Artz gives overwhelming evidence of how the cultural hegemony of individualism and consumerism is promoted everywhere by transnational media corporations (TNMCs), so that current social relations in capitalism are reproduced and reinforced. The reader can get a clear outlook of TNMCs and their impact on the diversity, hybridization, and standardization of global culture and outlooks.
Keyword: media
Make(r) Space, Making Space: A Media Ecology in Two Parts
The pop-up maker space hosted by the Media Interventions working group of the Cultural Studies Association at the 2014 annual meeting, ‘Ecologies: Relations of Culture, Matter, and Power,’ is a collaborative intervention into the typical structure of academic conferences in the interdisciplinary humanities and social sciences, whose genres and formats tend to privilege established scholars, disciplinary paradigms, the new, and above all a mindset in which the resources attached to ‘professionalization’ are governed by scarcity. Held concurrently with the main conference schedule at the University of Utah’s historic Pierre Lassonde House, the maker space showcases the work of artists, activists, media practitioners, performers, researchers, and amateur ‘makers,’ inviting conference attendees to engage the material not merely as spectators but as active participants in the collective meanings of the event. In doing so, it quite literally makes space for multimodal methods of knowledge production that decenter the individual and scramble the dominant temporalities of academic labor. This two-part essay describes the maker space as media ecology in the process of unfolding across multiple time frames (and time zones) and through unevenly distributed agencies as well as affective states. The first part documents the process of making a space for making, while the second attempts to partially capture and re-present the event itself through digital photography, video clips, sound snippets, links, maps, and other media ancillary to the maker space. In reading, watching, listening, touching, clicking, and otherwise attending to what we are making, you become integrated into the circuitry of our affections: the queer collection of things that comprise media ecologies.
Critical Purchase in Neoliberal Times
‘Critical Purchase in Neoliberal Times’ is an edited conversation with Ien Ang and three members of the Cultural Studies Praxis Collective (CSPC): Miriam Bartha, Bruce Burgett, and Ron Krabill. The transcript of the conversation conducted at the University of Washington was reworked and revised by the interlocutors. The document as a whole surfaces and addresses a series of questions about engaged and community-based forms of cultural studies scholarship; multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, and media policy; and the future of the transnational field of cultural studies in the context of the neoliberal turn in global higher education.
Culture Industries: Critical Interventions
This thread presents a different agenda for studying culture and the culture industries in particular, one that is grounded in a distinctly cultural studies materialist reflexivity. Cultural studies is probably best understood as the politically committed, theoretically grounded, and radically self-reflexive and historical-materialist analysis of cultural processes and practices, where the commitment to imagine a humane, socialist society has always been a guiding assumption in the field from its early formations in post-war Britain.