Media Pedagogies: Limits of Performativity and Potentials for Disruption

• In Event: Disrupting Colonial Narratives of Development Work and Service-Learning: Possibilities in Pedagogical and Research Methods

Abstract

Purpose
This paper analyzes the limitations and possibilities of “disruptive” forms of media as pedagogical tools. Offering specific examples of YouTube videos, websites and other media, it explores the public education potential of media that works to dispel colonial and racist logics rooted in popular cultural mythologies of tourism, travel, development/humanitarian work, migration and race.

Theoretical framework
Spectatorship has historically played a key role in the public’s ability to condone or condemn projects pursued in the guise of “helping the other.” Images of racialized bodies have been used to sell products, and indeed to sell the very idea of Empire, domination and otherness, from the very beginnings of mass advertising (McClintock, 1996). Images have never been benign, but rather, have constituted and generated culture and ideas that actualize imperialism (Jay & Ramaswamy, 2013). Modern media produces culture that accepts structural inequity and violence, while performatively grieving it, while also gratuitously positioning and visioning the Western self as a potential saviour (Chouliaraki, 2013).

Modes of inquiry
Humanitarian work, and fundraising for it, has relied heavily on, and continually produced, images of either the suffering or the resilient other. Recently, a sense of irony on the part of the Western subject about who has and who has not in our modern world serves to promote the wish to “help” (Chouliaraki, 2013). Yet, when it comes to aid and development work, what this help is, and whether it is useful, has been the subject of much cynicism and doubt. Recently, videos and other media content have emerged to challenge and subvert popular narratives of saviour culture. These instances of culture jamming (Warner, 2007) represent important voices of dissent that interrupt and call out performativity, and do so in a way that is ironic. However, this irony, when in response to the irony Chouliaraki (2013) argues is fundamental to aid work in the first place, may reproduce a sense of hopelessness, and may also become a form of what Jane (2016) terms “digilantism,” which functions to separate those who feel in the know with those who are not. They also sometimes perpetuate Indigenous and Black erasure.

Data sources
This paper presents an analysis of several videos and online platforms that directly confront, and work to generate different ways of thinking about, humanitarian/aid work, including Saviour Barbie on Instagram and the SAIH Africa For Norway YouTube channel. Several viral media moments that address racism and colonization are also discussed, including YouTube sensation Lily Singh’s “A geography class for racists,” the Yolocaust campaign, videos countering Australia’s “Independence” day, and the upheaval following the Kendal Jenner Pepsi Ad, to explore how media can perpetuate or disrupt popular notions of empire and race.

Scholarly significance
Disruptive media pedagogies serve as vitally useful and massively accessible classroom tools for teachers to teach about race and racism. They present possibilities for a future of humanitarian work dislodged from its fundamentally racist roots. They can also provide students with their own useful mediums for generating and sharing alternate worldviews and experiences.

Author

• Nisha Toomey, University of Toronto