Yesterday was the long awaiting CAP conference. After attending this event, I can honestly say I could not be more proud to be a part of such a intelligence diverse group of students. Like a proud dance mom I was taking pictures and waving embarrassingly at my colleagues (see attached picture) as they brought great pride to our cap stream with their careful, amazing work. Furthermore, I was amazed with the work being done by students who were in other cap streams. I was so interested in the cross over of subject matter throughout. Many of the panels I observed I was amazed to note subjects we have taken up in our class but with an entirely different lens.
Of all the amazing speakers I had to privilege of observing, I am choosing to discuss the paper presentation done by Kate McLaughlin, a student in the Media and Culture CAP stream. She presented her aper on the subject of Racist Media Representation. Not only was her paper wonderful informative, I was amazed to see the cross disciplinary conversations that could be happening. Kate discussed racism in relation to media representation, and while we did not directly study this, as autobiography scholars, I could contribute to this conversation with bringing in sources such as Diamond Grill, and explore the subject of media representation through the study of counter narratives of autobiography. This juxtaposition between the imposed identify and the created identify is a subject I plan to take up in my final paper, and noting the role of the media in the formation of stigmas is a vital source I have neglected to factor into my study. Furthermore Kate also brought up the issue of the glorification of the white body. This is a phenomenon which can be also applied to our subject matter, especially in relation to Fred Wah and his identification as “White Enough”. All in all I was amazed to see that some of the issues we have taken up in our discussion are being discussed elsewhere, and in completely different contexts. This lead me to the idea, that perhaps next year, two students from different cap streams could be paired up and together they would have to find a common ground subject and using their own unique disciplinary perspectives. That may be a very interesting addition to the 2016 CAP conference.
Hey Delaney!
I was also really interested in drawing connections between CAP streams and finding similarities! I did not attend Kate McLaughlin’s presentation on “Racist Media Representation”, but I am interested in how you have connected the ideas it raised to your term paper, particularly “the role of the media in the formation of stigma”. This reminded me of Jiwani and Young’s method of frame analysis to find that the missing and murdered women of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside “invit[e] victimization”, because of their “racialized status” as Aboriginal, drug-addicted female sex workers (902). Relating to your point of “the glorification of the white body”, Jiwani and Young also analyze the media’s representation of Robert Pickton, a white man, after it is revealed that he murdered these women. Jiwani and Young state that Pickton is framed as a pig farmer with “wild, stringy hair and a blank stare” (905), permitting the audience to blame him for the crime. This frame is necessary in order to take away from his more privileged societal position and instead position him as a criminal associated with blame. I found it interesting that media representation can easily emotionally persuade people to take one side of an issue and blame the other side. This made me think that the media often has agency in deciding the outcome of an issue and then forcing their perspective into the minds of the people. What would happen if the media was very objective in portraying events? Personally I believe that the media would not lose its agency, yet it would be less assertive, as more power would be left to the people in the sense that they would be able to formulate their own opinions objectively. I also think that with an objective approach, frames that can racialize groups of people would not exist in media representation and therefore they may not be continuously reinforced in society.