House of Cards: Political Drama or (Mis)Educative Public Pedagogy

• In Event: 52.084 - Roundtable Session 18
  In Roundtable Session: 52.084-25 - Curriculum and Cultural Studies: Past, Present, and Future

Abstract

This paper asks how political dramas explicitly foregrounds issues of how we, as a society, perceive, receive, and participate in disparate political practices under the guise of a representative democracy. Informed by the manner of empirical analyses of education applied from Cultural Studies, and by recent moves in the field of Public Pedagogy to broaden our consideration of pedagogical and curricular forces at play outside of traditional public school classrooms, this work considers how the newly praised Netflix Series, House of Cards, along with other DC television shows (e.g. Scandal, Veep, The Blacklist) may be acting as mis-educative rather than educative public pedagogy – complicit in the (re)production of dysfunctional and oppressive machinations of government and governance.

Authors

• Jennifer L. Milam, Our Lady of the Elms (Elementary School, Principal)

• Jennifer Job, Oklahoma State University