Spectacle Pedagogy

Examines the interrelationships between art, politics, and visual culture post-9/11.

Examines performance art and the powerful implications it holds for teaching in the schools.

Bringing together scholars, public intellectuals, and activists from across the field of education, the Handbook of Public Pedagogy explores and maps the terrain of this burgeoning field. For the first time in one comprehensive volume, readers will be able to learn about the history and scope of the concept and practices of public pedagogy. What is 'public pedagogy'? What theories, research, aims, and values inform it? What does it look like in practice? Offering a wide range of differing, even diverging, perspectives on how the 'public' might operate as a pedagogical agent, this Handbook provides new ways of understanding educational practice, both within and without schools. It implores teachers, researchers, and theorists to reconsider their foundational understanding of what counts as pedagogy and of how and where the process of education occurs. The questions it raises and the critical analyses they require provide curriculum and educational workers and scholars at large with new ways of understanding educational practice, both within and without schools.

This book edition offers a collection of scholarship and reflections that goes beyond theoretical conversations. This volume helps reignite a dialogue not only by scholars but also by educators, activists, and students who believe in inclusive and equal access to education for all individuals regardless of race, ethnicity, immigration status, gender, sexuality, religion, and other identities. In this volume, the authors examine curriculum and pedagogy as a tool for recovery from political trauma and healing. They used thisas an opportunity to confront some of the politically shameful situations affecting educational environments, homes, neighborhoods, enclaves, and regions marked by socioeconomic inequality. The authors of Making a Spectacle present wide-open questions: How are educators and school leaders learning to interact with one another, students, their families, and community while facing increased mass school shootings, police violence, racial profiling, unequal access to education and basic needs during a pandemic (COVID-19), and other forms of sociopolitical stress influenced by discrimination, institutional racism, and White nationalism? What curricular and pedagogical geographies are educators and students afforded through which to process their emotional responses to ecological or political activities witnessed in schools and their surrounding areas? These chapters and reflections/perspectives represent a diversity of positionalities within critical intersections of power and privilege as they relate to identity, culture, and curriculum and social justice, schools, and society.

This book discusses ethnography from the three points of view of Emerging Methodologies, Practice and Advocacy, and Social Justice and Transformation, with an over arching emphasis on researchers' and participants' worldviews. While these three thematic threads cut across each other, the actual chapters will be located so that the reader understand many of the current issues and concerns—with specific exemplars from around the globe—for ethnographers. 'Ethnographic Worldviews: Transformations and Social Justice' will have its "finger on the pulse" of contemporary ethnography. Chapters demonstrate up-to-the-moment awareness of ethnographic methods, concerns, and subject matters within contemporary ethnographic writing. Authors are deeply engaged in both their subject matter and their method. For example, discussion of ethical issues surrounding visual methods of "collecting" for photo-ethnographies is anticipated as a potential hot topic for this book. Unlike other ethnographic books which often suggest "giving voice to others", this book will actually give voice to a wide variety of perspectives, from the points of view of researchers.

In Qualitative Inquiry in the Present Tense, contributors engage with epistemological and philosophical questions concerning the conduct of qualitative inquiry in the present moment, and especially as it relates to various understandings of writing in/as inquiry. Topics addressed include methodological processes, questions of narrative uprootedness, relational inquiry, Indigenous ethico-onto-epistemologies, storytelling, and transformative writing forms and practices. This is a messy, often unruly collection (in the best way possible) of disparate ideas strung tightly together by literal and metaphorical questions of the research act of writing. Contributors from the United States, Australia, Canada, England, and Scotland imaginatively conceive of new qualitative futures—and how we might write ourselves there. This evocative new book is a must-read for faculty and students alike who are interested in and engaged with questions and ideas oriented toward understanding our current historical present in qualitative research—a moment in which the field is perpetually in motion or in flux, with new theories, methods, and orientations arising, competing, and even contradicting one another.

Why did medieval dramatists weave so many scenes of torture into their plays? Exploring the cultural connections among rhetoric, law, drama, literary creation, and violence, Jody Enders addresses an issue that has long troubled students of the Middle Ages. Theories of rhetoric and law of the time reveal, she points out, that the ideology of torture was a widely accepted means for exploiting such essential elements of the stage and stagecraft as dramatic verisimilitude, pity, fear, and catharsis to fabricate truth. Analyzing the consequences of torture for the history of aesthetics in general and of drama in particular, Enders shows that if the violence embedded in the history of rhetoric is acknowledged, we are better able to understand not only the enduring "theater of cruelty" identified by theorists from Isidore of Seville to Antonin Artaud, but also the continuing modern devotion to the spectacle of pain.

Sport, Spectacle, and NASCAR Nation critically interrogates stockcar racing's ascendance into the upper-echelon of the North American sporting popular. While most contributions to the public discourse gloss over NASCAR's exclusively white racial identity politics, its underlying patriarchal gender politics, its overtly conservative political commitment, its hyper-Christian orthodoxy, and its omnipresent commercialism, this book connects the dots and critically analyzes the problematic nature of this non-natural, strategically-orchestrated sporting spectacle.