Global flows as gendered cultural pedagogies: learning gangsta in the ‘Durty South’

Abstract

This article theorizes empirical data from an ethnographic project conducted in and around the economically disadvantaged suburb of Noble Park in southeast suburban Melbourne (Victoria, Australia). Exploring the politics around gendered identities of young people involved in the research, particularly Australian-Sudanese men, the authors theorize global flows of 'gangsta culture' as gendered cultural pedagogies that are (re)produced by young men who live in the area. In highlighting the pedagogical role of gangsta culture, the authors read Appadurai's theories of globalization and the imagination in relation to theories of hegemonic masculinity, to argue global flows of gangsta culture are gendered and carry with them specific kinds of idealized masculinities in relation to which young people in the study produce themselves. The authors also argue that gangsta culture clearly is not an American phenomenon, despite commonly being associated as such. Rather, its reach is globalizing, appearing everywhere global media texts form part of local communities. Gangsta pedagogies are thus in motion and disjunctive, operating transnationally and having differentiated effects in the lives of young participants involved in the research. In line with this, gangsta masculinities are ubiquitous and constitute sites of constant contest and reconstruction, with the young men involved in this research constructing their masculinities dialogically, in relation to the perceptions of peers, family members, teachers, members of the community and in relation to the contours of local space. Whether young people choose to actively engage with gangsta culture, or are unwillingly engaged with it by virtue of the spaces they traverse, its pedagogical forces effect both problematic and productive performances of racialized, gendered and spatialized identities.

Mapping the Complexity of Public Pedagogy Scholarship

“…We did find some authors who explicate the intended or imagined pedagogies of particular sites in their work (see Anderson, 2006; Bates, 2007; Hladki, 2006; Nieland, 2008; Sandlin & Milam, 2008) and some who have also been clear in connecting their explications of processes of pedagogical address in specific sites to broader theorizations of public pedagogy (see Ellsworth, 2005; H. A. Giroux, 1999, 2001a, 2001d, 2002a; Savage & Hickey-Moody, 2010). In addition, we located a few publications from the past year (see, e.g., Hickey-Moody, Savage, & Windle, 2010; Sandlin et al, 2010) that specifically attempt to theorize the notion of public pedagogy itself and to begin to grapple with the variety of ways the concept has been used.…”

Learning, Becoming, and the Unknowable: Conceptualizations, Mechanisms, and Process in Public Pedagogy Literature

“…As a divergent subset of scholars in this strand of public pedagogy theorizing, we found those individuals who see the possibilities of critical pedagogy as inherent in the very media forms that many cultural critiques deride. Specifically, the work of scholars like Savage and Hickey‐Moody (), Luttrell (), and Wright () illuminate the ways in which popular culture forms actually serve to impart critical, culturally resistant, dispositions on their viewers. For Savage and Hickey‐Moody, who elect to use the term cultural pedagogy instead of public pedagogy, the flows of popular culture cannot be understood from their local contexts alone.…”

“…Savage and Hickey‐Moody () utilize the example of American gangsta rap's application to the lives and identities of young, disenfranchised children of Sudanese refugees living in southeast Melbourne, Australia. In their ethnographic accounts of these children's relationship to popular media, they found both the anticipated effects of gangsta culture as pedagogy that

operates productively and normatively: offering powerful modes of resistance and identification, while at the same time producing extreme forms of hegemonic masculinity, violence and territorialism.

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“…And, whereas schooling has served as the primary site for educational researchers investigating this activity (e.g., Apple, ; Bourdieu & Passeron, ), noninstitutional sites have also provided fecund ground for studying the pedagogies that maintain, reproduce, forward, and reinstate cultural structures, largely via the mechanism of transfer . Authors who view pedagogy as cultural transfer have investigated such sites as popular culture, to include film (Brayton, ; Hladki, ; Nieland, ), radio (Darder, ), rap music (Savage & Hickey‐Moody, ), and reality television (Bach, ); public knowledge of colonialist history (McKenna, ); and the emergent knowledge politics of technology (Rice & Vastola, ). However, this notion of transfer is not limited to understandings of social reproduction, as authors in this strand also work to articulate the potentially liberatory possibilities inherent in public pedagogies, as well as the role of critical pedagogues as interlocutors who utilize cultural learning as a basis for interventionist praxis.…”

“…Rather, as we noted in our previous review (Sandlin, O'Malley, & Burdick, ), many authors simply utilize the term public pedagogy (frequently with a nod to Giroux's body of work) as a commonsensical and wholly legible construct. As such within this review, we use selected works to focus on extending and enriching research that clearly conceptualizes pedagogy, that explicates the intended or imagined pedagogies of particular sites in their work, and that explicates processes of pedagogical address in specific sites to broader theorizations of public pedagogy (e.g., Ellsworth, ; Giroux, , , ; Hickey‐Moody, Savage, & Windle, ; Hladki, ; Nieland, ; Rich, , ; Sandlin & Milam, ; Savage & Hickey‐Moody, ). The pedagogical mechanisms—operating across public pedagogy sites—we will be exploring include semiotic structures, narrative/rhetorical emplotment, temporal and spatial dynamics, the fostering of psychic disjunctions, and the use of desubjectifications and disidentifications, all of which have emerged in the literature as means of understanding pedagogies in non‐school sites.…”