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.

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.

What types of “Othering” occur in graffiti art discourse? How have these boundaries been created and what are the implications?

Bonus Questions:

3) How are other forms of media influenced by the power dynamics inherent in the graffiti world? For example, the New York Times (re)aligning itself with the dominant attitudes over the course of many decades

4) What shifts in power dynamics occur when capitalism adopts anti-capitalist modes of representation to reach youth through advertising? For example, Time magazine’s adoption of graffiti, and commissioning of graffiti artists, for advertising their publication

Dickinson, Maggie. 2008. The Making of Space, Race and Place: New York City’s War on Graffiti, 1970-the Present. Critique of Anthropology 28(1):27-45.

-SJ Kerr-Lapsley, Drew Hart, Madeleine Tuer, Chris Vague

Just to add to our discussion on art vs. vandalism, here’s how one graffiti writer put it when asked by Halsey and Young in their 2006 article Our desires are ungovernable: Writing graffiti in urban space…

“Researcher: Do you think graffiti is art or vandalism?

Interviewee: Oh, yeah, it’s obviously both isn’t it? In some forms it’s vandalism. Some guys probably don’t even differentiate between the two . . . They do graffiti, [they g]o bombing or
trashing or whatever, [and] they want to label it as [art]. Obviously murals are seen as art. [But] if I don’t like it I might just think it’s rubbish—then that wouldn’t be art to me. If you can appreciate it, then I think . . . it is art. Probably within the right confines it always is art.” (Halsey and Young 2006:284-285)

Sj

For this article, we are posing the following discussion question:

Are the artistic aspects of graffiti enough to legitimize it as a medium or does the illegal properties outweigh its value?

Later in our discussion, we would lead into another question we have of:

“Would political legalization of graffiti as an accepted art form change the current difference in distribution of art between graffiti artist and regular artists?”

Looking forward to feedback!

-Brian Le, Matthew Ebisu, Garret Lashmar

Source:

Rafferty, Pat. 1991. Discourse on Difference. Visual Anthropology review 7(2):77-84.