Cultural Studies
M.S. Zokaei
Abstract
Knowledge and perspective about cultural studies have been debated extensively in the global academic spaces and partly within Iran. However, the pedagogical requirements of this tradition have rarely been a topic for discussion. As a matter of fact, cultural studies’ project inevitably requires ...
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Knowledge and perspective about cultural studies have been debated extensively in the global academic spaces and partly within Iran. However, the pedagogical requirements of this tradition have rarely been a topic for discussion. As a matter of fact, cultural studies’ project inevitably requires teaching critical skills and analyses in classrooms. Relying on educational experiences of the author, the current paper aims to introduce some major challenges in the process of cultural studies pedagogy. Reliance on a formal teaching separated from social context, ambivalence and confusion on the concept of culture and cultural theory, difficulties in providing critical teaching and drawing boundaries of popular culture are amongst the major challenges faced by academics attached with cultural studies in Iran. It therefore can be argued that to be efficient and dynamic, and to preserve its distinction as a critical discipline, cultural studies needs today to employ educational initiatives that not only serve multi-layered historical understanding of Iranian society and culture but also fit with a reformistic cultural policy-making.
Higher Education
F. Lolaee; S. Bastani; M. Farasatkhah
Abstract
The dramatic changes that have taken place in the field of information and communication in the present age have led to fundamental changes in various parts of human life. The important point is that the emergence of virtual technologies is not just a conventional technical development but contains a ...
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The dramatic changes that have taken place in the field of information and communication in the present age have led to fundamental changes in various parts of human life. The important point is that the emergence of virtual technologies is not just a conventional technical development but contains a cultural nature. The university is also one of the institutions that has been particularly affected by these developments. Such conditions have changed the relationship between students and professors, their way of accessing information and resources, creating and sharing educational content, and so on. The purpose of this article is to study the experience of virtualization and academic culture. This is a qualitative research that has applied a phenomenological method with semi-structured interviews. Participants were purposefully selected from among students, graduates, faculty members, and university administrators. Data were analyzed using the thematic analysis technique which resulted in 10 semantic clusters. The results of the interviews show a duality in responses, with some interviewees emphasizing the functions of virtualization in university culture in terms of communication, education and lifestyle. They believe that virtualization has opened doors to universities. The other category, however, explains the negative consequences of virtualization in academic culture and its various dimensions. The results indicate that with virtualization, important changes have occurred in various dimensions of the university culture that should be considered at micro and macro levels.
