Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
20
result(s) for
"Krabill, Ron"
Sort by:
Starring Mandela and Cosby
During the worst years of apartheid, the most popular show on television in South Africa—among both Black and White South Africans—was The Cosby Show. Why did people living under a system built on the idea that Black people were inferior and threatening flock to a show that portrayed African Americans as comfortably mainstream? Starring Mandela and Cosby takes up this paradox, revealing the surprising impact of television on racial politics. The South African government maintained a ban on television until 1976, and according to Ron Krabill, they were right to be wary of its potential power. The medium, he contends, created a shared space for communication in a deeply divided nation that seemed destined for civil war along racial lines. At a time when it was illegal to publish images of Nelson Mandela, Bill Cosby became the most recognizable Black man in the country, and, Krabill argues, his presence in the living rooms of white South Africans helped lay the groundwork for Mandela’s release and ascension to power. Weaving together South Africa’s political history and a social history of television, Krabill challenges conventional understandings of globalization, offering up new insights into the relationship between politics and the media.
eBook
american sentimentalism and the production of global citizens
“American Sentimentalism and the Production of Global Citizens” looks at recent trends in the globalization of U.S. higher education through the lens of sentimentalism to expose three dangers: the linking of a certain kind of productivity with global citizenship; the division of the world into global citizens and global subjects; and the illusion that awareness and enthusiasm are sufficient for social change. Social scientist Ron Krabill calls for international education policies that embrace radical reciprocity to overcome these dangers.
Journal Article
Using Clickers in the Social Sciences
This chapter deals with clickers indicating that they provide a technology to identify and explore issues of particular relevance to the social sciences. Clickers are uniquely suited to trouble the assumptions students often carry into the classroom around issues of class, race, gender, religion, income inequality, and political ideologies. They allow students to experiment with the framing of social science questions and the way research into such questions is communicated through social and mass media. And they allow a level of anonymity in responses that, if used carefully, can raise controversial subjects in a way that encourages students to rethink their own positions and respect the positions of their classmates. Survey research methodologies occupy a central role across most of the social science disciplines, particularly those making broadly generalizable claims through large sample sizes. Students replicate the surveys reported in the media with their classmates using the clickers.
Book Chapter
Research Circles: Supporting the Scholarship of Junior Faculty
This article describes and assesses \"Research Circles\" as a mechanism for enhancing faculty collegiality and research. Recently established on our campus, these circles, composed of three to four faculty members, have had a particularly powerful effect on the new faculty members' adjustment to their tenure track positions, especially since they entered a context that might otherwise have been challenging: a new interdisciplinary upper-division campus with high expectations for teaching excellence. Based on the end-of-year evaluations, journals, and focus groups, the co-authors described themes that emerged from their participation in these circles. Circle participation not only facilitated faculty writing throughout their first year, but it also fostered the development of an interdisciplinary community which nurtured creativity and risk taking in writing.
Journal Article
I May Not Be a Freedom Fighter, but I Play One on TV
This chapter extends the analysis into the period of political negotiations, bookended by the release (in 1990) and the inauguration (in 1994) of Mandela, both major international media events in and of themselves. As the moment when the structured absence of Black South Africans from political life is overturned and political contestation over maintaining privilege becomes explicit, this fence post represents a crucial turning point in the overall analysis. Contestation around television, particularly control of the SABC, comes to the fore, with a massive increase in both transnational media flows and innovative domestic programming arising simultaneously with an increase in both the scope and magnitude of political violence. Many assumptions of South African social life suddenly opened up for negotiation at the same time that the nation was being reintegrating into international politics and global economies. This period marks both the demise and the reinvention of apartheid in the contexts of democratization and globalization.
Book Chapter
They Stayed 'til the Flag Streamed
This chapter examines television's introduction to South Africa in 1976. In spite of the political contention around television before it arrived, the medium quickly became a popular and important part of the mediascape of South Africa. From the very beginning, television remained under the strict control of the ruling party and its allies. Nonetheless, White South Africans began to form a new communicative space through television and, most important, shared that space with the world beyond South Africa through transnational media flows. And even though the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) initially excluded Black South Africans from both television and its conceptualization of its own audiences, Black South Africans also began to participate in this newly forming communicative space of television. Thus, television's initial presence in the context of South Africa immediately began complicating the tightly controlled mediascape of apartheid, with transnational media flows crossing both national and racial borders.
Book Chapter
Surfing into Zulu
This chapter investigates the apartheid regime's introduction of “Black television” in the form of two new channels aimed exclusively at the growing Black middle class in 1983. The introduction of these channels, known as TV 2/3, was part of a larger attempt to develop legitimacy for the apartheid regime in the face of growing international pressure through constitutional reforms establishing a tricameral parliament with a limited franchise for Asian and Coloured South Africans. Instead, massive resistance to the tricameral parliament among all those disenfranchised by apartheid gave birth to the United Democratic Front, the mass movement that would lead the resistance to apartheid. Paralleling the failed attempt of the regime to win legitimacy through constitutional reform, the South African Broadcasting Corporation also failed to win legitimacy through TV 2/3. In spite of apartheid's ideology, which believed that only White South Africans would be interested in the “White channels” and only Black South Africans would watch the “Black channels,” interviews indicate a large amount of so-called “surfing into Zulu,” that is, channel surfing by White South Africans onto so-called Black television and vice versa.
Book Chapter
Structured Absences and Communicative Spaces
This chapter explores the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of the research through three concepts that recurs throughout the book: hegemony, structured absence, and communicative space. It looks at the ways in which television as a medium is uniquely able to provide a shared communicative space across various social divisions, thereby becoming a site in which the structured absence of Black South Africans from the social and political life of the nation was first reimagined. It also outlines the methodological approach of the book, utilizing more than 100 ethnographic interviews conducted over several years while triangulating evidence from those interviews with archival and market-driven ratings research.
Book Chapter