Carmen Luke

Women in the Academy: the politics of speech and silence

Abstract This paper examines womens voice and silence in the academy. It begins with a discussion of the theoretical underpinnings of feminine voice and silence, and then analyses the gendered production of girls/womens voices throughout their schooling careers from the primary to university classroom. This is followed by a discussion of the contradictory politics of voice when differences clash among women (students) of colour. I argue here that ‘granting’ spaces for womens speech may be pedagogically desirable but has potentially silencing effects. In closing, I consider some pedagogical strategies that can potentially enable women to better partake in the management of their own academic, social, and political interests.

Childhood and Parenting in Popular Culture

The texts, imagery and commodities of popular culture encode constructs of childhood and parenthood which act as powerful public pedagogies in the production of social identities of the child, family, gender, and race. This paper focuses on (i) the corporate construction of childhood in the toy and media industries and, (ii) the textual and market construction of childhood and parenthood in childcare and parenting magazines. The analysis suggests that the social and consumer lessons children learn early, through the world of media and toys, are matched by similar visions of childhood in parenting magazines. It describes the marketplace of childhood, and the contradictory cultural logic of postfeminist images of family, child, and parenting.

The making of the child TV viewer: A poststructuralist agenda for conducting the history of research on mass media and children

Communications research claims to have an interdisciplinary history and perspective, yet it continues to operate within a predominantly empirical tradition. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, this article outlines an agenda for the deconstruction of the discourse on media and youth. It is argued that any conceptualization of the child in late capitalist media and cultural environments should begin from an acritical historical perspective on the discursive and institutional processes of knowledge production.