Everyday racism and "my tram experience": emotion, civic performance and learning on YouTube

Does the public expression and performance of shock, distress, anger, frustration and ideological disapproval of particular sorts of politics constitute a form of collective political expression from which individuals can learn about being citizens When it comes to the expression of feelings of racial and other types of prejudice, has political correctness led to a deepening of entrenched racist beliefs with no channel for discussion This article engages with such questions through a case study of YouTube responses to «My Tram Experience» a commuter-uploaded mobile-phone video of a racist diatribe on a tram in the UK. Using qualitative content analysis and thematic analysis, it describes how these performed, networked and distributed moments of citizen angst demonstrate a limited but interesting range of civic engagements with and positionings towards racism, immigration, class and nationalism. For one reason or another these are not allowed to occur in other public for a such as the mainstream media or schools. The article argues that these vlogs are both a wide-ranging potentially therapeutic resource for those needing validation for their racist or anti-racist views, or for those who wish to express and garner solidarity for discomfort and pain caused by racism; they are also a significant though currently uncurated resource for citizenship education both formal and informal because of their engagements with technology, social context, emotional context and political rhetoric

Social media and self-curatorship : Reflections on identity and pedagogy through blogging on a masters module

El uso de los medios sociales se ha extendido notablemente y se considera ya como una oportunidad única para el diseño de entornos innovadores de aprendizaje, donde los estudiantes se conviertan en protagonistas de experiencias de multialfabetización participativas y entre iguales. El trabajo cuestiona la conexión entre los usos sociales de los nuevos medios y las prácticas educativas relevantes, y propone marcos teóricos más rigurosos que puedan orientar en futuras investigaciones sobre el papel de los medios sociales en la educación. El trabajo reflexiona sobre el estudio de caso llevado a cabo en un grupo de alumnos en un módulo on-line como parte de un programa de máster sobre medios de comunicación, cultura y comunicación. Se invitó a los estudiantes a desenvolverse en estrategias de evaluación más allá de las convencionales, con el fin de teorizar y reflexionar sobre sus experiencias con los medios sociales como soporte y materia del curso. El artículo analiza la experiencia de los estudiantes evaluados en el conjunto del proyecto. Durante la exposición de resultados, los autores situaron los argumentos en el contexto del debate sobre las nuevas alfabetizaciones, la pedagogía y los medios sociales, así como en el marco de la teoría emergente de la autogestión del individuo en estos contextos, como marco metafórico para comprender la producción y la representación de la identidad en los medios digitales.The widespread uses of social media have been celebrated as a unique opportunity to redesign innovative learning environments that position students at the center of a participatory, multiliteracy and peer learning experience. This article problemitizes the connection between the social uses of new media and relevant educational practices and proposes more rigorous theoretical frames that can be used to guide future research into the role of social media in education. This article reports on a case study of a small group of students who use an online module to study media, culture and communication as part of a wider master’s programme. The students were invited to reflect in a more reflexive and theoretical manner than is commonly used in a standard course evaluation about their experiences of engaging with social media as both the medium and the subject of the course. The article discusses the student experience as it unfolded in the context of an assessed piece of project work. In discussing the findings the authors locate the arguments in the context of debates about new literacies, pedagogy and social media as well as in an emergent theory of self-curatorship as a metaphorical frame for understanding the production and representation of identity in digital media

Learning from Gujarat

On Wednesday, 19 February, Dr Shakuntala Banaji, Carla Ferstman, Suresh Grover, and Dr Biju Mathew engaged in a panel discussion chaired by Professor Chetan Bhatt at LSE on key questions about human rights and impunity that arose in the aftermath of the Gujarat carnage of 2002, and the subsequent rise of Narendra Modi as a national leader and the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate. In this post, Dr Banaji establishes the context for that discussion (click here for a podcast of the event)

Regulating the Media in India – an Urgent Policy Priority

As the UK waits for the outcome on proposals for its new press regulator, LSE’s Shakuntala Banaji describes a much bigger country with a much bigger problem with unethical media behaviour. She argues that in India self-regulation will not be sufficient to deal with the shocking problems in its media

A hierarchy of hate

Some groups of people attract far more online hate and abuse than others. In this post and accompanying video, LSE’s Professor Shakuntala Banaji explains that her research shows how online hate is entangled with different kinds of oppression across the world, and how to challenge it

India: digitising an unequal world

India is portrayed as being on a technological par with the West, but in this blog, Shakuntala Banaji reveals the stark reality. In the context of demonetisation, she maps Indian children’s experiences of media technologies and argues that we must recognise the disenfranchising nature of large-scale digitisation of nations. Shakuntala is an Associate Professor at London School of Economics in the Department of Media and Communications. Her research in India asks in what ways diverse groups of children are participating in or excluded from communities and communications on and offline. She has written previously about the ways in which different media formats and tools are implicated in Indian children’s leisure and in their learning and formal education, and examined some of the structural issues that form barriers to inclusion and leisure for working-class children

Leisure, learning and exclusion: children’s media encounters in India

Indian media is booming and the industry is expected to continue growing at an average of 13.2 per cent a year until 2015, making it a 1,199-billion-rupee market. LSE’s Shakuntala Banaji considers how the proliferating media environment impacts Indian children and their ways of learning

Bollywood horror as an uncanny public sphere: genre theories, postcolonial concepts, and the insightful audience

This article critically interrogates the many ways in which contemporary urban life in India is imagined and theorized by Hindi horror films and their critics and audiences. It suggests that “horrific” representations of tropes such as living space, family life, labor, gender relations and childhood are repositioned by the meanings attributed in critical and audience discussions across time and national boundaries. Acknowledging and questioning a conceptual mélange from “abjection” and “subalternity” to “voice” and “carnival,” it complicates homogenizing accounts of Bollywood's ideological allegiance to authoritarian master-narratives. While Hindi horror films invite spectators to engage with political rhetorics about economic success, exclusion, justice, and patriarchy, the outcomes of such engagement are inflected by individual spectators's cultural, political, and generic experiences

Remembering Yash Chopra’s complex and critical films

Dr Shakuntala Banaji asks whether future audiences of Hindi cinema are to be denied the creative and politically charged offerings of Yash Chopra’s early oeuvre

Behind the high-tech fetish: children, work and media use across classes in India

A dearth of media might seem idyllic to urban parents tired of being pestered for an ipad or the latest game. But given the increasing focus amongst Western scholars and educators on theorising digital media as a conduit to conviviality, creativity and civic participation, insights can be gained from the lives and narratives of media-rich and media-deprived children in areas of the global south. Using original observations and in-depth qualitative interviews with rural and urban Indian children aged 9-17, this paper discusses the media, work, learning and anxieties they face in everyday life. These data are analysed drawing on frameworks developed to understand child work and children’s agency in the fields of critical sociology and anthropology. Findings suggest the need for a revised analysis of media use and cultural meaning in middle and low income contexts as strongly inflected by children’s social class, their responsibilities, labour, contextual knowledge and embeddedness in diverse non-mediated communities