1. How We Know What We Know Culture & the Critical Perspective
Dr. Fred Blevens (2018 additions GP)
Culture & the Critical Perspective

2. Definition of Culture
The symbols of expression that individuals, groups, and societies use to make sense of daily life and to articulate their values.
Culture = Meaning

3. What is Culture?

4. Culture as Process
It delivers the values of a society through products or other meaning-making forms . . .
Newspapers
Entertainment media
Mass communication
Point-to-point communication
There is no single location for culture
It cannot be defined the same for everyone

5. Media Creates Culture
This is done by a process called “negotiation,” which is the interaction of the symbols and ideas in the media you consume with the symbols and ideas already in your head. Through that process of sampling, thinking, processing, things come to be meaningful to each of us.

6. Cultural/Historical Change
Individuals alter culture
Social movements alter culture
Technology alters culture

7. Communication is not . . . Truth -- language and perception
Reality -- interpreted, constructed, mediated
Objective -- experience and identity
Comprehensive -- guess who gets left out?

8. Origins: The Frankfurt School
Jewish scholars
Challenged Hitler’s assumption that fascism could lift up the Germans
Seeds of the Holocaust
Many died for their beliefs
Survivors came to U.S. to establish the basis for the critical perspective.

9. Critical Perspective Hallmarks
Questioning assumptions: Hitler and Jews
Make America great again (Now, it really sucks)
Taxes are too high (Cuts benefits for everyone)
We must privatize (Business better than government)
Immigration in crisis (They take away great jobs)
Expanding the bounds of debate
What documents/data prove or disprove?
Who are left out of the conversation?
Are there different and better “authorities”?
Betterment of society
All peoples treated with dignity/respect
All taxpayers are treated equally
“We don’t do these things because they are easy; we do them because they are hard.” John F. Kennedy

10. Taxes Are Too High? 91% highest tax bracket 50% corporate tax
Increase of 24 cents per gallon gas tax
Federal spending on education 1.03% GDP (2020 = .47%)
Research spending increased from .73% to 1.69% GDP

11. Who is it?

12. Dwight D. Eisenhower

13. What Are the Implications?
It’s easier not to question things
It’s easier to accept assumptions
It’s easier to assume the best in people
It’s easier to be egocentric
It’s easier to blame vulnerable populations
It’s easier to not think deeply about the issues
Put in context, few people work hard enough to participate vigorously in the world; some work hard enough to understand the world; most work just hard enough to watch it pass by.

14. Our Uncritical Past Assumptions: Critical Perspective:
White men write most history
White men tend to be the heroes of most history
People of color tend to be the villains of history
Women are left out of most history
The East ignores the West; the West ignores the East
Most history is Eurocentric storytelling
Critical Perspective:
We have missed (and continue to miss) a lot
Point A may connect to Point B, but A did not cause B
History simply cannot be that simple

15. Practice this, please Active, not passive, reading
Turn on your critical sensibility
This course is an alternative explanation
What problems do we introduce here?
What or Who is missing from our work?
Who are Professors Blevens, Pearson, Ottolenghi and Soto, anyway?

16. A moment of Zen
Many things in history are inevitable when somebody does something. If we learn about the coarse of events we can prevent ourselves from doing it again. History, as we know, is always bias, because human beings have to be studied by other human beings, not by independent observers of another species.