AED 813 “1: Meet and Greet”
Striking me hard from this explorations readings was the concept of space and place introduced in “The Black Vernacular: Architecture as Cultural Practice” by B. Hooks. She discussed the homes of her relatives and what it was like to come up in the South at a time of white supremacism. I believe where you were raised and come from determines a big part of your human experience in your community, country, and world. It largely affects the perspective you carry when approaching the rest of your lived experience. I am a middle class white female living in the northern suburbs of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; I have lived a very privileged life as an only child. My ancestors immigrated to the Aliquippa area (a steel town north of Pittsburgh) working blue collar jobs in the early 1900s, and their progression up the socioeconomic ladder has opened up the possibilities for me to go to college and have the financial support of my parents in various endeavors. My ancestors acted on “moving forward and beyond the limits and confines of fixed locations (Hooks, 1995).”
Continuing with the idea of place, what news broadcasts we see and listen to largely determine how we see and approach our human beliefs and vice versa, where our values determine what we choose as our public source for information. Certainly, like relational art, we have relational beliefs about our contexts in our respective word. I often think about how social media curates news sources and stories to what they know about your values. Anywho, I do not have a cable subscription, and as a young liberal, I listen to the WESA NPR channel for my news education while I’m driving around town. I feel empowered by stories of people overcoming adversity and angered by political idiocracy (my opinion). I was raised with left-leaning parents, so I followed their footsteps. I think about how news broadcasting as a form of public pedagogy is not being listened to on purpose by those who do not agree with the specific source's political subscription because of the ideas they perpetuate. I can’t blame conservatives though for not partaking in my public radio interest; I would never turn on and watch FOX news. This begs the question, how is our political education warped or a censored snapshot of real world issues?
As politics are very polarized in our country, I find it interesting how we experience news as public pedagogy in a segregated format. The ideas and beliefs that I have about current events have been strongly influenced by what public radio has taught me currently and even what democratic news sources taught me on the television growing up. This is parallel to how for example my best friend’s mother has been strongly educated by FOX news to strengthen her values and fears. It’s further interesting to see how current politicians and events mirror things from the past. This goes hand in hand with the idea of simulacra from “Public Pedagogy as Visual Culture" by Wilson McKay and Keifer-Boyd (2005). Not only do artists feed off of one another’s creations and ideas, so do politicians and the way the media educates us through time.
Even though political comics are now mostly online, they serve as an important artistic commentary on politics. Below is a comic of one of our most pressing political issues we hear about on the news 24/7: Immigration, the wall, funding, and the shut down. What channel you turn on is going to give you a very different picture of this current event. As I am and most are decendents of immigrants to this country, the divide over this issue helps to drive people further apart. I leave this entry with two questions:
1. What can be done to make news broadcasting as a form of public pedagogy more equitable and less segragated?
2. How can public pedagogy and activism help to bring polarized political sides together to realized shared values and interests as a humanity?
