CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland
Childhood Representations, Postmodernity and
Cultural Pedagogy
Organisers: Margarita Morgado
Morgado, Margarida (Escola Superior de
Educação do Instituto Politécnico, Portugal) THE AGENCY OF CHILDREN IN
CONTEMPORARY CULTURE
Agents may be defined as 'those people who make things happen' (Pope 2001). In
cultural studies recent debates have located agency midway between being
subjected by power and being able to resist those powers that subject us (see
Stuart Hall and Lawrence Grossberg). A productive definition of agency is that
which highlights how individuals or groups struggle to transform their existing
social, economic or material forces that 'maintain dominant relations of power'.
In the light of this debate I propose to discuss the possibilities of children's
agency in the context of adult/child relations of power both in contemporary
research and through the analysis of fictionalised agency positions of children
in literature.
Hessel Silveira, Rosa Maria (Luterana
University of Brazil, Brazil) and Fonseca Richthofen de Freitas, Letícia
(Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) THE CHILDHOOD BETWEEN THE
GLOBAL AND THE LOCAL: THE CASE OF "GAÚCHAS" CHILDREN IN THE SOUTH OF
BRAZIL
Childhood has been understood as a cultural construction socially shaped and so,
it is subjected to the characteristic processes of post modernity:
globalization, technologisation and mercantile system. Therefore ,there are some
actions that remain in some spaces along these processes in order to build
regional subjects, heirs of a local identity which was also invented. This is
the case of a kind of children's education in the south of Brazil, made from
school, family and mainly the Centers of "gaúchas" traditions,
that intend to create "peões" and "prendas" who would
reproduce the "rural traditions"- typical dances, folk music,
singings, arts, regional costume, local custom gauchescas. But this childhood
isn't made separated from globalization and the "hibridização" is
unavoidable. This paper intends to show some aspects of this
"hibridização" in order to discuss how the process of cultural
homogenization is never finished since the "hibridização" is only
conpound of fragments from others cultures and it is never made from its
totality, the result is the interlocution of these fragments, estabilishing what
Canclini calls "hibrid cultures" in which the "gaúcha"
childhood is constituted/built in its core.
Cancio Gama Leal, Manuel Augusto
(University of Lisbon, Portugal) ORDERING THE "OTHER" IN THREE
DIMENSIONALS TIMESPACES
This paper discusses the always problematic relations between teacher and
students according to Lavie and Swedenburg's theory of boundaries (1996) and its
rearticulation by Henry Giroux (2001). Three timespaces will be considered: the
'Here', i.e. the dominant/hegemonic culture, the 'culture' of the textbook and
other oppressive forms and practices; secondly, the culture of those 'Out
There', students looking for dialogue, negotiation and democracy in the
classroom; last but not least, the third timespace, that hybrid power always
written with an hyphen, as in self-help. As Giroux states, 'at stake here is the
need to insist on modes of authority that are directive but not imperious,
linking knowledge to power in the service of self-production, and encouraging
students to go beyond the world they already know to expand their range of human
possibilities'.
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