Pixar
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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 “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 