Film
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Claire Birkenshaw “It is my professional opinion that now is the time to PANIC!” (Human Child Expert, Monsters, Inc.) It is a television news moment that is all too familiar: after broadcasting a series of eyewitness accounts, the News 13 anchor turns to a bespectacled, bow-tied expert to provide a calm and authoritative interpretation of events…
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Claire Birkenshaw “I don’t want to survive. I want to live!” (Captain McCrea, WALL-E) The Ship of Consumption In History of Madness, Michel Foucault (1972/2009) examines how Western reason constituted itself through an evolving relationship with madness: first encountering it as an unsettling bearer of truth, then excluding it as unreason and, finally, transforming it into an…
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Claire Birkenshaw “Hey Cameron, do you realise if we’d played by the rules right now, we’d be in gym?” (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, 1986) Scholars Hunter and Frawley (2022, p.14) argue that use of film as a ‘pedagogical tool’ can help students better understand abstract theoretical concepts to aid their application in imaginative ways. For…
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Claire Birkenshaw “By means of strange incantations, they conjured up a new incarnation of evil, another grinning mask of fear, home to the constantly renewed magic of purification and exclusion” (Foucault, [1972] 2009, p.3). Film, as Sian Barber (2015, p.4) reminds us, is a “crafted artefact”, which is “never produced in a cultural and social…
Altered States of Academia 