Thinking about university teaching, Alfred North Whitehead once wrote, “The Justification for the university is that it preserves the connection between zest of life, by uniting the young and the old in the imaginative consideration of learning.” Whitehead believed that a real pedagogy ought to be a transformative pedagogy. Henry Giroux argues that our task […]
Author: Tony Kashani
THE POWER OF CINEMA
The intersection of cultural studies (e.g., cinema studies) and social sciences offers the possibilities for scholar/practitioners to confront history as more than simulacrum and ethics as something other than the casualty of incommensurable language games. If we want to be agents of social change we need to assert a philosophy of life that makes the […]
FILM THINKING FOR ITSELF
As I was reorganizing my study—again– I came across some dusty research from a distant past. This was material on the impact of Dada and Surrealism on cinema. As it is well documented, all those European filmmakers of yesteryear who were heavily involved in Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism-let’s just say, Avant-Garde cinema-were profoundly influenced by Henri Bergson. […]
THE PERILS OF PRO WRESTLING
Whenever I argue that the social impact of professional wrestling merits close examination, more than a few of my colleagues chuckle and call it a waste of time. They seem to posit that professional wrestling is not a social force and has very little impact in shaping young minds. I think otherwise. When, back in […]
IS ASTROLOGY A SCIENCE?
A while back, I went to an astrology seminar conducted by a self-proclaimed “historian” with a doctorate degree in psychology. He showed an awful lot of birth charts of many famous people, and made some interesting comparisons between their personalities and their impact on our history, etc. Well, these were all Western figures-except with the […]