Tactical Media: Praxis in Sustainability Education
Tactical Media: Praxis in Sustainability Education
Public opinion may not always win the battles fought over environmental issues, but the possibility of more pro-active and powerful public participation is attractive. While individual persons write the letters, coordinate petitions, and collaborate on research in sustainability and environmental campaigns, educators acknowledge that a paralyzing flood of contradiction is readily available to a student undertaking to define a position in a sustainability research project. Further, students may identify their relations to these issues in many, possibly contradictory, ways. I suggest that some prospects for research and practice emerge from considering the field of public media and the role of students as authors of public media with potentially competitive reach compared to corporate media.
Even while we assume that value and meaning are contingent on context and perspective, it remains worthwhile for students to explore issues and develop their values and perspectives. But in application to real-world experience, we might consider whether engaging students to compete with corporate media will yield satisfactory results without suitable skills, strategies and tactics. These skills, strategies, and tactics may be embedded in the practice of making and publishing (uploading, really) tactical satire.
I proceed on the assumption that an embedded posture, say “environmentalist,” modelled by an educator and prescribed for imitation by students, does not comprise praxis, but rather in fact reinscribes the discipline of compliance. I affirm that student praxis in working with sustainability issues must indeed be embedded in an informed exposure to a wide array of background knowledge as well as training in detecting bias. However, action and practice should be developed not in pursuit of a unified meaning, but focused on achieving convergence of agendas. A student who is challenged to defeat a corporation’s policy, practice, plans, and lobby efforts is usually set up as an heroic David vs the corporate Goliath. The learning value of formulating a position is sufficient to warrant this exercise. However, this is more appropriately understood as a background exercise. When students are encouraged to enter the arena of action, their goal should be to find a way to cultivate into the obvious the obligations of the corporation or agency they are challenging. This requires a higher level of rhetorical skill than forming an opposing, righteous position. Further, to do so using the same tools or weapons that their opponent has deployed, namely public media, has been long a daunting challenge. Presently the landscape changes, in that recent access to public media has become open to a much larger number of students.
A student’s capacity to undermine or counter advertising or propaganda is much more open now than it ever has been.The possibility for the student to lampoon or satirize is partly dependent on her or his literacy of the medium. At a theoretical level, the student can be considered to write as s/he reads (Jacques Derrida, from Dissemination Chicago, U of Chicago Press 1981, Barbara Johnson, trans). In reading a piece of advertising or propaganda, any text becomes fragmentable, therefore reconfigurable. In a practical sense, this is very clear in the realm of internet media, where even broadcast advertising loses the power of its ephemerality, and is quickly subject to capture, dismemberment, rewriting, and redistribution. In this medium the essays are videos, the paragraphs and sentences and words are videos. Letters are clips, shots, cuts, while graffitti and marks are added by hits, tags, favourites, responses, imitations, and honors.
How these opportunities are articulated in education is an area for productive research. Media produced by students is a potential playground for parody. Internet media can be for students a source of entertainment and recreation. Specific to sustainability education, however, well-informed and well-executed tactical satire is to be found as well. Given the theoretical framing in Derrida’s point—to always know we are participants in texts as we read and write, (/are read and written)—and Beaudrillard’s caution to acknowledge and discern the power of the simulacrum, and Ackerman’s reminder that our bodies are our interfaces with the world, I offer a provisional suggestion: that students should be making media that is explicitly both simultaneously derivative and grounded—mashups of their own footage of their own experiences or simulations entwined with a rewriting of the messages of an opponent / potential ally. The goal should not be simply to attack, although rhetorical attack might be one of many possible approaches. The essential basis should be possible action, creative, proactive naming of possibility for provisionally mutually agreeable goals. To simply fight by contradiction is often best a private enterprise. To plainly persuade, cajole, lobby, or petition is legitimate for a democratic undertaking, if one can find one.
If we are to see more of our students contribute more to the writing of the history of our period of critical sustainability issues, their praxis is to wield the agency of a media-maker-or-breaker in the field of contested market-share. Beyond opposition, their praxis is to adapt their media to emerging situations, and to adapt corporate media to their intentions. Students’ praxis is grounded in their own meaning-making, but executed in the real world, where they must aim to rewrite the public media messages to incorporate the corporations into sustainability choices that may not have been apparent to the directors and marketing specialists and engineers whose job is to see profit and a better public image. As educators we are responsible to teach students that they can make challenging, tactical media, and how they can begin doing so in the context of a low-grade, ongoing game, “played” for the preferences of their fellow consumers, for the choices of corporate and government leaders, and for the policies and practices that will affect the health of this planet and all of its inhabitants.
With acknowledgment to Foucault, Derrida, Ackerman, Beaudrillard, Jameson, Haraway, and thanks and acknowledgment to Dr. Don Krug, Associate Professor, University of British Columbia.
Morgan Reid is a Master’s student in the Centre for Cross-Faculty Inquiry, Faculty of Education, at the University of British Columbia.
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