Education and the screens

Starting with the cinema and up to our current audiovisual system, moving images have been part of certain constructions of meaning that arose in a certain time and place.

It is certain that, amidst ideological confirmations and disconcerting disclosures, the spectacular dimension has contributed to shaping the collective imagination through the dissemination of models, counter-models, icons and stereotypes, to the point of becoming, today, an almost inescapable element of our ordinary perceptive experience. It is certain that representation, as such, chooses to take, combine and show certain elements of lived life; and it is precisely in the implicit or explicit meanings of this “manipulative act” that, in the case of the cinema, for example, Francesco Casetti identified the socio-historical proof brought by the “Eye of the Century”.

The spectacle that has lived and lives on our screens, therefore, corresponds to a “signifying practice” that, while proposing a fictitious world, can suggest much about the material and spiritual experience concretely lived by individuals in a given epoch. This is why audiovisual products are rightfully included among the actual sources of social-historical studies, as W. J. T. Mitchell specified when speaking of the visual or pictorial turn, i. e. the growing interest in “the visual construction of the social field” and “the social construction of the visual field”.

Within this framework, how are the subjects and places of education shown? What aspects emerge and which are concealed? What can they suggest about the social relations concretely experienced within the educational sphere?

Such, then, are the pedagogical questions that animate the question.

 

Keywords: culture industry; education; entertainment; youth; ideology.

 

Publication: beginning of December 2023
Submissions deadline: June 10th 2023
Journal approval: within July 10th 2023
First peer review’s outcome: within September 20th 2023