Key Terms

Pedagogy
"the method and practice of teaching, especially as an academic subject or theoretical concept"

"[Pedagogy] enables us...to ask under what conditions and though what means we 'come to know.' How one teaches is therefore of central interest but, through the prism of pedagogy, it becomes inseparable from what is being taught and, crucially, how one learns...What pedagogy addresses is the process of production and exchange in this cycle, the transformation of consciousness that takes place in the interaction of three agencies--the teacher, the learner, and the knowledge they produce together." (Lusted "Introduction: Why Pedagogy?" Screen 27(5) 1986, 3)

Ideology
"What is ideology? The term was likely coined by the French thinker Claude Destutt de Tracy at the turn of the nineteenth century, in his study of the Enlightenment. For de Tracy, ideology was the science of ideas and their origins. Ideology understands ideas to issue, not haphazardly from mind or consciousness, but as the result of forces in the material environment that shape what people think...Ideology today is generally taken to mean not a science of ideas, but the ideas themselves, and moreover ideas of a particular kind. Ideologies are ideas whose purpose is not epistemic, but political. thus an ideology exists to confirm a certain political viewpoint, serve the interests of certain people, or to perform a functional role in relation to social, economic, political and legal institutions." (Sypnowich, "Law and Ideology," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2001/2010)

Hegemony
"Gramsci used the term hegemony to refer to the moment when a ruling class is able, not only to coerce a subordinate class to conform to its interests, but to exert a hegemony or total social authority over subordinate classes. This involves the exercise of a special kind of power--the power to frame alternatives and contain opportunities, to win and shape consent, so that the granting of legitimacy to the dominant classes appears not only 'spontaneous' but natural and normal." (Clarke, Hall, Jefferson & Roberts, "Subcultures, Cultures and Class," 1975, 101)

Literacy
"the ability to read and write; competence or knowledge in a specified area"

"A first critical lesson is that literacy is not an independent variable, as in the myth. It is instead historically founded and grounded, a product of the histories in which it is entangled and interwoven, and which give literacy its meanings...Related to this, second, we must grasp the fundamental complexisty of literacy, the extent to which it is a product of the intersection of multiple economic, political, cultural, and other factors." (Graff, Literacy Myths, Legacies & Lessons: New Studies on Literacy, 2011, 65)

"Critical literacy is the ability to read texts in an active, reflective manner in order to better understand power, inequality, and injustice in human relationships. For the purposes of critical literacy, text is defined as a 'vehicle through which individuals communicate with one another using the codes and conventions of society.' Accordingly, songs, novels, conversations, pictures, movies, etc. are all considered texts." (Coffey, "Critical Literacy," Learn UNC: K-12 Teaching and Learning from the UNC School of Education)

Media Literacy 
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Feminism
"Feminist criticism is part of the broader feminist political movement that seeks to rectify sexist discrimination and inequalities. While there is no single feminist literary criticism, there are a half-dozen interrelated projects: exposing masculinist stereotypes, distortions, and omissions in male-dominated literature; studying female creativity, genres, styles, themes, careers, and literary traditions; discovering and evaluating lost and neglected literary works by women; developing feminist theoretical concepts and methods; examining the forces that shape women's lives, literature, and criticism, ranging across psychology and politics, biology and cultural history; and creating new ideas of and roles for women, including new institutional arrangements." (Leitch, The Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism, 2nd Ed., 2010, 24)

Cultural Studies
"In recent decades, cultural critics started to pay serious attention to mass, popular, and everyday materials, usually in the context of their ideologies (dominant ideas and values). Those in the discipline called cultural studies, in particular, study such discourses as television, cinema, advertising, rock music, magazines, minority literatures, and popular literatures (thrillers, science fiction, romances, westerns, Gothic fiction), focusing on how such materials are produced, distributed, and consumed. While researchers in cultural studies employ various methods, including surveys, field-based studies, textual interpretations, historical background studies, and participant observations, institutional analysis and ideology critique have been especially important." (Leitch, The Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism, 2nd Ed., 2010, 30-1)

Multiculturalism
"Multiculturalism is a body of thought in political philosophy about the proper way to respond to cultural and religious diversity. Mere toleration of group differences is said to fall short of treating members of minority groups as equal citizens; recognition and positive accommodation of group differences are required through 'group-differentiated rights'..." (Song, "Multiculturalism," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2010)

Critical Pedagogy
"Critical pedagogy is a way of thinking about, negotiating, and transforming the relationship among classroom teaching, the production of knowledge, the institutional structures of the school, and the social and material relations of the wider community, society and nation-state...I am calling for a pedagogy in which a revolutionary multicultural ethics is performed--is lived in the streets--rather than simply reduced to the practice of reading texts...Teachers need to build upon the textual politics that dominate most multicultural classrooms by engaging in a politics of bodily and affective investment, which means 'walking the talk' and working in those very communities one purports to serve. A critical pedagogy for multicultural education should quicken the affective sensibilities of students as well as provide them with a language of social analysis, cultural critique and social activism in the service of cutting the power and practice of capital at its joints." (McLaren, "Revolutionary Pedagogy in Post-Revolutionary Times: Rethinking the Political Economy of Critical Education," 1988, 441, 452)

Critical Theory
"Critical Theory has a narrow and a broad meaning in philosophy and in the history of the social sciences. 'Critical Theory' in the narrow sense designates several generations of German philosophers and social theorists in the Western European Marxist tradition known as the Frankfurt School. According to these theorists, a 'critical' theory may be distinguished from a 'traditional' theory according to a specific practical purpose: a theory is critical to the extent that it seeks human emancipation, 'to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them' (Horkheimer 1982, 244). Because such theories aim to explain and transform all the circumstances that enslave human beings, many 'critical theories' in the broader sense have been developed. They have emerged in connection with the many social movements that identify varied dimensions of the domination of human beings in modern societies. In both the broad and the narrow senses, however, a critical theory provides the descriptive and normative bases for social inquiry aimed at decreasing domination and increasing freedom in all their forms." (Bohman, "Critical Theory," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2005)

Dialectic
"For Hegel, only the whole is true. Every stage or phase or moment is partial, and therefore partially true. Hegel's grand idea is 'totality' which preserves within it each of the ideas or stages that it has overcome or subsumed...Nothing is lost or destroyed but raised up and preserved in a spiral. Think of the opening of a fern or a shell. This is an organic rather than a mechanical logic. Hegel's special term for this 'contradiction' of overcoming and at the same time preserving is aufhebung, sometimes translated as 'sublation.'...

• Thesis: A thought is affirmed which on reflection proves itself unsatisfactory, incomplete or contradictory...
• Antithesis: ...which propels the affirmation of its negation, the antithesis, which also on reflection proves inadequate...
• Synthesis: ...and so is again negated...

In classical logic, this double negation would simply reinstate the original thesis. The synthesis does not do this. It has 'overcome and preserved' (or sublated) the stages of the thesis and antithesis to emerge as a higher rational unity." (Spencer & Krauze, Introducing Hegel, 1996)

Stereotypes
"a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing."

"...a stereotype--which we retain in the face of contradictory evidence--must function in one of the following ways: it may be relatively fundamental to our conceptual scheme; it may protect our self-esteem; it may help bring about some desirable situation; or it may shield us from facing an unchangeable, unpleasant fact." (Andre, "Stereotypes: Conceptual and Normative Considerations")

Political Remix
"It's a process. It's about deconstructing mass media or mass media fragments or corporate media or pop culture. So then, you capture it off of TV, off of movies, off of music videos, off of mainstream music, off of newscasts, especially. and then you reconstruct it. So, you break it apart, you reconstruct it, and then you create a new subversive message. You use the old vehicle to make something new and you put that alternative message back out there." (McIntosh, "Building a Critical Culture with Remix Video")

Fan (or Avatar) Activism
"The Avatar activists are tapping into a very old language of popular protest. The cultural historian Natalie Zemon Davis reminds us in her classic essay "Women on Top" (2) that protesters in early modern Europe often masked their identity through dressing as peoples real (the Moors) or imagined (the Amazons) seen as a threat to the civilised order. The good citizens of Boston continued this tradition in the New World when they dressed as Native Americans to dump tea in the harbour. And African-Americans in New Orleans formed their own Mardi Gras Indian tribes, taking imagery from Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, to signify their own struggles for respect and dignity..." (Jenkins, 2010, "Avatar Activism")