Call for Chapter Submissions - Through a Distorted Lens: Media as Curricula and Pedagogy in the 21st Century

Call for Chapter Submissions

Through a Distorted Lens: Media as Curricula and Pedagogy in the 21st Century
Laura M. Nicosia & Rebecca A. Goldstein, Editors, Montclair State University
Series, Constructing Knowledge: Curriculum Studies in Action
Under contract with Sense Publishers

The purpose of Through a Distorted Lens is to explicate the media as forms of public curricula and pedagogy within the rapidly shifting context of a marketized, corporatized, and commodified torrent of media messages that threatens democratic possibility (Gitlin, 2007).

We seek contributions that focus on the political, social, economic, and cultural subjectivities that are simultaneously constructed, resisted, and transformed through media, and which tackle themes such as:

• The hidden dynamics of media discourse production in the age of neoliberalism
• Hypermedia as a form of explicit and hidden curricula
• The performative workings of power and pedagogy in the curricula of the media
• The public pedagogy of the media as a fractured lens: Socio-cultural, political, economic, and sexualized discourses
• The cultural politics and currency of critical readings of media about education
• Public pedagogy as action: Preparing current and future global participants

Chapters illustrate and advocate for an inter- and meta- reflexivity in which authors interrogate the co-constitutive nature between the media, and the public and private worlds. The essays we seek will strive to uncover what is left unsaid in and through media discourses. Approaches to these essays may be theoretical, pedagogical or conceptual, as appropriate.

We hope to provide readers with chapters that explore and explain what and how the media teach, to and by whom, and for what purpose. While concerned with education, authors move the discussion beyond the setting of formal schooling to uncover the ways in which the media contribute to individual and collective understandings of self and other, and their relations to society at micro and macro levels. In doing, this edited collection moves beyond exclusionary discussions of citizenship to consider participation in local and global geographies against a neoliberal backdrop that marginalizes those unable to, unwilling to, and excluded from competing in the free market (Ong, 2006).

Contributors extend their deliberations back to formal school settings to pose pedagogies that rediscover the reading of the word in the world through multimodalities (Freire & Macedo, 1987). In this sense, the text strives to be transdisciplinary, and is appropriate for use in multiple disciplines and fields of study.

Tentative Table of Contents and Structure of Book

Forward (2500 Words)
Introduction: Mapping the Distortion: The Mediating and Mediatization of Curricula and Pedagogies in Everyday Life (6500 words, confirmed)

Part One: Probing the Media: Contexts, Theories, and Problems in the 21st Century
1. A Fourth Estate for the Mainstream No More? Corporatization, Mediatization, and the Public in the 21st Century (6500 words, confirmed)
2. Public No More: The Curricula and Pedagogies of Privatization and New Languages of/about Learning in the Media (confirmed, 6500 words)
Additional chapters of 5,000-6500 words each are welcome. Possible topics or chapter titles may include:

• The Myth of Media Democratization: Global Inferences, and the Curriculum and Pedagogy of Surveillance
• Reflecting the 1%: Selling the Political Economics of Neoliberalism through Curricular Control
• Discourses of Globalization: Framing the Invisible in Media Discourses
• The New Rugged Individual: The Framing of Web 2.0, Media Literacy, and “Workplace Readiness”
• On the Internet, Everyone is Equal: Deconstructing Marginalizing Discourses in the Media
• Curriculum Studies and the Media

Part Two: Learning to “See” the Curricula and Pedagogy of the Media: Uncovering the Official and the Hidden
5. How dare you make her black! Mediating Images and The Hunger Games (confirmed, 6,500 words)
6. The Spectacle of Mental Illness in the Media: Explicating the Curriculum of Mariginalization (6500 words)
Additional chapters of 5,000-6,500 words each are welcome. Possible topics or chapter titles may include:

• Media Framing of the Labor Movement within the Discourses of Neoliberalism: The New Curriculum of Work
• The Political Work of the Curriculum About Education: Media Influences and Mediating Norms
• Imaging the Public in Education: Media Images of Education from Around the World

Part Three: Transforming Media Curricula, and Pedagogies and the Public
9. “Queering” the Media, “Queering” the Narrative: Revealing and Transforming the “It Gets Better Campaign” and the Curricula and Pedagogy of/about Queer Youth, (confirmed, 6,500 words)
10. A Heavy Burden to Shake Off: Immigrant Youth Challenging Islamophobia in Media Contexts (confirmed, 6,500 words)
Additional chapters of 5,000-6500 words each are welcome. Possible topics or chapter titles may include:

• Envisioning a Curriculum and Pedagogy of the Media that Serves the Public
• Beyond False Equivalencies: Defining a critical public media pedagogy
• Understanding the Media as Curriculum and Pedagogy: Teaching and Learning about the World

Time-table:

February 28, 2014 Chapter proposals due (250 word abstracts)
April 1, 2014 Notification of acceptance of the chapter proposals complete
June 15, 2014 Draft of chapters and questions due
July 15, 2014 Review of drafts complete; Comments sent to contributors
September 1, 2014 Revised chapters due
November 1, 2014 Copy editing and final rewrites
January 1, 2015 Final formatted manuscript delivered to Publisher

Chapter Proposals

Authors interested in contributing a chapter should submit a 250 word abstract which provides an overview of the intended manuscript no later than February 28, 2014 to Nicosiala@mail.montclair.edu or Goldsteinr@mail.montclair.edu.