Culture Jam Pedagogy and Practice: Relocating Culture by Staying on One's Toes

Abstract

We illustrate how culture jam practitioners and pedagogues are responding to increasing commercial incorporation by using participatory communication strategies to bring the act of jamming back into the realm of relocating culture. We analyze the past decade's evolution of one of YouTube's first viral videos, "Where the hell is Matt?," and connect this case to ways university pedagogy might integrate culture jams as artifacts and assignments to empower students to use communication frameworks not only to critique the status quo but also to collaboratively generate transformation. Throughout, we elucidate culture jam processes as creative and cooperative performances of staying on one's toes in the perpetual renegotiation of hegemony.

Make love, not war?: Radical environmental activism’s reconfigurative potential and pitfalls

“…Both radical and mainstream environmental organizations often must draw from the material-symbolic discourses they ostensibly exist to dismantle (McGaurr and Lester, 2017;McGregor, 2004). And, as activist organizations grow and age, this tendency, or even seeming necessity, to adopt dominant discourses and, as a result, to reify (instead of resist or replace) antithetical discourses in one's own self-representations may be difficult to shake (Milstein, 2020;Milstein and Pulos, 2015). We argue, however, that a shaking up -and a reconstituting -is precisely what is direly needed at this synchronized moment of radical environmentalism maturity and rebirth alongside catastrophic biospheric endangerment.…”

Non-prescribed spaces, creativity and narrative formation: a systems-based examination of a community art group exploring food poverty

“…As Bamberg and Andrews (2004, 01) suggest: 'Counter-narratives are the stories which people tell and live which offer resistance, either implicitly or explicitly, to dominant cultural narratives'. As the more concrete counter-narrative emerged and found expression in the artwork, participants began describing themselves as art activists and adopted a familiar visual trope that audiences would recognise as subversive in the form of the 'culture jamming' and 'Adbusters' styles (English 2004;Milstein and Pulo 2015) (Figures 4 and 5). However, as participant Leon, a long time Centre user in his forties, suggested when presented with the Adbusters style leaflet promoting the art exhibition: I think that's been done before, it's been done before, I seen things like that before though [Group interview, 10 February 2015] The adoption of an existing artistic approach can perhaps be thought of as a response to the emergence of a more familiar and available narrative.…”

Who loves consent? Social media and the culture jamming of Victoria’s Secret

“…Therefore, research on culture jammers relies upon contextualizing and improving moral actions, building community, and attempting to understand how jammers work to create sites of change (Milstein and Pulos, 2015). An article about Banksy, a famed and unnamed graffiti artist and social commentator, culture jamming Disneyland discussed the idea that people who saw the artifact and took pictures of it or in some way talked about it on social media gave it, and the idea behind it, an 'eternal online presence' (Harzman, 2015: 18).…”