The Pragmatic

So my son and I are talking about the program the other day and he asks me, "What exactly do you want to contribute to the field?" And I couldn't answer him directly. I have many interests in media, and am developing a high school curriculum founded on the making and study of media and its relationship to democratic institutions (in fact, the basis on which I applied to our program), but winnowing it all down to a narrow area of research focus is proving to be very challenging. Scary.

My main subject matter interests:

1. Propaganda & Social Activism

2. Fair Use & Private Property Rights (ironically, a related example is in the reading, Vaidhyanathan's Copyrights and Copywrongs)

3. The Depiction of History in Film

They all have some relevance to what I'm working on, and are really dimensions of the whole. Whatever I wind up focusing on, I'm pretty sure my purposes are exploratory, descriptive, explanatory, and emancipatory, and that I'll need to employ aspects of all the methodological frameworks.

I'd like to be able to say I have some testable/ provable statistics supporting my thesis that when young people work with and study media of their choice it tends to stimulate/ activate interest and participation in the political process. I'd also like to explore emerging attitudes towards the use of copyrighted/ protected works, and how that might affect the organizing principles/ assumptions of such a school program. If my son is any indication, there isn't a whole lot of respect for the notion of proprietary rights in intellectual property these days. Seems like Larry Lessig's views on an open, free access paradigm is becoming more pervasive. Are we facing the demise of traditional copyright, and will its weakening tend to foster greater participation in the form of media-making because of fewer perceived legal and other obstacles? Big issues and big questions. Delimit is De Problem.

{Quick comment about Prof. Mattern's lecture -- Her remarks about one of her main areas of interest -- 'place' vs. 'space' -- really resonated with me. One of my earliest goals as a history teacher was to somehow make the 5 Themes of Geography the slightest bit interesting, and the most challenging part of that was to communicate the differences between these two concepts: Place vs. Location. An esoteric and inscrutable distinction to your average 8th-grader. But they always got it when they understood that one was physical while the other was sensory -- the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, textures of a physical space. "Where am I?" vs. "What's this place like?" Anyway, this little connection helped me feel like I wasn't so remote from the lecture 'space' in New York . . .}