Frankfurt School -- Mass Communication Theory

 Adorno & contemporary advertising

Althusser & ISAs

Benjamin Arcades Project

Benjamin Collage

Here are some short videos that represent various aspects of Frankfurt School thought.

They may help us get in the mood!

Interested in Critical Theory? Visit JRMC 9011 or take it next Spring (it's required)

Forthcoming, Qualitative Inquiry

“Peering Through the Crack & Good-Bye to All That:30 years of TV, Telephones,Sports, Drugs, Etc.”

Social relationships are enacted and remembered through interpersonal relationships and replayed through the media as the author uses a defining personal experience, that of her son’s drug addiction, to rethink, analyze, and resituate

herself in the world. The result draws attention to the messy juxtaposition of social structures and policies with personal loss, grief, anger, and episodes of joy and courage. Crack, whether drug, fissure, gibe, highlights remembered fragments which allow the author to tell her stories in ways other than those originally considered. As those personal stories are interwoven with public moments such as school desegregation and changes in telecommunications and popular culture, a social commentary is offered that defamiliarizes the familiar, evokes rather than represents, and therefore offers the reader entry into the narrative, the cultural critique.