Video Games and Anti-intellectualism: Higher Education in Modern Video Games

Lozano, Jon M.

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-57004-8_4

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

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“…The antiintellectual slant to representations of the profession has been thoroughly analysed in the edited collection by Tobolowsky and Reynolds (2017a). For instance, primetime US-produced TV shows aired between 1996 and 2014 present an anti-intellectual discourse that attacks the value of tenure and suggests deep distrust towards academics and academic life (Tobolowsky, 2017) while video games position in-game academic characters as emotionless, immoral and elitist (Lozano, 2017). Furthermore, academics have been identified by numerous commentators as displaying immoral and decadent attributes, engaging in sexual relationships with students and being unfaithful to partners (Tierney, 2004).…”

Section: Cultural Representations Of Academia: Contradictions and Amb...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Mobile, hierarchical, normative, decadent and conflict prone: understanding academia through fictional conferences

Henderson

Reynolds

2022

High Educ

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Representations of higher education in fiction-based sources contribute to forming public perceptions of academia, and so are a form of public pedagogy. Within popular culture representations, understandings of academics are constructed using particular tropes which build shared meanings of the profession. Conferences are one of these tropes and can thus be used as a focus to explore the construction of the academic profession in popular culture representations of higher education. This paper draws on a research project which explored representations of conferences in narrative fiction texts (novels, graphic novels, short stories). In this paper, we analyse references to conferences for what they teach us about the academic profession. The paper is based on analysis of 98 symbolic references to conferences from a sample of 23 fictional texts. Symbolic references are short references which serve as a shorthand to signal aspects of the academic profession, and in this paper, they have been analysed in terms of what they portray and where they position the reader. The paper argues that popular culture representations of academia are pedagogical, in that they show the profession to be desirable to others but encourage a disidentification with academics, reinforcing the exclusionary nature of the profession.

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Section: Cultural Representations Of Academia: Contradictions and Amb...mentioning

confidence: 99%