit interns, the article argues that the reality TV intern is actually a misclassified worker. The study demonstrates that reality TV interns are workers whose labour feeds reality TV production and that reality TV internships are a means of getting workers to labour without pay. The conclusion establishes some grounds for a reality TV intern class action suit

Socialists on Social Media Platforms: Communicating within and Against Digital Capitalism

Bertolt Brecht, in the 1932 essay ‘The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication’, made a ‘positive suggestion’ to transform radio into a dialogical medium for many-to-many communications. ‘Radio is one-sided when it should be two’ said Brecht. Brecht saw the state as the only entity capable of remaking radio in this way, but because radio’s ‘proper application’ might make it a ‘revolutionary’ medium, Brecht concluded the bourgeois state would have ‘no interest in sponsoring such exercises’. Brecht’s ‘positive suggestion’ for a many-to-many communications system seems to have come to fruition with the internet, and more recently, with the spread of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Socialists around the world are now using these platforms to produce, distribute, exhibit, and consume socialist media and cultural works, and they are openly building events, movements, and organizations within digital capitalism, to go beyond it. That said, the internet and social media platforms are surrounded by all kinds of deterministic, optimistic, and pessimistic rhetorics that cloud a clear view of what they give to and take from socialist communicators, especially as compared to the twentieth century’s mass media industries, whose state and corporate owners tended to filter out and vilify socialist ideas. While digital platforms are enabling socialists to communicate in ways that were not possible in the pre-digital world of mass media, they are supplements to – not substitutes for – building democratic and sustainable socialist organizations and militant working-class movements. Taking it as axiomatic that communications underpins any possibility for socialist organization and politics, this essay contextualizes the ‘brave new world’ of digital capitalism, historicizes socialist communications from the ‘old media’ world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the ‘new digital media’ world of the early twenty-first, and then maps ‘another world’ of socialists on social media platforms, with an eye to the novelties, limitations, and challenges