This book reveals the profound impact that our purchasing-obsessed culture has on our children and argues that corporate marketing to youth has reshaped the experience of childhood into something that is prefabricated. Top scholars in education, sociology, and cultural studies contribute insightful essays that students, parents, and educators will find entertaining and disturbing. This third edition is thoroughly updated with examinations of the icons that shape the values and consciousness of today's children, including Twilight, Barbie, hip-hop, Disney, McDonald's, and many more.
America is a corporatized society defined by a culture of consumerism, and the youth market is one of the groups that corporations target most. By marketing directly to children, through television, movies, radio, video games, toys, books, and fast food, advertisers have produced a 'kinderculture'. In this eye-opening book, editor Shirley R. Steinberg reveals the profound impact that our purchasing-obsessed culture has on our children and argues that the experience of childhood has been reshaped into something that is prefabricated. Analyzing the pervasive influence of these corporate productions, top experts in the fields of education, sociology, communications, and cultural studies contribute incisive essays that students, parents, educators, and general readers will find insightful and entertaining. Including seven new chapters, this third edition is thoroughly updated with examinations of the icons that shape the values and consciousness of today's children, including Twilight, True Blood, and vampires, hip hop, Hannah Montana, Disney, and others.
Contemporary American horror literature for children and young adults has two bold messages for readers: adults are untrustworthy, unreliable and often dangerous; and the monster always wins (as it must if there is to be a sequel). Examining the young adult horror series and the religious horror series for children (Left Behind: The Kids) for the first time, and tracing the unstoppable monster to Seuss's Cat in the Hat, this book sheds new light on the problematic message produced by the combination of marketing and books for contemporary American young readers.
A diverse group of contributors, from the fields of education, psychology, philosophy and cultural studies, explore the social phenomenon of labeling. The authors question the nature of labeling, its contexts and processes, looking in particular at its prescriptive and confining effects. The assumption that labels are neutral and applied neutrally is rejected as the political nature of labeling is revealed. Topics discussed by the contributors include: *the politics of labeling *whiteness as a label for western cultural politics *labeling in institutions *popular culture and labeling *school communities and classrooms and the politics of labeling *labeling and race *sexual labelings *the impact of categorization on our children *labeling in the special education system *immigrants and limited English proficiency groups. Contributors include: Michael Apple, Peter McLaren, Cameron McCarthy and Maxine Greene.
Key Works in Critical Pedagogy: Joe L. Kincheloe comprises sixteen papers written within a twenty-year period in which Kincheloe inspired legions of educators with his incisive analyses of education. Kincheloe was a prolific thinker and writer who produced an enormous number of books and chapters and journal articles.In a career cut short by his untimely death, Kincheloe led the way with an approach to research and pedagogy that incorporated multiperspectival approaches that examined a wide range of topics including schooling, cultural studies, research bricolage, kinderculture, Christotainment, and capitalism. In these works Kincheloe used accessible, elegantly produced language to capture his emotional yet scholarly ways of engaging with the world. He was a champion of the disenfranchised and his writing consistently examined social life from the perspective of participants who were often treated harshly because of their marginalization. The articles in this book were selected to encompass Kincheloe’s impressive scholarly career and to draw attention to the necessity for educators to take a critical stance with respect to the enactment of education to reproduce disadvantage. Among the theoretical frameworks included in the works are critical pedagogy, research, hermeneutics, phenomenology, cultural studies, and post-formal thought. Key Works in Critical Pedagogy is a comprehensive introduction to the scholarly contributions of one of the foremost educational researchers of our time. The selected chapters and associated scholarly review essays constitute a reference resource for researchers, educators, students of education – and all of those with an interest in adopting a deeper view of ways in which policies and practices shape education and social life to produce privilege and disadvantage simultaneously in ways that are often hidden from view. The critical perspective that permeates these works constitute ways of thinking and being in the world that others can adopt as a framework for analyzing their engagement in education as researchers, teacher educators, policymakers, students, parents of students, and members of the community at large. Responding to each of Kincheloe's chapters is a scholar/teacher who is intimately familiar with the works, theories, and epistemologies of this unique scholar.
America is a corporatized society defined by our culture of consumerism. One of the groups most targeted by corporations is children and youth. TV, movies, radio, video games, toys, books, and fast food are all directed specifically at consumers under 18. By marketing directly to kids, advertisers have produced a "kinderculture." The first edition of Kinderculture: The Corporate Construction of Childhood created a discourse that exposed the lack of understanding, education, and contextualization in this new children's culture. This new edition adds discussions on the icons that shape the values and consciousness of children, including hip hop, Disney, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Harry Potter, professional wrestling, Nickelodeon, Weekly Reader, video games, Barbie, McDonald's, and the Home Alone movies. Through entertaining and insightful essays, contributors drawn from the fields of cultural studies, communications, and education analyze the profound effects and the pervasive influence of these corporate productions in a style parents, educators, and general readers will welcome. Arguing that the experience of childhood has been, with or without our consent, reshaped into something that is prefabricated, Shirley Steinberg and Joe Kincheloe reveal to readers the impact our prefab, purchasing-obsessed culture has on our children-and on our beliefs about childhood.
Why does the secret agent never seem to die? Why, in fact, has the secret agent not only survived the Cold War - which critics and pundits surmised would be the death of James Bond and of the genre more generally - but grown in popularity? Secret Agents attempts to answer these questions as it investigates the political and cultural ramifications of the continued popularity and increasing diversity of the secret agent across television, film, and popular culture. The volume opens with a foreword by Tony Bennett, and proceeds to investigate programs, figures, and films such as Alias, Austin Powers, Spy Kids, the «new» Bond Girl, Flint, Mission Impossible, Jason Bourne, and concludes with an afterword by Toby Miller. Chapters throughout question what it means for this popular icon to have far wider currency and meaning than merely that of James Bond as the white male savior of capital and democracy.
Anthropologists travel back in time and across the globe to understand human culture but, surprise, there is culture right here in the United States. This second edition of the best-selling textbook and anthology, Reflecting on America, again focuses on how we can recognize the common cultural thread running through diverse American phenomena from heroin addiction and Big Business‘s efforts to shape the identities of children, to Civil War reenactments and the popularity of burlesque in the Midwest. In addition, this second edition includes chapters written especially for this volume on striptease, Burning Man, The Big Bang Theory TV show, and Groundhog Phil. Written throughout with verve and quirky humor, and offeringQuestions for discussion after every article, this book is perfect for undergraduate classes in anthropology and American studies. Drawing together twenty-two scholars with expertise in anthropological ideas about culture, Reflecting on America examines what it means to be American.
In 1945, John H. Johnson published the first issue of Ebony magazine, a monthly periodical aimed at African American readers. In 1973, the Johnson Publishing Company expanded its readership to include children by producing Ebony Jr!. Targeting Black children in the five to eleven age-range, the magazine featured stories, comics, puzzles, and cartoons. Its contents combined elements of Black culture, Black history, and elementary school curriculum. The publication remained in print until 1985 and was resurrected online in 2007.
A wide-ranging collection of essays on millennial American culture that “marshals a vast pop vocabulary with easy wit” (The New York Times Book Review). From the far left to the far right, on talk radio and the op-ed page, more and more Americans believe that the social fabric is unraveling. Celebrity worship and media frenzy, suicidal cultists and heavily armed secessionists: modern life seems to have become a “pyrotechnic insanitarium,” Mark Dery says, borrowing a turn-of-the-century name for Coney Island. Dery elucidates the meaning to our madness, deconstructing American culture from mainstream forces like Disney and Nike to fringe phenomena like the Unabomber and alien invaders. Our millennial angst, he argues, is a product of a pervasive cultural anxiety—a combination of the social and economic upheaval wrought by global capitalism and the paranoia fanned by media sensationalism. The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium is a theme-park ride through the extremes of American culture of which The Atlantic has written, “Mark Dery confirms once again what writers and thinkers as disparate as Nathanael West, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Sigmund Freud, and Oliver Sacks have already shown us: the best place to explore the human condition is at its outer margins, its pathological extremes.” “Dery is the kind of critic who just might give conspiracy theory a good name.” —Wired
