About Tal Nitsan

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Examples of Essay Questions on Films

Year of Living Dangerously

How do the movie characters Guy Hamilton [played by Mel Gibson], Jill Bryant [played by Sigourney Weaver] and Billy Kwan [played by Linda Hunt] express the tension between personal uses of media and public, commercial, and political uses?

 Slumdog Millionaire

What are some of the specific ways that globalization is represented in the movie Slumdog Millionaire?

 Exit Through the Gift Shop

In what ways is Banksy’s graffiti art a political and cultural commentary?

CBQM

How does local radio inFortMacPherson, NWT as portrayed in the movie CBQM both reflect and create community?

 Transfictions

In what ways does the movie Transfictions parallel the techniques and objectives of Theatre for Living as described by Director David Diamond in his class presentation. What sorts of concerns in the lives of transsexuals does the movie address?

 

Final Exam Example Questions

1. What changes do Walter Benjamin and Benedict Anderson argue have resulted from mass mechanical reproduction (of words in print as well as of images)?

(Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities.

Benjamin, Walter. 1936. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”.)

2. How does Brigit Meyer use ethnographic examples to argue for a natural relation between religion and media?

(Meyer, Brigit. 2010. “Mediation and Immediacy: Sensational Forms, Semiotic Ideologies and the Question of the Medium”. )

3. What comparisons can you draw between the dynamics of news reporting in India at the time of the Deepa Wehta Water controversy and the development of politically polarized television reporting  in the United States (for example Fox News, CNN political commentators, Rush Limbaugh, etc.)?

(Rao, Ursula. 2010. “Embedded/Embedding Media Practices and Cultural Production”. In Theorizing Media and Practice.)

3. How is the practice of graffiti and attendant discourses reflective of issues of class and property? Use examples from class readings, blogs or the movie Exit Through the Gift Shop to illustrate your argument.

(Rafferty, Pat. 1991. “Discourse on Difference”.

Dickinson, Maggie. 2008. “The Making of Space, Race and Place:New York City’s War on Grafitti, 1970-the Present”.

Banksy. 2010.Exit through the Gift Shop.)

4. How does community radio inAustraliaandFortMcPherson, NWT (Canada) reflect and create community?

(Fisher, Daniel. 2009. “Mediating Kinship: Country, Family, and Radio inNorthern Australia. Cultural Anthropology”.

Allen, Dennis (Director). 2010. CBQM.)

5. In what ways did the Nicaraguan television shows described in “Spectacles of Sexuality” fulfill the goals of the NGO that provided the funding? How was the show able to raise awareness of sexual issues despite the repressive political climate inNicaragua?

(Howe, Cymene. 2008. “Spectacles of Sexuality: Televisionary Activism inNicaragua”)

6. What does Lila Abu-Lughod’s study of Egyptian melodramas reveal about the extent to which audiences absorb the meanings that the producers intended to convey? Give specific examples from her study. What does her study indicate about the constraints on meaning and the ability of media producers to impose their own messages on media consumers?

Abu-Lughod, Lila. 2002. “Egyptian Melodrama—Technology of the Modern Subject?”)

7. Use evidence from Shimmering Screens, Jennifer Deger’s study of media use in an Australian Aboriginal Community, to evaluate James Weiner’s argument that indigenous use of media is inherently problematical because the media technologies and practices are products of “Western culture”.

(Deger, Jennifer. 2006. Shimmering Screens: Making Media in an Aboriginal Community

Weiner, James.1997. “Televisualist Anthropology: Representation, Aesthetics, Politics”)

8. How has European (and North American) photographic tradition maintained what Christopher Pinney terms depth, possession and exploitation, consequently affirming chronotopes? How have photographic conventions in other countries developed in different directions?

Pinney, Christopher. 2003. “Notes from the Surface of the Image”.)

9. Alex Golub argues that online video games increasingly appeal to players

because their sociality mimics real life. What social skills do players of World

of Warcraft and similar online multiplayer games have to master? What are the

implications of these games for the future of computer-based gaming? In what

ways are the effects of these games positive and in what ways are they negative (Be specific)? (Golub, Alex (2010) “Being in the World (of Warcraft): Raiding,

Realism, and Knowledge Production in a Massively Multiplayer Online Game”)

 

 

Spectacles of Sexuality: Televisionary Activism in Nicaragua

Spectacles of Sexuality: Televisionary Activism in Nicaragua by Cymene Howe.

  1. In the article, Howe asserts that gay and lesbian characters do not match/relate to the perception of “real” gays & lesbians in the community. Assuming this is true, are these NGO funded television shows effective in their goal?
  2. Are there any such North American equivalents that are trying to promote social justice (as mentioned in the article)?
  3. Are gays and lesbians represented accurately on North American TV?

Discussion Question Feb 27th

1)      Do you believe it is  possible to understand film(s) created by another culture without a pre-existing understanding of that cultures norms and values?

2)      In what way has the introduction and use of film, diminished the social and cultural significance of history and memory amongst indigenous and Third World people? Do you think that it has diminished social and cultural significance amongst peoples in the Western world?

 

3)      Although we are able to obtain more information, subjectively, through the analysis of an image as opposed to reading a text, is it possible to fully understand an issue based on televisualist anthropology?

 

Mediating Kinship: Country, Family, and Radio in Northern Australia

1. In what ways is radio successful in effecting nostalgia and mediating kinship?

2. How does Aboriginal radio facilitate social media by linking distinct phenomena e.g. kinship, expressive language, music and remote communities together?

Main points

-Fisher discusses the performative, mediated interweaving of speech, song, & kinship on Aboriginal radio broadcasts in Northern Australia.

-He focuses specifically on increasingly popular radio request programs, which have emerged from the activist drives of Indigenous media producers, and invariably involve “shout outs” by callers to close and extended kin. These request programs developed as a means for connecting prison inmates to their families and communities; they are the intersection between a history of Aboriginal incarceration, the dispersal of kin networks, and the expressive idiom of radio requests.

 

Reference:

Fisher, Daniel

2009         Mediating Kinship: Country, Family, and Radio in Northern Australia.

Cultural Anthropology 24(2): 280-312.

Moscow’s Echo: Technologies of the Self, Publics, and Politics on the Russian Talk Show

Discussion Questions:

1 – Are talk shows (and other forms of participatory media) really cathartic or personalized experiences for the involved audience, giving people agency, or are they more a means of pushing the particular agenda of those in control? Relatedly, are they democratizing devices that give voice to audience members or “anti-political” machines as described by Matza in the article?

In other words, are talk shows a platform for the public to voice their frustrations and to subsequently inspire change in the society, or are they simply a distraction that keeps people from taking concrete actions in the real world?

2 – Matza describes the differences between the very personal subject matter of American talk shows and the more distanced nature of Soviet talk shows. Despite these differences, are there parallels between the talk shows he discusses and forms of participatory media we’re familiar with in our own culture?

Bonus Question: Have you ever participated in a radio talk show program? If so, does your personal experience relate to what we have talked about here?

Matza, Tomas                                                                                                                 2009    Moscow’s Echo: Technologies of the Self, Publics, and Politics on the Russian       Talk Show. Cultural Anthropology 24(3): 489-522.

Dean Ward, Beth Penney, (Tony) Meng Zhai, and Jana Mings.

The Graffiti blog post (instructions)

You will upload your graffiti posting to the class blog

Your posting should include:

1. Your name
2. A title
3. A picture of the graffiti that you will be talking about.
4. Up to 250 words arguing for the significance of this use of graffiti, or making a wider argument about the significance of graffiti in general.
5. At least one in-text citation to a source relating to your argument
6. One or more references in the bibliography that are not class readings (the references don’t count as part of the 250 word limit)

 

Embedded/Embedding Media Practices and Cultural Production

How are political performances and news-making practices entwined in India, and how might the ‘subjectivity’ of the press affect its institutional authority?

[and then we could further the discussion by asking about other examples (celebrities/politics/news media/etc.) closer to home]

Clare Mildenberger

Rao, Ursula
2010 Embedded/Embedding Media Practices and Cultural Production. In
Theorizing Media and Practice, Brigit Brauchler and John Postil eds. Pp.
147-168. New York: and Oxford: Berghahm Books

The blog-post assignment

The blog-post assignment  is due on Feb 10th.
More details.. soon.
For now, i’m sharing with you two graffiti photos from my last visit in Guatemala.

Nov 25th, 2011, Guatemala City

 

Rosa’s graffiti.

Nov 25th, 2011, Guatemala City.

The text reads:
Those who attack women, rape them and kill them, are not sick. They are criminals.

Nov 25th, 2011, Guatemala City

 

 

A morning  outing with grandma Rosa. 

Nov 25th, 2011, Guatemala City