Henry Jenkins's Blog, page 18

Funny Pictures?: An Interview on Hollywood Animation with Daniel Goldmark and Charlie Keil (Part Two)

Both cartoons and comedy shorts have a relationship to the Hollywood studio system which is different from the feature films which have dominated film studies. What do we learn about the logic of the studio system by recentering our focus on this level?

CK & DG: To a certain degree, these shorts operated on the margins of the studio system. The units set up to produce them even occupied a separate space within the studios, physically reinforcing their marginality. In many ways, like the B-film, shorts were the poor step-child of the studio family, less highly regarded than the A-level feature, but a indispensable part of the distribution mix.

Even if the studios didn't value the work of the animators to the degree that they might have, the studios did provide an outlet for these animators to ply their craft and the sheer volume of cartoons produced during this period is quite impressive.

Looking more closely at these marginal products of the studio system reminds us that it wasn't only about stars and valued literary properties; the studios were responsible for turning out a varied array of products for mass consumption and both diversity and reliability had equal weight in the industry's calculations. If we consider the role of

works such as cartoons within the broad aims of the studio system, it allows us to see that system as the complicated, hierarchical, sometimes ungainly method of operating that it was. It also helps to reveal some of the ways in which the studios did resemble factories, because turning out animated works relied on so much repetitive labour. Scott Curtis's consideration of boredom in the work of Tex Avery is an incisive look at how that repetitious labour finds itself replicated on a formal level.

The essays here certainly cover the canon of American animation, including the Fleischer Brothers, Walt Disney, Warner Brothers, Tex Avery, and Frank Tashlin. What new insights do we gain about these familiar figures as a result of the comparative approach this book adopts?

CK & DG: The most obvious insight is amplified context. Focusing on the studio period means that we don't isolate particular figures as aberrational geniuses. But when exceptional work was produced, we can still understand its relationship to the traditions and tendencies evident throughout the period. Directors like Tashlin and Avery were distinctive, but as various of the contributors point out, they were beholden to broader tendencies enshrined within the system and influenced by comic conventions passed down from other comic forms. By focussing on the basic common element of animated humour, one can begin to see th continuities linking these figures to a larger representational system, to widely-held cultural values, and to a pre-existing industrial context.

At the same time, your contributors also bring new discoveries into the mix. What films and filmmakers should we be paying more attention to as a result of this new scholarship?

CK & DG: Well, we hope that readers will take their cue from Rob King's eye-opening chapter on Charley Bowers and pay more attention to this largely forgotten hybrid figure. More generally, the volume's tacit message is that much of animated work from this period remains underexplored. Again, there are so many films being made during this time that to watch even a fraction of the output requires a lot of time. Representative works of interest are highlighted in the volume, by authors such as Richard Neupert and Donald Crafton, just to take two examples of contributors who focus on largely unheralded cartoons from the 1930s.

But the same could be said of almost any decade within this period: there is a lot to see and a lot to discover. And the work on sound, primarily represented (in very different ways) by Philip Brophy and by Daniel, reminds us that we shouldn't ignore the sonic dimension of these funny pictures.

All that said, this anthology can only scratch at the surface; our main aim was to come at the vast amount of material from a key perspective that had largely been overlooked--that all of these films were made with an aim to get audiences laughing.

The formal structure of the gag is a shared concern of scholars working on comedy and animation. What can we learn by exploring this issue across these two domains?

CK & DG: One of the more interesting aspects of the gag from an analytical perspective is the constructed nature of it. And yet, as familiar as the gag may seem to a viewer, it must still be produced with an eye to conveying a spirit of spontaneity, else the responsive laughter will be diminished.

For both live-action and animated films, a lot of preparatory labour goes into the mounting and execution of the gag. In live-action, practice makes perfect, whereas in animation, it's all achieved in the process of drawing. Yet the result is so similar. The gags often play to the spatio-temporal strengths of the cinematic universes created by film comedy, the seeming defiance of gravity, the manipulation of objects, the emphatic, almost parodic violence of the pratfall.

Because the intent--to elicit laughter--runs across both live-action and animated comedy, gags are surprisingly similar in both forms, even if the means differ substantially. As might be predicted, animated gags don't have to go to the lengths of live-action to impress us, as it's all ultimately on the page and almost anything is possible.

As many of your contributors suggest, comedy and animation both draw on earlier forms of popular amusement, such as vaudeville and the comic strip. How does this book contribute to our understanding of this larger history of popular culture?

CK & DG: By stressing the comic conventions that underlie so much of what comes out of Hollywood, live entertainment and the print media, our anthology tries to draw through lines that suggest productive intermedial cross-fertilization. Popular culture is always a product of diverse and not always completely compatible factors. This was true early on, as evidenced by Mark Langer's demonstration of the debt that the Fleischer Brothers owed to vaudeville and the comic strip. Similarly, J.B. Kaufman shows how silent live-action comedy exercised an influence on early sound-era animation. And both Paul Wells' article and your own remind us not to forget that popular comic forms also intersect with modernist tendencies in intriguing ways.

Dealing with these genres, your authors necessarily have to confront the history of stereotyping, especially racial and ethnic stereotypes, in American humor. What new insights do we gain?

CK & DG: Nic Sammond's work on racial masquerade and early American animation is a game-changer, in our opinion. He asks the hard question: how do we reconcile our ready laughter with the fact that many of these cartoons are irredeemably racist? Rather than simply condemning these works, he tries to understand the roots of their racist humour and why they still strike us as funny. There are no simple answers available, but the questions demand asking. And as we say in our Introduction, this is equally true of much of the uncomfortable laughter that these cartoons often engender as they trade in stereotypes, demean women or adopt ideologically reprehensible positions. But by so insistently focussing their energies on being funny, they draw our attention to why we laugh in the first place.

What has been the lasting legacy of the early cartoon shorts on contemporary forms of animation?

CK: The studio-era cartoons have become a part of our shared cultural heritage and especially in this 'age of allusion,' their importance to present-day animators cannot be ignored, because it is constantly on display. The technology of animation may be changing at a head-spinning rate, but its basic impulse--to keep audiences laughing--remains pretty much the same. So these earlier works will never cease to be a source of inspiration for animators nor of delight for viewers. Our anthology is a reminder that the pleasures of studio-era animation, as palpable as they are, demand careful consideration, as surely as do our often visceral reactions to those pleasures. We designed Funny Pictures to supply that consideration while never denying the satisfaction of the belly laugh. We didn't want to lose sight of the indelible fact that cartoons are funny--while still providing room for reflection.

Daniel Goldmark is Associate Professor of Music at Case Western Reserve University and the author of Tunes for 'Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon. Charlie Keil is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto and the author of Early American Cinema in Transition: Story, Style, and Filmmaking 1907-1913 and American Cinema's Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, and Practices.

Funny Pictures?: An Interview on Hollywood Animation with Daniel Goldmark and Charlie Keil (Part One)

A few years ago, I featured here the draft of my essay, 'I Like to Sock Myself in the Face': Reconsidering "Vulgar Modernism,"which updated some concepts first introduced by J. Hoberman about American comedy in the 1950s and sought to make a case that artists such as Tex Avery, Spike Jones, Basil Wolverton, and Olsen and Johnson, among others, were part of an informal "school" or "movement" which straddled media platforms. Now, the book for which this essay was written -- Daniel Goldmark and Charlie Keil's Funny Pictures: Animation and Comedy in Studio-Era Hollywood -- has been published and I am featuring this week an interview with the two editors about the collection.

For those of you who are interested in either the history of American cartoons or in live action comedy, this collection will be a rare treat, one which brings together many of the key people working in this space today, including Mark Langer, Donald Crafton, Richard Neupert, Susan Ohmer, Paul Wells, Nicholas Sammond, Philip Brophy, Rob King, Scott Curtis, and Linda Simensky. The contributions extend from considerations of the silent films of the Fleischer Brothers to the echoes of the studio era cartoons in contemporary animation practice, from discussions of racial stereotyping to the role of the musical score. Collectively, the essays both map the familiar and the less well known and contribute enormously to our understanding of how comic texts do or do not fit the logic of the classical Hollywood film as articulated by recent film scholarship. At its core, the book is making an argument that the history of live action comedy and animation are intertwined in ways more complex and more decisive than anyone had previously suggested.

In the interview which follows, the book's two editors, Daniel Goldmark and Charlie Keil, chose to speak in a collective voice, offering their insights onto their goals for the project and what they've discovered along the way.

Let's start with the question you use to frame your book. Is Hollywood animation a subset of the broader field of comedy or is the cartoon a particular (and distractingly popular) strand of animation practice?

CK & DG: One of the points we wanted to make in putting together this anthology involved acknowledging the hybrid status of the Hollywood cartoon: it is both an example of studio-era comedy and of animation practice. Insofar as American animation developed primarily within versions of the studio system, it became indebted to principles and practices of that system pretty much from the outset. In fact, the routinized labour involved in producing animation would seem to exemplify Fordist principles of manufacture sometimes associated with the studio system. So animation could be seen as the consummate studio product.

But the Hollywood cartoon, with a few notable exceptions, also aligned itself with comic traditions, derived from comic strips, vaudeville, and other pre-existing forms of humorous representation. In that regard, it has strong ties to other forms of comedy coming out of Hollywood at this time.

As we say at the beginning of the book's introduction, Hollywood made efforts to define itself as a purveyor of entertainment, and nothing epitomized that moreso than the relentlessly comic cartoon. And yet there is the proviso: Hollywood cartoons often resist the pull of verisimilitude that we associate with classical period norms, and the cartoon's indebtedness to comedy often manifests itself in an admittedly bounded tendency toward anarchy.

As someone who works in comics studies, I am well aware that both comics and animation are constrained by a tendency to imagine them as a genre rather than as medium and from an assumption that they are, as your title suggests, just "funny pictures." What steps can or should be taken to break out of that ghetto?

CK & DG: One is to rethink the concept of genre, a move that has been undertaken productively by many different scholars in the field, Rick Altman being just one notable example. That would help us imagine the generic category of comedy more expansively, so as to see logical connections between the work of live-action comic directors and those working in animation. There are numerous points of overlap even if there are relevant medium-specific distinctions.

Another is to stop thinking about animation as a genre, period. That makes little sense, as animation is a broad type, in categorical terms, akin to documentary or experimental cinema. What links Hollywood cartoons to other animated work is the fact of animation, not any generic affiliations.

But what binds cartoons to their humorous live-action counterparts is the common aim of trying to evoke laughter from an audience: whether that makes all such films part of the same broad genre or mode is a separate matter. But at a certain level, Rabbit of Seville has more in common with A Night at the Opera than it does with Begone Dull Care, so the fact that these are FUNNY Pictures should not be undervalued

.

Does focusing a book on the comic aspects of animation run the risk of reinscribing the stereotypes or does it allow us a way to think past them?

CK & DG: Admitting to the inherently humorous nature of these films addresses an historical reality borne out of production decisions made at the time. Studios could have made serious animated films had they wanted to, and Disney certainly infused its features with a high degree of dramatic material (though rarely the shorts). But the cartoon as comic short remained the studio norm for decades, and even now, as Linda Simensky shows when writing about television animation in the 1990s and its indebtedness to the studio era, the vast majority of American animated film and television material is still designed to make audiences laugh.

Rather than seeing this as a stereotype, our volume seeks to understand how and why this happened. Many of the contributors take very seriously the cartoon's impetus to make us laugh and that proves to be a valuable analytical endeavour. From Susan Ohmer's examination of how Disney engaged in forms of audience response research in the 1940s to ensure that their cartoons maximized the production of humour through animation to Ethan de Seife's attentiveness to Frank Tashlin's mise-en-scene-based comedy, the essays in our volume demonstrate in quite varied ways how paying closer attention to the comedic aspects of American studio-based animation reveals a new dimension of a seemingly familiar period of classical filmmaking.

Tish Tash: The Animated World of Frank Tashlin

Daniel Goldmark is Associate Professor of Music at Case Western Reserve University and the author of Tunes for 'Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon. Charlie Keil is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto and the author of Early American Cinema in Transition: Story, Style, and Filmmaking 1907-1913 and American Cinema's Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, and Practices.

Internet Blackout: SOPA, Reddit, and Networked (Political) Publics

This wednesday, Wikipedia, Reddit, and a range of other high profile on-line sites will go black in protest of SOPA and PIPA, legislation currently being considered by the U.S. Congress, which will impose regulations on net practices in the name of exerting greater control over "piracy." For those of us who have been involved in the digital world for a long time, this protest recalls another key moment in the history of the web when key sites went black in 1996 in protest of the Communications Decency Act, which would have similarly regulated the content and practices of the online world, in this case in the name of "protecting children" from obscenity. We should be cautious about the deployment of morally fraught terms like "piracy" and "decency" in framing public policies, since the stakes in these regulatory struggles are always more complex than such black and white language might indicate. Both are often deployed in ways that place the participatory ethos and free expression of the web at risk.

One can argue that the broadcast media has already largely "gone black" over SOPA -- since they have shown a remarkable unwillingness to discuss this important media policy issue on the air, or at least had refused to do so prior to the statement the Obama administration issued this past week coming out in opposition to SOPA but defining alternative ways that they might confront the war on "piracy." (I recall having a CNN executive some years ago tell my class that they did not cover the Federal Communications Act because they did not think the public would be interested, a unique definition of the "public interest" if ever I heard one. Thankfully, my students were not buying this explanation, which is more than the public got in terms of the willingness of news media to cover issues where their own corporate interests are at stake.)

Under such circumstances, those us in the blogosphere have a special obligation to help educate the public about matters that commercial media thinks is "over our heads" (or more accurately, "behind our backs.") So, I was delighted when Alex Leavitt, a PHD candidate in Communications at USC, offered to share his reflections on SOPA and especially on the online communities efforts to rally in opposition to it. Leavitt worked with the Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT and now is part of the Civic Paths Research Group I run here at USC.

Internet Blackout: SOPA, Reddit, and Networked (Political) Publics

by Alex Leavitt

If you don't have time to read this article in full, the easiest way to skim information about this topic is to visit http://americancensorship.org/.

In the past year, we've dealt with various novel political moments around the world that have been enabled or augmented with networked technology, from Anonymous' global "hacktivist" incidents to the numerous protests in the Middle East, topped off of course with the vibrant grassroots protests of the Occupy movement. Over the last few months, we've also seen another interesting case study taking place in American politics: rampant opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act, dubbed as "the most important bill in Congress you may have never heard of" by Chris Hayes of MSNBC.com.

Watch Chris Hayes' interview for a good introduction to the debate around SOPA.

SOPA, a bill currently making its way through the House of Representatives (along with its sibling PIPA, the Protect IP Act, currently in the Senate) has faced weeks of protest from Internet companies and users alike. Why? Well, on Google Plus, Sergey Brin -- cofounder of Google -- likened the potential effects of SOPA to the Internet censorship practiced in China, Iran, Libya, and Tunisia. Basically, to protect against international copyright infringement, SOPA allows the US to combat websites (such as file lockers or foreign link aggregators) that illegally distribute or even link to American-made media by blocking access to them. Theoretically, the bill has dangerous implications for websites that rely on user-generated content, from YouTube to 4chan. Many have already written about the worries that SOPA and PIPA cause, such as Alex Howard's excellent, in-depth piece over at O'Reilly Radar. For more information on the bills, visit OpenCongress's webpages, where you can see summaries of the legislation, which companies support and oppose them, and round-ups of by mainstream and blogged news: SOPA + PIPA. The bills are one more step in a long line of anti-piracy legislation, such as 2010's Combatting online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA).

Within the first few weeks since SOPA was introduced, http://fightforthefuture.org/ introduced the hyperbolic http://freebieber.org/ to illustrate the fears ordinary Internet users should have in relation to the legislation. In essence, SOPA would radically undermine many of the fan practices that Henry and others have analyzed on this blog. Fight for the Future also released the following video (which was my first media exposure to SOPA):

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

However, for the most part, criticism -- or even basic coverage -- of SOPA remained an online phenomenon. While there have been a few online articles written on CNN and a couple other networks, the mainstream news coverage of the bills remain fairly nonexistent, reports MediaMatters, likely due to the fact that the television networks largely support the bill. The Colbert Report featured a pair of short segments on SOPA in early December.

The Internet, though, largely worked around that problem.

In his book, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software, UCLA anthropologist Chris Kelty describes free software programmer-activists as a recursive public. Drawing from Michael Warner's concept of "publics and counterpublics" from Habermas's "public sphere," Kelty illustrates these programmers as a group that is addressed by copyright and code, and who work to make, maintain, and modify their technological networks and code as well as the discourse with which they engage as a public. This "circularity is essential to the phenomenon."

Especially over the past two months, we've seen an exceptional effort on the part of online companies to engage users with the political process to oppose SOPA. For instance, on 16 November 2011, Tumblr blacked out every image, video, and word on each user's dashboard, linking at the top of the page to http://www.tumblr.com/protect-the-net, where users could call their local representative.

The effort set of thousands of shared posts and hundreds of hours of calls.

While other companies attempted similar experiments (like Scribd on 21 December), Internet leaders joined together to spread word and inform Congress (such as with this letter from Facebook, Google, and Twitter on 15 November, and later this letter by many others on 14 December) and even political opponents of SOPA reached out on social media, like when Senator Ron Wyden asked people to sign their names at so he could read the list at a filibuster. Other experts eventually spoke up too.

But perhaps the most intriguing political effort occurred within one specific online community: Reddit.com.

Reddit, founded in 2005, is a social news and discussion website where users submit and vote on content. According to Alexa.com, Reddit is currently the 53rd most-visited site in the United States. Due to its increasing popularity, Reddit's slogan is "the front page of the internet" -- pertinent, because when a link hits the front page of Reddit, it can lend hundreds of thousands of page views. Though members at times highlight the site's immaturity and incivility, its vibrant community -- combined with the hypervisibility of the front page, has particularly thrived over the past couple of years, especially in terms of political participation and charity. Co-founded Alexis Ohanian gave a TEDtalk about Reddit's dedication to strange things online and when that translates into a sort of political participation:

Humorously, every activist-related post on the official Reddit blog is tagged with "do it for splashy.

In terms of more prominent political activism, Reddit's community -- particularly it's subreddit, /r/politics, and the emergent subreddit /r/SOPA -- has unified around opposing SOPA, in line with the free-speech, utopian personality that pervades the site. For instance, a couple posts on /r/politics and r/technology that reached the front page [1, 2] helped bring rapid visibility to Senator Wyden's filibuster initiative.

A more effective protest occurred in the form of a website boycott. GoDaddy, the domain register, was discovered to be a supporter of SOPA. After some discussion on Reddit, one r/politics thread reached the front page: GoDaddy supports SOPA, I'm transferring 51 domains & suggesting a move your domain day. Visibility of SOPA-related content was aided by a new subreddit, r/sopa, to which a global sidebar linked from the Reddit homepage. Less than 24 hours after the boycott started (even though, by numbers, it was deemed hardly successful), and with two more /r/politics threads that reached the front page [1, 2], GoDaddy reversed their stance and dropped support for SOPA.

SOPA debate continued to be fueled by various posts, including one by cofounder Alexis Ohanian: If SOPA existed, Steve & I never could've started reddit. Please help us win.. At the end of December, r/politics joined together to place pressure on SOPA-supporting Representative Paul Ryan; eventually, he reversed his position and denounced the bill.

Most notably, Alexis Ohanian recently announced on the Reddit blog that the entire site would voluntarily shut down on Wednesday 18 January 2012 for twelve hours, from 8am-8pm EST. Replacing the front page will be "a simple message about how the PIPA/SOPA legislation would shut down sites like reddit, link to resources to learn more, and suggest ways to take action." This blacking out of Reddit coincides with a series of cybersecurity experts' testimonies in Congress, at which Ohanian will be representing and speaking.

In reaction to SOPA (and PIPA, to which the opposition is now growing, since the SOPA vote has now been shelved), a vigorous public emerged across the web and united around discourse about the bills, particularly on Reddit.com. But to return to Kelty: is this a recursive public? Do the political users of Reddit have enough power and agency to maintain and modify their public?

I believe this question gets at a deeper question of ontology: what does political participation mean in a 1) networked, and 2) editable age? For instance, some users are able to promote their skills for discourse -- eg., My friend and I wrote an application to boycott SOPA. Scan product barcodes and see if they're made by a SOPA supporter. Enjoy. -- but in certain cases, participation in technological systems becomes participation in a recursive public because that participation helps modify the system. In the case of Reddit, participation can become political when content reaches extreme visibility. And this is particularly important when we reconsider that the mass media has barely covered SOPA as a topic: due to this conflict, participation on a network platform like Reddit becomes an inherently political action.

And out of these seemingly-innocuous actions emerge more political moves. In reaction to the black out, other websites have agreed to join the effort, such as BoingBoing.net. Perhaps the decision with the most impact came on Monday, when Jimmy Wales announced that Wikipedia -- which receives up to 25 million visitors per day at the English-language portal -- would also shut down, but this time for a full 24 hours, after a lengthy discussion on Wales' personal Wikipedia page. Wales responded to the announcement on Twitter by saying, "I hope Wikipedia will melt phone systems in Washington on Wednesday."

In a recent New York Times article, Reddit's political actions were noted. "'It's encouraging that we got this far against the odds, but it's far from over,' said Erik Martin, the general manager of Reddit.com, a social news site that has generated some of the loudest criticism of the bills. 'We're all still pretty scared that this might pass in one form or another. It's not a battle between Hollywood and tech, its people who get the Internet and those who don't." Of course, Reddit isn't the only platform that is part of this important recursive public, just as Twitter wasn't the saving grace of the Arab Spring or the Iranian Revolution. The efforts of hundreds of activists around the country have contributed immensely to the anti-SOPA effort. But keep in mind that Reddit has reached a pinnacle of political participation in the last few months, and I have a feeling that -- like YouTube in the 2008 presidential elections -- Reddit may be the site to watch in 2012.

Alex Leavitt is a PhD student at USC Annenberg, where he studies digital culture and networked technology. Recently, his work has focused on creative participation in immense online networks, examining global participatory phenomenon like Hatsune Miku and Minecraft. You can reach him on Twitter @alexleavitt or via email at aleavitt@usc.edu; to read more about his research, visit alexleavitt.com.

My Favorite Things: Raymond Scott

This is the first in an occasional series devoted to things in popular culture which have inspired my passion or captured my imagination. Let me be clear: this is not a series of "guilty pleasures," a term I hate since I don't think we should feel guilty for taking pleasure in the culture around us. These posts will feature things that I've discovered and have an urge to pass along to my readers, figuring that while they may not be to everyone's taste, there will certainly be people out there who might not encounter these artists and works otherwise.

The other night, my wife and I watched the dvd of a documentary about the composer-performer-inventor-visionary Raymond Scott, Deconstructing Dad, which had been made by his son. Below is the trailer for the documentary, which will give you some sense of who Scott was and why he might rank fairly high on my list of favorite things. While the film is perhaps a bit more invested than I am in dealing with Scott's multiple marriages and whether or not he was a decent father, the documentary nevertheless is crammed with his remarkable performances and helped me to place Scott's work in a much broader context.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Scott and his band recorded a series of highly infectous and playful swing songs with titles such as "New Year's Eve in a Haunted House," "Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals," "Reckless Night on Board an Ocean Liner," "Bumpy Weather Over Newark," or "The Girl at the Typewriter." These whimsical titles barely hint at the playful quality of his music, which managed to be experimental in its style yet accessible in its approach. Here, for example, is Scott and his band performing "Twilight in Turkey" for the Eddie Cantor vehicle, Ali Baba Goes to Town (1938).

And here's another vintage musical performance of one of my favorites, "War Dance for Wooden Indians."

If you recognize some of these songs, it is most likely because Carl Stalling was a huge Scott fan and used his music in more than 120 classic Warner Brothers cartoons. I found an interesting fan made video which shows how one of Scott's best known compositions, "Powerhouse," surfaced across a surprisingly broad range of cartoons. Scott never wrote music directly for cartoons, but his songs worked so well in this context that they were rediscovered by a whole new generation of animators, starting in the 1990s, who used them for, among other shows, The Simpsons, Duckman, Animaniacs, and most consistently, Ren and Stimpy.

Scott went on to become the bandleader on the classic 1950s era television program, Our Hit Parade, and to become a key experimenter in the early development of electronic music. Deconstructing Dad offers the curious insight that in the 1930s and 1940s, he sought to develop a style of jazz which was highly rehearsed and carefully scored, allowing limited room for improvization, where-as in the 1950s and 1960s, he ceded far more control of his compositions over to his digital tools, foreshadowing John Cage and others in his fascination with chance in composition. Nevertheless, I would argue that you can still hear Scott's puckish personality at play in at least some of his digital music, especially if you listen to the electronic and jazz stuff side by side.

If you'd like to discover the pleasures of Raymond Scott's jazz, I'd recommend Reckless Nights and Turkish Twilights as a cd which features many of his best-known songs. This was what set the Jenkins family down the path to actively pursuing as much of his work as we can get our hands on.

Dreaming Out Loud! Youth Activists Spoke About Their Fight for Education, Immigrant Rights and Justice Through Media and Art (Part Four)

This is the final installment in a four part series, written by Arely Zimmerman and Sangita Shreshtova from the USC Civic Paths Project, concerning the young activists who are supporting the Dream Act. This research was funded by the MacArthur Foundation and is part of the work of the Youth and Participatory Politics Network.

  New Media and Movements

 

Dreamer youth have
also used new media to grow their movement on a national scale.  Between 2009-2010,
youth organized many protest, including sit-ins at Congressional offices,
hunger strikes, marches, and symbolic graduations. They used new media to
exponentially amplify their voices through sophisticated and strategic use of live
streams, blogs, user generated video portals and social media like Facebook and
Twitter. For example, in June 2009, the founders of Dreamactivist.org, and United We Dream,
organized 500 youth to participate in the National
DREAM Act Graduation in Washington DC. This protest combined
a symbolic ceremony with legislative lobbying (Behary 2009).

On the same day, solidarity graduations took
place in Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky,
Massachusetts, Montana, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, and Texas (Dream Activist 2009).

source:
http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/news...

 

In another widely publicized campaign, on
January 1, 2010, four undocumented youth from Miami Dade College began a
4-month, 1500-mile-trek to Washington, DC to advocate for the DREAM Act. In
what they aptly called the "Trail
of DREAMs," the youth documented and mobilized support
for their their walk through blogging, Facebook, YouTube, and twitter. Along
their journey, they gathered 30,000 signatures to bring to President Obama.

 

Watch the trail of dreams video here: 

 

Despite all these efforts, the DREAM Act has yet
to pass, and undocumented youth continue to be deported. In the face of this
continuing crisis, the youth have used a combination of direct action and media
activism to highlight (and render visible) detentions and deportations, which
have generally received little public attention (Kohli 2011). They have staged rallies and sit-ins at detention centers, ICE offices, and
have even targeted banks that invest in private prisons to directly confront
the institutions invested in the immigrant detention and deportation system (Foley 2011). Grass roots new media messaging campaigns have been crucial to these action as
youth use Facebook, Twitter, and microblogging to share the stories of, and
garner support for, those detained and fighting deportation.

The story of Matias Ramos,
, an undocumented youth and co-founder of United We Dream, is a powerful
example of such mobilization. On the morning that an electronic monitoring
device was placed on his ankle, Matias Ramos posted a photo of himself on
Twitter and announced that he had been given two weeks to leave the country (Berenstein 2011).

 

[image error]

source: http://americasvoiceonline.org/blog/entry/dream_activist_matias_ramos_scheduled_for_deportation/

 

Ramos and his supporters were able to gain high
visibility for his case, to the point where it was even called a "high
profile challenge to the White House's new deportation guidelines."
Stories like these are transmitted through many overlapping social media
networks connecting campus organizations, community groups, sympathetic media
and allies, providing links to petitions and online donations.

 

Nancy Meza is a key
media strategist for the END our Pain campaign. At DREAMing Out Loud!
 she discussed the importance of
combining both new media and traditional media strategies to shape the movement
messaging.  To Nancy, social
media is a space where "we can 'freely' express ourselves, push our messaging
forward... in terms of Twitter and Facebook."  At the same time, Nancy stressed the need to complement new
and more traditional media as she continued: "Our organization doesn't even own
a camera...With whatever resources we have...I have a blackberry on a month to
month plan...So I think for us, it's really been about how we use traditional
media and how we mix it in".  New
media has allowed for youth to shape their message in a more democratic and
participatory fashion. They are, however, increasingly conscious of the need to
be strategic about its use. For example, Nancy explained that a lot of effort
goes into coming up with a Twitter hashtag for an event.  Is it accurate? Is it catchy? Will it
travel? Often, Twitter is a good way to catch the attention of more traditional
media, she explained. To her, the key is arriving at the happy medium between
locally constructed messaging and coordinating a coherent frame that can
translate to major media outlets. 

 

Concluding
Thoughts:

At the heart of the event were the stories that
the panelists shared and accounts of how stories inspired activism.  Pocho
1, a internationally recognized photographer, recalled how
photography shaped his activism and his reformation from a gang member to a
social activist: "I started telling stories...I wanted to tell their story...I
started hanging out with artists...I picked up a camera...I went crazy with
it...shoot it everyday... tell people's stories". Now Pocho 1 documents the Dream
movement, using his camera and social media as a form of social commentary and
social activism. 

 

source: http://www.pocho1.com/#!

 

DREAMing
Out Loud! provided many insights into how young people
use new media to participate and mobilize in their communities. In many ways, the
event highlighted the great democratizing potential that new media has,
especially when it can be used to provide a platform to amplify the voices of
youth who are marginalized from the mainstream political process. 

References

Behary, Samya. "Students
storm Capitol Hill for National Dream Act Graduation Day," Immigration Impact, June 25, 2009.

Berestein, Leslie Rojas. "A High-Profile Challenge to the White House New Deportation Guidelines," MultiAmerican, September 21, 2011, multiamerican.scpr.org/2011/09/a-high....

DREAM Activist, "DREAM for
America: National DREAM Act Graduation Day - June 23, 2009," press release, June 21, 2009
dreamactivist.org/blog/2009/06/21/nat....

Foley, Elise. "Immigrants to Wells Fargo: Stop investing in For-Profit Detention," The Huffington Post, October 17, 2011.

Kohli, Aarti Peter l. Markowitz, and Lisa Chavez, "Secure Communities by the Numbers:
An Analysis of Demographics and Due process," Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute
on Law and Social Policy Research Report, October, 2011.

Sangita Shresthova is currently the Research Director of the Media Activism and Participatory Politics  (MAPP)  Project at USC. She is a Czech/Nepali international development specialist, filmmaker, media scholar, and dancer with extensive interdisciplinary qualitative research experience. She holds a Ph.D. from UCLA's Department of World Arts and Cultures, and a MSc. degree from MIT's Comparative Media Studies program where she focused on popular culture, new media and globalization. She also earned a MSc. in Development Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). While at LSE, her work focused on the educational communication components of international development interventions. Her scholarly writing has been published in several journals, and her work on global participatory aspects of Bollywood dance was recently released as a book by SAGE Publications.

Arely Zimmerman, a Melon Post-Doctorate Fellow at the USC Program for Environmental and Regional Equity,  holds a doctorate in political science from UCLA. Her scholarship engages overlapping research areas of U.S. Latino/a studies, race and ethnicity, social movements, transnational, media, and feminist studies. Before joining PERE, she held a postdoctoral appointment at USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where she examined how new forms of social and digital media are reshaping modes of civic engagement amongst Latino, immigrant, and undocumented youth. As part of her ongoing concerns with issues of identity and citizenship in transnational contexts, Arely's manuscript in progress, "Contesting Citizenship across Borders: Central Americans in the United States" details Central American migrant communities' struggles for citizenship and inclusion across multiple nation-states through transnational social movement and community activism.

Dreaming Out Loud! Youth Activists Spoke About Their Fight for Education, Immigrant Rights and Justice Through Media and Art (Part Three)

The following is the third installment in a four part series on young activists who are using new media to rally behind the Dream Act. It was written by Arely Zimmerman and Sangita Shreshtova from the USC Civic Paths Project. This work was funded by the MacArthur Foundation. 

Coming Out/Pop Culture

The need to be active, to be connected to other
undocumented youth, and to strive collectively to make positive changes are key
motivators for all of the youth panelists. They are all extremely active online.
They create original media content. They blog. They share their stories and art
through Facebook and Twitter.  They
participate in public online conferences and symposia.  Yet, online visibility comes with its
own challenges and risks. As Nancy recounted, she was personally targeted in a
public campaign after a local conservative radio program called for her
deportation.  Because of her role
as the communications director of Dream Team Los Angeles and IDEAS at UCLA, she was an easily identifiable target.  The campaign got so vicious that she
eventually had to disconnect her phone. 
But, the risks of visibility have to be counter balanced with the
benefits, she concluded.  "Yes, it
is dangerous, there are risks that we face in being so publicly active, but it
is even more risky if they don't know we exist". 

Listen to Nancy
Meza speak on this topic here:

 

Driven by their urgent need to draw attention
to their plight, undocumented youth put themselves at risk of deportation and
arrest not only by participating in public civil disobedience but by also
publicly 'coming out' via social media platforms.  The coming out process, as Erick notes, is a deeply personal
one, shaped by each individual's own journey towards self-awareness and
identification.  But, this process
also has significant consequences on the movement because it is a first step in
embracing one's undocumented legal status and becoming politically
involved.  One of the common themes
in the 'coming out' stories of undocumented youth is asserting their belonging,
their 'Americannes', despite their undocumented legal status. Most Dream activism
youth were brought to the United States as young children, and the United
States is the only country they've ever known. It is their home. Fluent in
English, educated in the American school system, these youth defy the already
clearly inaccurate stereotypes of the 'illegal immigrant'. Mohammad of Dreamactivist.org, an online undocumented
youth advocacy network, shared one often cited "coming out" narrative.

 

Watch Mohammad's "I
am Mohammad and I am undocumented" video here:

 

The 'coming out'
narratives of Dreamer youth often draw on shared cultural references.  Erick, for instance, shared how he
formulated his identity from "Anime, heavy metal, and comic books"
which he says, " framed my outlook on life".  When he came out as undocumented for the first time, he says
he was inspired by a story arc in the popular comic Spiderman.  "When I mentioned my first name for the
first time- I compared it to a story arc of Spiderman- when Spiderman shares
his identity, I am also sharing my identity". Erick, and others, have also
drawn connections to Superman as being undocumented.

 

[image error]

source: yfrog.com/h314mmz
(@laloalcaraz)

Sangita Shresthova is currently the Research Director of the Media Activism and Participatory Politics  (MAPP)  Project at USC. She is a Czech/Nepali international development specialist, filmmaker, media scholar, and dancer with extensive interdisciplinary qualitative research experience. She holds a Ph.D. from UCLA's Department of World Arts and Cultures, and a MSc. degree from MIT's Comparative Media Studies program where she focused on popular culture, new media and globalization. She also earned a MSc. in Development Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). While at LSE, her work focused on the educational communication components of international development interventions. Her scholarly writing has been published in several journals, and her work on global participatory aspects of Bollywood dance was recently released as a book by SAGE Publications.

Arely Zimmerman, a Melon Post-Doctorate Fellow at the USC Program for Environmental and Regional Equity,  holds a doctorate in political science from UCLA. Her scholarship engages overlapping research areas of U.S. Latino/a studies, race and ethnicity, social movements, transnational, media, and feminist studies. Before joining PERE, she held a postdoctoral appointment at USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where she examined how new forms of social and digital media are reshaping modes of civic engagement amongst Latino, immigrant, and undocumented youth. As part of her ongoing concerns with issues of identity and citizenship in transnational contexts, Arely's manuscript in progress, "Contesting Citizenship across Borders: Central Americans in the United States" details Central American migrant communities' struggles for citizenship and inclusion across multiple nation-states through transnational social movement and community activism.

Dreaming Out Loud! Youth Activists Spoke About Their Fight for Education, Immigrant Rights and Justice Through Media and Art (Part Two)

Dreaming Out Loud! 

by Arely Zimmerman and Sangita Shreshtova

Civic Paths Project

Theme 1: Barriers and Supports

The DREAMing Out Loud! symposium provided the
panelists an opportunity to reflect on how
they have grown their movement through harnessing new media's technological
and communication affordances. Clearly, immigrant, low-income, undocumented
youth face many barriers to both online participation and civic engagement,
none more important than the lack of financial resources.  

 

Yet, these barriers
do not foreclose their ability to mobilize online communities around their
cause. Studies conducted by William Perez and more recently by USC sociologist Veronica Terriquez show staggering rates of civic engagement
amongst undocumented immigrant youth, challenging dominant presumptions about how
youth become active and which youth are able to tap social networks behind
their causes. Arely Zimmerman's research on Dream Activism similarly finds that
youth - including those who are undocumented and low income -  are active in organizations supporting
the Dream act also acquired high levels of new media skills. Not only were they
active on social media; they also created new media content and shared it
through platforms such as Flickr and YouTube.  Given this context, the Dreaming
Out Loud! panelists spoke openly about how they overcame financial and
other barriers to their political participation.

 

(source of image:
http://blogs.laforward.org/2010/12/06...)

 

Erick, for example,
is working towards his journalism degree but has had to take time off because
of financial hardships.  Since
2007, Erick has been blogging about his experiences as undocumented youth.  Without full-time access to a personal
computer, Erick uses various resources to develop an online presence.  With his mother making ends meet as a
street vendor, and his father picking up odd jobs, Erick used a scholarship to
buy an Iphone.  Although it doesn't
have Internet access, Erick uses his Iphone to take pictures, take notes, write
blog entries. He then uploads the content to Facebook and Twitter via SMS text
messaging.  Erick notes that, "As
technology progresses it's becoming easier and easier and easier to be 'out
there'."

 

Listen to Erick speak about this here:

 

The lack of access to technology does not keep
these youth from participating online.

 

Julio Salgado is a co-founder of Dreamers Adrift,
a collective of digital media artists. 
After graduating with a degree in journalism from Cal State Long Beach,
he could not put his degree to use. 
Working odd jobs primarily in the service industry, he was frustrated by
the lack of opportunities.  He
became more active in the Dream movement and used his artistic talents at the
service of the cause. He has developed a personal style that is immediately
recognizable, and his images have been used to represent national conferences,
t-shirts, and other movement iconography. 
He recalls how he has used whatever we could to 'make ends meet', going
to college parties and gatherings and drawing caricatures of friends to raise
money to pay for books and tuition. 
Using his artistic talent, he began posting his drawings of 'dreamers'
on Facebook using a scanner and photo-booth on his Apple laptop. Soon
thereafter, his pictures garnered national attention.  

(image source:
http://dreamersadrift.com/wp-content/...)

Reflecting on the barriers he has faced, Julio
says, "that never stops you, you're so passionate...I need to draw this stuff".  

See Julio's video "Wall of Dreams" here: 

Sangita Shresthova is currently the Research Director of the Media Activism and Participatory Politics  (MAPP)  Project at USC. She is a Czech/Nepali international development specialist, filmmaker, media scholar, and dancer with extensive interdisciplinary qualitative research experience. She holds a Ph.D. from UCLA's Department of World Arts and Cultures, and a MSc. degree from MIT's Comparative Media Studies program where she focused on popular culture, new media and globalization. She also earned a MSc. in Development Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). While at LSE, her work focused on the educational communication components of international development interventions. Her scholarly writing has been published in several journals, and her work on global participatory aspects of Bollywood dance was recently released as a book by SAGE Publications.

Arely Zimmerman, a Melon Post-Doctorate Fellow at the USC Program for Environmental and Regional Equity,  holds a doctorate in political science from UCLA. Her scholarship engages overlapping research areas of U.S. Latino/a studies, race and ethnicity, social movements, transnational, media, and feminist studies. Before joining PERE, she held a postdoctoral appointment at USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where she examined how new forms of social and digital media are reshaping modes of civic engagement amongst Latino, immigrant, and undocumented youth. As part of her ongoing concerns with issues of identity and citizenship in transnational contexts, Arely's manuscript in progress, "Contesting Citizenship across Borders: Central Americans in the United States" details Central American migrant communities' struggles for citizenship and inclusion across multiple nation-states through transnational social movement and community activism.

DREAMing Out Loud! Youth Activists Spoke About Their Fight for Education, Immigrant Rights and Justice Through Media and Art

From time to time, I have show-cased here the work of my Civic Paths Research Team. This is a group of more than a dozen USC graduate students, faculty, staff, and post-docs, who meet each week to research the intersection between participatory culture and political participation. You can check out our blog here. The team is associated with a larger network on Youth and Participatory Politics which has been supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and headed by Joe Kahne from Mills College. We are in the process of doing interviews, media audits, and field work focused on innovative movements and networks which have been effective at using new media and participatory practices to get young people involved in the political process. Over the next few installments, I am going to be showcasing one of those case studies, focused around the efforts of undocumented youth and their allies to rally support around various versions of the Dream Act, which would extend education and citizenship rights. This report was written by Arely Zimmerman, the post-doc who has been primarily responsible for overseeing this case, and Sangita Shresthova, the research director for the Civic Paths Project. 
Dreaming Out Loud! Youth Activists Spoke About Their Fight For Education, Immigrant Rights, and Justice Through Media and Art
by Arely Zimmerman and Sangita Shresthova


In a dimly lit room, a young man peers into the camera and adjusts the viewfinder to check his image. He then looks directly into the camera and states "My name is _____, and I am undocumented." His migration story resonates with hundreds of others who then upload their own stories to YouTube. Elsewhere, Livestream carries the feed of a youth-led civil disobedience to thousands across the country. Statements of support for the protest soon appear on blogs, Twitter, and other social media....

On
November 2, 2011 the Media Activism and Participatory Politics (MAPP) project hosted a
symposium, DREAMing Out Loud! at USC's Annenberg School for
Communication and Journalism. The extremely well attended event emerged out
of a case study on DREAM activism carried out by Postdoctoral Fellow Arely
Zimmerman and brought immigrant youth activists together to share their
perspectives on the intersection of new media, art, and social activism.

These 'dreamers' (as
they are commonly referred to) are members of a national youth-led movement
centered around the Dream
Act, federal legislation
(proposed with bipartisan support) that would provide an opportunity for
undocumented students with "good moral character," who have lived in the U.S.
for a certain period, to obtain legal status.  Jacky A., Julio
Salgado, Erick
Huerta, Nancy Meza,
and Pocho 1
represented different local, regional and national youth organizations as well
as different experiences using new media.

(photo: Civic
Paths)

The forum followed two
significant events impacting current debates around the Dream movement.  In September 2011,
representing at least a small victory, the state passed a bill known as the California Dream Act -- undocumented youth in the state could obtain some financial aid to
attend college.  However, without
any change on the federal level, undocumented youth still cannot work legally
upon graduation. Thus, while the legislation extends state financial aid to undocumented
students, immigrant youth continue to be deported at alarming rates.
Nationally, more undocumented immigrants have been deported under the Obama
administration than under any previous administrations. 

Less than a month after the California Dream
Act was passed, on October 12, 2011,  five undocumented youth, wearing graduation caps, staged a
sit-in at the Immigration
and Customs Enforcement (ICE) offices in downtown Los
Angeles to urge
the Obama administration to stop deporting undocumented youth (Rojas 2011). The sit-in was launched by the
national Education Not Deportation (END) Our Pain campaign, which is comprised of a network of immigrant youth organizations and
allies demanding an immediate moratorium on deportations of youth eligible for the Dream
Act.

Watch the Ustream of that protest here:  


Armed with camera phones, the Dream activists
broadcast their action on Ustream, which was followed by 4,000 people.  Nancy Meza, one of the panelists, was
one of the protestors arrested at the sit-in.  She notes that new media was crucial to the activists'
ability to raise awareness around this event. Confirming the effectiveness of
this new media strategy, the activists were soon invited to a conference call
with key officials of the Obama administration.
The use of new media has played a key role in mobilizing undocumented
youth across the country, connecting local and regional youth organizations,
scaling local movements to the national level, and contesting elite-driven
messaging on immigration policy.

Sangita Shresthova is currently the Research Director of the Media Activism and Participatory Politics  (MAPP)  Project at USC. She is a Czech/Nepali international development specialist, filmmaker, media scholar, and dancer with extensive interdisciplinary qualitative research experience. She holds a Ph.D. from UCLA's Department of World Arts and Cultures, and a MSc. degree from MIT's Comparative Media Studies program where she focused on popular culture, new media and globalization. She also earned a MSc. in Development Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). While at LSE, her work focused on the educational communication components of international development interventions. Her scholarly writing has been published in several journals, and her work on global participatory aspects of Bollywood dance was recently released as a book by SAGE Publications.

Arely Zimmerman, a Melon Post-Doctorate Fellow at the USC Program for Environmental and Regional Equity,  holds a doctorate in political science from UCLA. Her scholarship engages overlapping research areas of U.S. Latino/a studies, race and ethnicity, social movements, transnational, media, and feminist studies. Before joining PERE, she held a postdoctoral appointment at USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where she examined how new forms of social and digital media are reshaping modes of civic engagement amongst Latino, immigrant, and undocumented youth. As part of her ongoing concerns with issues of identity and citizenship in transnational contexts, Arely's manuscript in progress, "Contesting Citizenship across Borders: Central Americans in the United States" details Central American migrant communities' struggles for citizenship and inclusion across multiple nation-states through transnational social movement and community activism.

Help Time Lord Rocker Beat Justin Bieber on British Pop Charts

I know I signed off the blog for the year, but my imagination has been captured by a fascinating struggle which is taking place this weekend around the UK Pop Singles Chart.

Specifically, I am excited by 22 year old Alex Day, who is gaining ground and British bookies give him a 1 in 16 chance of winning the competition, despite the fact that he has no record deals and has built his following entirely through his deft use of YouTube, Twitter, and other social media.

His catchy pop song, "Forever Yours," was released December 3 and his video, which playfully pairs a love song with images from superhero comics and zombie movies, has already been seen more than a million times. To win, he will need to best Justien Beber and Mariah Carey (not to mention the recent winner of the British X-Factor).

But, Day's certainly bringing on the grassroots support. Here's what he shared with me via a recent email: "'Forever Yours' is on sale as from today, became the second-highest trending topic on Twitter worldwide within eight minutes, and is so far sitting at number 96 on the UK iTunes Chart and rising about twenty places every time I refresh." This seems like a classic example of spreadability in action!

Apart from trying to turn the British pop world on its head, Day has been a key figure behind the growth of "Time Lord Rock," music inspired by Doctor Who, which has emerged as a grassroots movement in the spirit of the Wizard Rock associated with Harry Potter fandom. As a Time Lord Rocker, Day runs a website, Chameleon Circuit, which features such songs as "Blink" and "Exterminate Regenerate."

Check it out and if you feel so inclined, do what you can to help him beat Justin Bieber. Whatever happens, this is a fascinating example of how grassroots media and participatory culture is starting to impact the operations of the commercial mainstream.

This story came to me from Andrew Slack from the Harry Potter Alliance.

A Few Final Reflections at Year's End...

Having made it, more or less, through the grading frenzy, I am now really and truly spent, and looking forward to some much needed rest and relaxation over the holidays. So, this is going to be the last blog post for 2011. We will be back by the Second Week of January with an exciting line-up of interviews, essays, and other resources, but for the time being, I am going to take a few weeks off to read, write, and other things that keep Henry healthy and wise, if not particularly wealthy.

Before I do, I wanted to share a few loose ends which have come across my desk in the past few weeks.

The first is the webcast created by the fine folks at the New School of Social Research depicting the public conversation I had with Liz Losh at the Mobility Shifts conference earlier this fall. Many of you will have seen photographs of Liz and I wearing the Team Critical Theory and Team Cultural Studies racing jackets which Liz's husband designed and produced for the event. They were our joking way of calling out some of the unproductive tensions which have existed between those two camps over the past few years and the desire to work beyond them in order to contribute to far more important public debates, such as those concerning the future of public education, and to contribute towards shared visions, such as those concerning the democratization of access to digital media.

Here's how the program was billed:

At Mobility Shifts: An International Future of Learning Summit Henry Jenkins (Team Cultural Studies) and Elizabeth Losh (Team Critical Theory) offer a progress report on whether and in what ways the public schools and universities are going to be able to absorb or meaningfully deploy what Jenkins calls "participatory culture." Rather than an abstract discussion of a theoretical construct drawn from their supposedly opposite positions studying fan culture and institutional rhetoric respectively, the two will discuss concrete experiences of young people acting appropriately or not, inside or outside the classroom. What might a participatory learning culture look like? What policies make it hard for even supportive teachers to achieve in their classrooms? What stakeholders would need to be engaged in order to change the current cultures of our school? How might participatory learning take place beyond the schoolhouse gates? What is everyone afraid of?

The Mobility Shifts conference did a great job of combining multiple groups of people, from around the world, who care passionately about the future of education, many of whom are doing local projects designed to have a material real world impact that exist alongside and in relationship with their theory and scholarship.

As you will see, the differences that might exist between Losh and I on paper start to break down when we deal pragmatically with the concerns that animate our work. We've sometimes disagreed through our blogs, but the more we worked on pulling together this event, the clearer it became that our shared values and commitments were far more significant than tactical disagreements. In the course of this conversation, we make strong arguments for why, tempting though it may be, we can not just blow up the public schools and walk away, we talk about some specific insights we've gained through our educational interventions, and we discuss the strengths and limits of the concept of participatory culture as a way of framing current struggles over access to the means of cultural production and circulation. If you want to learn more about Liz's work, see her blog here.

Nikki Usher, a recently minted PhD from the Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism, has been using excerpts from Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Society (which I co-authored with Sam Ford and Joshua Green and which will be released by NYU Press next fall) with her students at American University. Nikki shared with us a video produced as part of a class project by her student, Sandi Moynihan, which applies our concepts of "spreadability" to describe the Occupy movement. The video is part of a larger set of resources around the movement you can find at her website, many of them dealing with Occupy's use of social media. I was so excited by her wonderful video that I asked if I could share it with you here.

Last week, I was down in Rio. In Copacabana, there are the most remarkable sand sculptures, including several which reconstruct the city's landmarks. Somehow, this sculpture depicting Santa and friends caused me great amusement. It speaks to the incongruous way that Euro-American Christmas iconography and traditions work in the context of South America, where, after all, December is one of the hottest summer months, but we are hearing "Frosty the Snow Man" and "White Christmas" playing everywhere we go. I decided this particular version of Father Christmas might better be called "Sandy Claws." (By the way, while it does not show up very well in this particular image, the woman in the picture is actually wearing one of those "itsy bitsy polka dot bikinis" that one sees on the beaches here, though admittedly, the sculpture left very little to the imagination in this rendering, itself a marker of cultural difference, given how unlikely it is to see anything so "family unfriendly" in public spaces in the United States.)

[image error]