Greg Dimitriadis

“Making History Go” at a Local Community Center: Popular Media and the Construction of Historical Knowledge among African American Youth

Abstract As a range of critical pedagogues have argued, the curricula that young people are exposed to today has broadened immeasurably, due to the ever-increasing prevalence of popular media texts and cultures. The implications for social studies educators here is far ranging though little explored. In this paper, I look at how historical knowledge is mediated to young people in popular culture, how young people choose to mobilize such knowledge, and the consequences they face therein. Focusing on the film Panther (1995) (about the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense), and drawing on a series of focus groups with African American adolescents at a local community center, I look closely at what popular texts young people resonate with as well as how they pick them up and deploy them to deal with historical contingencies, here a proposed march in town by the Ku Klux Klan. I stress, throughout, the importance of looking, in concrete and situated ways, at how young people make history relevant in the here and now, how they, to echo Della Pollock, “make history go.”

The Social Field(s) of Arts Education Today: Living Vulnerability in Neo-Liberal Times.

The arts are often seen as peripheral to the ‘real business’ of school and schooling. While this has been the case for some time now, the increasing pressures of high-stakes testing and ever-more draconian public funding schemes (particularly in the wake of 9/11) have created something of a ‘perfect storm’ for those working in the arts. Arts proponents today live and operate within a culture of scarcity, having to justify their increasingly marginalized vocations while competing for continually shrinking resources. The result is an often deep-bodied sense of vulnerability, one which saturates the social field (both micro and macro) of arts education in ways not often publicly acknowledged. In this article, I explore this notion of ‘vulnerability’ as a framework for understanding qualitative data which emerged from a three-year arts and education project I conducted in a large, northeast city in the USA beginning in 2003. In so doing, I look to open up a broader discussion about the oft-ignored intersection(s) between the material and aesthetic in arts and education – a discussion which is sober about the future of such work in times of economic scarcity and conservative retrenchment.

The Situation Complex: Revisiting Frederic Thrasher’s The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago:

Originally published in 1927, Frederic Thrasher’s The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago is a panoramic, multilayered, richly detailed account of youth gangs—a milestone text of the Chicago School of Sociology. The most widely available version of The Gang is a highly edited edition published in 1963, which contained an extensive new introduction by noted sociologist James Short. I argue here for a return to the original text, as well as the work of Thrasher more broadly. Rereading this classic text in full, original form, I maintain, gives us fresh perspective on contemporary research and commentary on gang life. So commonly (now) the purview of the postpositivist and highly delimited field of criminology, The Gang returns us to questions of radical context, the multiple webs of influence and association that so marked studies of the period—a move long overdue.

Postcolonial Literature and the Curricular Imagination: Wilson Harris and the Pedagogical Implications of the Carnivalesque.

© 2004 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA Blackwell Publishing Ltd Oxford, UK EPAT ducational Philosophy and Theory 0013-1857

Framing Hip Hop New Methodologies for New Times

This article revisits the central impulse behind early advocacy for ethnographic approaches to hip hop—that critics should try as much as possible to limit their own certainties around what hip hop can and might mean. While ethnographic approaches can engender the kinds of personal dislocations that allow for this negotiation, they do not necessarily do so. Moreover, certain ethnographic approaches risk overly localizing the study of popular culture at a time when cultural phenomena need to be understood in global context. New forms of self-reflexivity are necessary for scholars and critics who look to “frame” hip hop as an object of analysis.

Travelling Home(s): Contemporary Korean Art after the Postcolonial.

Contemporary discussions of globalisation (in general) and postcolonialism (more specifically) have largely remained wed to critiques of the West, including around its outsized role in the proliferation of neoliberal economic logics. As Chen argues in Asia as Method, these discussions have precluded other kinds of discussions about globalisation and its ‘theories’ – those that are generated between Asian countries and peoples (recognising that ‘Asia’ itself is a construction). In this essay, we look towards a different kind of conversation about the postcolonialism, one that does not take the West as its primary interlocutor. We will look closely at two South Korean contemporary artists – Do Ho Suh (1962–) and Kimsooja (1957–) – and see how they work through contemporary, material concerns around ‘home’ and ‘place’. In particular, these artists point us towards ‘movement’ as a trope for displacing extant concerns with fixed identity and as a kind of ontological state of being in the world.

Studying resistance: some cautionary notes

The question of “resistance” has oriented the field of critical ethnography for several generations now. Indeed, the reproduction–resistance binary has animated much of the most important, critical work in educational studies over the last 30 years. Yet, this reproduction–resistance binary has perhaps calcified in recent years. Such work often searches for elusive moments of “authenticity” and “resistance” in time, pulling them out, celebrating them, exporting them to understand other sets of people in other social circumstances. Comparatively little work has treated resistance as a fluid and dynamic construct. This short essay offers some cautionary notes in this regard.

The Pedagogical Turn QI at 20 Years

The author argues that the proliferation of conferences, handbooks, and journals in qualitative inquiry can be seen as part of a “pedagogical turn” in the field. Specific attention is given to the emergence of “coding” as a tool in applied fields such as nursing, and the implications for making these practices more widely available for more people. The author ends by contextualizing the discussion in terms of Arjun Appadurai’s notion of the “right to research.”

Urban youth: emergent directions in the field

Midway through Black Youth Rising: Activism and Radical Healing in Urban America, Shawn Ginwright discusses a particularly stressful moment during his ongoing work with black youth in Oakland. Faced with a series of financial problems at Leadership Excellence (a programme he helped found and run for black youth in San Diego), professional challenges in his transition into a new job, as well as the personal pressures of having a newborn, he appeared visibly stressed. The young people repeatedly prodded, asking him what was wrong. He writes:

Reimagining Our Place in the World

This article thinks through the implications of the 2004 elections and the continued erosion of the left. In particular, it argues that the left must begin to offer people compelling narratives for how to live their lives or progressive spaces will continue to shrink. Qualitative inquiry, it concludes, can be enormously useful in this project.