Suchergebnisse

Basic training : making the soldier, militarizing the civilian -- What they bring with them : effects of military training on student veterans -- Campus veteran support initiatives -- Veteran self-hel p: embracing, re-creating, and contesting gendered military relations -- Spectral wars and the myth of the antimilitary campus -- "Thank you for your service" : gratitude and its discontents

Historically, the U.S. Department of Defense has attempted to advance military goals within the academy by guiding, gathering, shaping and suppressing knowledge production. However, with the ascendance of the Homeland Security state, relationships between the Armed Forces and higher education have become both less obvious and more familiar features of the academic landscape, as increasing research dollars go to develop weapons and cyber-security programs. This paper documents a less-known strategy designed to pave military inroads into contemporary college campuses: a military training program at Fort Knox, Kentucky, created to enlist civilian academic faculty and staff to become supporters of the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program. The training, "Operation Bold Leader," embeds academics in pseudo-warfare situations that serve as military training exercises. Pedagogies include inviting academic faculty and staff to rappel down 50-foot towers to a soundtrack of recorded gunshots while hearing about the benefits of collegiate ROTC programs. This paper, based on ethnographic research, shows that "Operation Bold Leader" portrays an educative Army that is separate and distinguishable from acts of war-making and from war itself. In doing so, this training fosters participants' identification with the U.S. Army by normalizing a vision of the military mission as a vehicle for social and educational improvement and global humanitarian development. This research finds that performing military training exercises facilitated a positive disposition toward the military, laying the groundwork for civilian academics to become "force multipliers" for the U.S. Army.

Going to War to Go to College: Student Veterans in Academic Contact Zones In the current all-volunteer U.S. military, many low-income recruits enlist for educational benefits. Yet many veterans find that their military training and combat experience complicate their ability to function in civilian schools; many drop out. Extensive research explores military training methods and outcomes of the G.I. Bill, yet little has been written about site-specific intersections of military and civilian pedagogies and cultures on college campuses. Moreover, there has been little written about how the presence of student veterans on contemporary campuses affects public discourse about U.S. involvement in foreign wars. This dissertation contests one often-cited explanation for low veteran success rates in college: that civilian campuses are anti-military, and by extension, hostile to veterans. Using Lave's analysis of situated learning and Pratt's notion of `contact zones', and drawing upon Gramsci's concept of `common sense', this dissertation explores the experiences of U.S. Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans on two California college campuses. It follows student veterans as their previous military socialization comes into contact and conflict with civilian academic, student and cultural norms. Drawing on interviews, observation of classes and everyday practice of veteran support NGOs, the dissertation shows that conflicting pedagogical and cultural norms and practices, rather than ostensible hostility towards veterans, impede veterans' success in higher education. There is little evidence to support the claim that contemporary college campuses show anti-veteran bias; indeed, framing campuses as hostile to veterans and conflating veteran support with support for U.S. wars produces a militarized common sense. Militarized common sense is a worldview based on the assumptions that war is a natural and necessary aspect of maintaining and protecting nationhood; that military priorities are more important than non-military ones; and that war veterans should serve as positive public symbols and proxies for U.S. military projects and wars. Acceptance of these common-sense understandings has the effect of silencing debate and dissent about the wars on campuses. The trope of the anti-military campus, while not reflective of contemporary reality, is rooted in historic narratives about the Vietnam War, and when veteran support programs are embedded in a context of uncritical esteem for the military, veteran support becomes a social force that organizes and regulates public discourse about the wars. Through the creation of discourses of care for student veterans, which simultaneously frame veterans as victims of discrimination and as heroes deserving of public valorization, campuses promote programs that conflate support for the veteran with uncritical support for the institution of the military, which has the effect of silencing debate on campus about contemporary military conflicts. This dissertation reveals some of the unintended consequences of these discourses of care. Campus veteran support efforts that conflate support for veterans with support for the military may be counter-productive to veterans, their teachers and classmates, because they tend to preclude candid discussions about the U.S. military and U.S. wars, which can heighten the cultural divide between civilians and military members. Moreover, for many veterans, these enforced silences, coupled with heroic narratives about past and current wars, increase the cognitive dissonance between veterans' lived military experience and their campus lives, which in turn can negatively affect their success in college.

In the current all-volunteer U.S. military, many low-income recruits enlist primarily for educational benefits. Yet many veterans encounter serious difficulties in transitions to civilian schools and do not graduate. While extensive research explores methods of military training and the effects of military service on socio-economic outcomes for veterans, little has been written about ways disjunctures between military and civilian pedagogies and culture shape veterans in civilian school settings. Using Lave's analysis of situated learning and Pratt's notion of 'contact zones,' this paper explores identities and practices of U.S. veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as they re-enter community colleges and university classrooms.In-depth interviews, classroom observation and analysis of everyday discourse of veteran support organizations show disjunctures between soldiers' lived reality and the discursive constructions of 'warrior/hero', 'baby-killer' and 'student.' As they re-enter the civilian world, soldiers not only contend with these shifting identities, they also encounter educational institutions that do not easily respond to them as students. This research finds that conflicting teaching, learning and cultural norms of military and civilian institutions, combined with enforced silences about the wars, exacerbate academic challenges.

This essay evaluates the relationship between commercial media representations and structural inequality through the lens of the recent Penn State scandal involving child abuse allegations against former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky. Specifically, the research provides two central lines of inquiry: first, detailing the power structures in a profitdriven corporate culture that make systematic child predation possible in large institutions like Penn State; and second, encouraging recognition that the routines and rules adopted by the U.S. commercial media system-including episodic coverage of isolated, sensational stories-often preclude meaningful coverage of corrupt institutions or systems. In concert, the two approaches provide a two-pronged call for commercial media: to stop presenting crimes like the one at Penn State as isolated events, and instead to provide crucial connections that permit media audiences to understand how power structures shape society and foster inequality.

This book explores tensions surrounding news media coverage of Indigenous environmental justice issues, identifying them as a fruitful lens through which to examine the political economy of journalism, American history, human rights, and contemporary U.S. politics. The book begins by evaluating contemporary American journalism through the lens of "deep media", focusing especially on the relationship between the drive for profit, professional journalism, and coverage of environmental justice issues. It then presents the results of a framing analysis of the Standing Rock movement (#NODAPL) coverage by news outlets in the USA and Canada. These findings are complemented by interviews with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, whose members provided their perspectives on the media and the pipeline. The discussion expands by considering the findings in light of current U.S. politics, including a Trump presidency that employs "law and order" rhetoric regarding people of color and that often subjects environmental issues to an economic "cost-benefit" analysis. The book concludes by considering the role of social media in the era of "Big Oil" and growing Indigenous resistance and power. Examining the complex interplay between social media, traditional journalism, and environmental justice issues, Journalism, Politics, and the Dakota Access Pipeline: Standing Rock and the Framing of Injustice will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental communication, critical political economy, and journalism studies more broadly.