Delores Phillips and Cultural Studies Association’s Globalization and Culture Working Group Co-Host Kathalene Razzano discuss Disorienting Politics: Chimerican Media and Transpacific Entanglements (University of Michigan Press, 2024) with author Fan Yang, along with writer and historian Mark Tseng-Putterman. This podcast is accompanied by a scholarly commentary by Marcus Breen.
Articles by Marcus Breen
Marcus Breen was born and educated in Australia. He first published in cultural studies in 1991. He first visited China in 2007 and is writing a book about his experiences of the country, trying to make sense of the contributions of its culture to world peace in advancing socialism. As well as many critical academic contributions to popular music and digital technology studies, he has worked as a journalist and a consultant. Since 2014 he has taught in the Communication Department at Boston College after stints teaching at The University of Melbourne, UNC Chapel Hill, Northeastern University, and Bond University.
Coronavirus Pedagogy in the Zoomscape: Pinhole Intimacy Culture Meets Conscientization
The COVID-19 pandemic emptied universities, colleges, and schools across the United States in March 2020, forcing instructors into an unavoidable culture in which a networked commercial technology mediated teaching and learning. In the tradition of critical pedagogy, this article argues that students and instructors alike engaged through the artificial lenses and screens of Zoom. The “pinhole intimacy” of the Zoomscape is assessed using conscientization, the concept offered by the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, to describe most pedagogy as an oppressive apparatus that can be overcome with direct engagement between students and instructors. In such an opticentric context, the Zoomosphere’s intimacy is used to explore how the emancipation proposed by conscientization might be applied to the culture of pedagogy in a college with a diverse student population, including pedagogical interventions to address the challenges associated with teaching Division I athletes. The context of a large communication department at Boston College provides the empirical foundation for the exploration of coronavirus pedagogy.