Christo Sims
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780691163987
- eISBN:
- 9781400885299
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691163987.003.0002
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
This chapter examines the emergence of the Downtown School for Design, Media, and Technology within the context of historical cycles of purportedly disruptive educational reform in the United States. ...
More
This chapter examines the emergence of the Downtown School for Design, Media, and Technology within the context of historical cycles of purportedly disruptive educational reform in the United States. It considers how reformers' inability to remedy the social and political problems with which education has repeatedly and increasingly been tasked—which reformers also recurrently promise to fix—help produce conditions in which both crises in education and calls for disruptive remedies can recurrently arise. Against this historical backdrop, the chapter shows how particular cycles of disruptive fixation occurred as the Downtown School's designers and reformers responded to calls for disruption by engaging in problematization and rendering technical processes.Less
This chapter examines the emergence of the Downtown School for Design, Media, and Technology within the context of historical cycles of purportedly disruptive educational reform in the United States. It considers how reformers' inability to remedy the social and political problems with which education has repeatedly and increasingly been tasked—which reformers also recurrently promise to fix—help produce conditions in which both crises in education and calls for disruptive remedies can recurrently arise. Against this historical backdrop, the chapter shows how particular cycles of disruptive fixation occurred as the Downtown School's designers and reformers responded to calls for disruption by engaging in problematization and rendering technical processes.
Christo Sims
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780691163987
- eISBN:
- 9781400885299
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691163987.003.0005
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
This chapter examines how reformers imagined subjects that would be amenable to and fixable with their intervention in comparison with the ways that students negotiated identification and difference ...
More
This chapter examines how reformers imagined subjects that would be amenable to and fixable with their intervention in comparison with the ways that students negotiated identification and difference with each other at school and online. It considers how problematization and rendering technical processes produce amenable and fixable subjects, how these intended beneficiaries exert unanticipated pressures on a philanthropic intervention, and how the reformers tend to respond to such pressures in rather retrograde ways. In the case of the Downtown School for Design, Media, and Technology, reformers imagined the project's intended beneficiaries as digital kids, a population that presumably would be especially amenable to the intervention's focus on gaming and new media production. The chapter also discusses assembling of affinities and divisions among amenable and fixable subjects, conditions of sanctioned nonconformity, crossing of boundaries, and identities-in-practice in relation to subject fixations.Less
This chapter examines how reformers imagined subjects that would be amenable to and fixable with their intervention in comparison with the ways that students negotiated identification and difference with each other at school and online. It considers how problematization and rendering technical processes produce amenable and fixable subjects, how these intended beneficiaries exert unanticipated pressures on a philanthropic intervention, and how the reformers tend to respond to such pressures in rather retrograde ways. In the case of the Downtown School for Design, Media, and Technology, reformers imagined the project's intended beneficiaries as digital kids, a population that presumably would be especially amenable to the intervention's focus on gaming and new media production. The chapter also discusses assembling of affinities and divisions among amenable and fixable subjects, conditions of sanctioned nonconformity, crossing of boundaries, and identities-in-practice in relation to subject fixations.
