Climates of Dissent: Media Ecologies as Oppositional Pedagogy

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

The political logic of dissent and resistance, as well as its accompanying pedagogy, often takes the form of an additive or discrete model, one that pinpoints singular critical, aesthetic, and discursive strategies belonging to dissent or transgression, and similarly unitary agencies as the wellspring of protest and critique. From this stance, teaching toward dissent is an operation of critical unmasking, the revelation of an underlying truth made visible by the scalpel of critique, the truth stripped bare of its mediations. As cogent and important as this critical and pedagogical legacy may be, it reinforces an atomistic and exclusionary understanding of protest and resistance, and the critical epistemology said to underlie it. This panel argues through disparate examples for a wildly expanded field of dissent, one that is best characterized as an ecology, and beyond that, as a mediated ecology where the various media —print, image, sound, digital, IRL event—intertwine, coalesce, and make of dissent or critique something as systemic, as mediated, as performative, and as contextual as are those forces dissent seeks to unravel. To think of and also to feel dissent as an aggregation, a dynamic and affective amalgam, is to construe dissent, protest, and resistance as an ecological commons, as an infrastructure--not simply a “structure”-- of feeling, as a mediated collective body, where temporal and spatial context is everything. In such a contextual ecology, pedagogy is neither separate nor added on, but rather integral and immanent, and pedagogy is as much a matter of emotion as of thought.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Christopher Grobe, Amherst College

Individual Presentations

• Inhabiting a Neoliberal Climate: The Mediated Ecology of Random International's Rain Room - Benjamin Bateman, California State University, Los Angeles

• A Terrible American Beauty is Born: The Poetics of US Protest From the Wizard of Oz to the Women’s Marches - Jennifer A Wicke

• The Great Outdoors: Robert Smithson’s Environmental Media and the American Globe - Morten K Hansen, Bowdoin College

• Unmade According to His Image; or, Night for Day: Radical Black Writing and Film in Spite of the Human - Kevin Bell, Penn State University