PESGB STRATHCLYDE-GLASGOW BRANCH AND SERA THEORY AND PHILOSOPHY NETWORK PRESENT 2023-24 seminar series:
Crystallising Education, Philosophy and Popular Culture – A Seminar Series
View upcoming seminars here
Oscar Wilde once noted: “Art is not a mirror, but a crystal. It creates its own shapes and forms.” (2013, 33). Popular culture, too, as a site of symbiotic meaning making (Fiske, 2010) can be considered a crystal as each individual comes to interpret the myriad media, objects and subcultures constituting popular culture in unique and distinctive ways. As philosophers and educationalists, the question of how popular culture comes to be formed, and comes to form us, is one that offers a rich opportunity for exploration but, with a few exceptions, is a territory upon which we have so far only skirted around the edges.
The aim of this seminar series will be to take a deeper stride across the frontier to, first, look at the ways in which the meanings we draw from popular culture serve to educate us about the world around us, and about ourselves. For example, the allegorical nature of popular science fiction (Hippolito, 1974) offers the opportunity to reflect on recognisable themes from the past and present via speculation on a hypothetical future (consider the colonial themes of Star Trek and The Orville, or the robot-as-slave trope to be found across the works of Asimov, even if it did not originate with him). The eternal battle between good and evil is another common trope to be found in comic books and movies alike, as such allowing the viewers to develop their moral compass to align with either with the heroes or villains. The modern trend of the anti-hero creates a wonderfully curious blurring of this dichotomy. Phenomena such as fan fiction and cosplay are rooted in the notions of hermeneutic knowing (Robertson & Chen, 2021) and ideas of becoming. The adoption of the persona or character of another – person, animal, or thing - as a rehearsal for becoming oneself aligns with Mollenhauer’s (2013) idea of the “educational reality” as a safe space for pedagogical practice.
Furthermore, we are interested in how representations of educational instances in popular culture give us an opportunity to reflect on our conceptual and normative understandings of education. UK TV shows such as Bad Education, and Teachers, can only be conceived because our culture has an idea of what makes a good teacher. Instances of education across popular culture are not only confined to representations of schools, colleges, and universities, of course – consider Arthur Dent’s odyssey in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as one such less conventional conceptualisation.
Reflecting on education via the crystallic lens of popular culture offers the opportunity for new, perhaps radically different, perspectives and ideas to be formed which, for the field of philosophy of education, may prove to inspire some significant shifts in the overall discourse.
References
Fiske, J. (2010). Understanding Popular Culture, 2nd Edition. Routledge.
Hippolito, J. (1974). Flatland and Beyond: Characterization in Science Fiction. CEA Critic, 37(1), 18-21.
Mollenhauer, K. (2013). Forgotten Connections: On Culture and Upbringing. (N. Friesen, Trans.). Routledge.
Robertson, N. & Chen, Y. (2021, September 30 – October 2). Autobiographical Writing and Fan Fiction: Pedagogical Reduction and the Hermeneutic Link [Conference Presentation]. International Society for Educational Biography 37th Annual Conference. St Louis, MO, United States.
Wilde, O. (2013). De Profundis and Other Prison Writings. Penguin.
