EWI Seminar Outline - Alison Wilde
EWI Seminars scheduled for Thursdays will take place from 11 am - 12.30 pm in the
Library Building in Room L532.
6th November- Seminar 1: Disability and Media
This session will complement and build upon issues raised in the Emancipatory
Research- Issues and Contexts course. Specifically, media images of disability will be
addressed, relating literature on this topic to issues raised by the disabled people’s
movement. Academic work on stereotypes and narratives of disability and of
impairment will be examined in the first of these two sessions. The epistemological
and methodological frameworks of this literature will be examined and critically
evaluated and alternative methodologies will be considered.
20th November- Seminar 2: Gender, disability and media
This session will be an exploration of some of the issues raised in media studies of
gender and the ways impairments are depicted in gendered terms. Constructions of
masculinity and femininity will be explored, examining assumptions of
heteronormativity and issues such as stereotyping, essentialism and class. This
session will draw on popular film and television genres, and news media. Seminar
participants are encouraged to bring their own examples to be discussed.
December 4th - Seminar 3: Media, Cultural Studies and Disability-Frameworks
for Analysis
This session will explore media studies methodologies in more depth, exploring the
strengths and limitations of cultural and media theory and methodologies in the
deconstruction of portrayals of disability and impairment. Discussion will include the
following perspectives: the sociology of emotions, analysis of popular culture,
structuralist/post-structuralist, semiotic , psychoanalytic theory .
December 11th – Seminar 4: Anti-oppressive Perspectives in Media Studies
Research- Transformative Methods and Techniques in Practice
This session will be based upon considerations from disability, gender and media
studies. My own effort to synthesise anti-oppressive methods with data collection and
analysis will be examined. This session will also examine research methods and
techniques and the quality of the participants involvement in research contexts. I will
examine the possibility of participants ‘gain’ and any potentially oppressive features
of the research process. Drawing on examples of my own project we will explore the
compatibility of ‘conscientization’ (critical consciousness) with the production of
useful knowledge. Literature for this session is focussed upon focus groups and
documentary research (including diaries) but the session can explore alternative
research methods according to the participants’ interests.
January 8th -Seminar 5 : Film, Comedy and Disability (Alison Wilde and
Deborah Williams) That joke isn’t funny any more: Impairment, disability and
audience in the films of the Farrelly brothers
This paper traces the evolution of the representational strategies taken in the depiction
of disabled characters in the films of the Farrelly Brothers. In particular, it explores
some of the paradoxes of deliberate attempts to raise disability concerns in accessible
forms of mainstream comedy. Focussing on such films as Me, Myself and Irene,
Something about Mary, Kingpin, and Stuck on You, we will highlight cinematic
devices which grapple with the multiple and fluid identities of disabled characters,
and will examine the roles disabled actors play. We will also discuss the engagement
with audiences and their psycho-emotional attachments. This will be followed by an
exploration of the ways that these films play with and manipulate disabled and nondisabled viewer’s prejudices and audience reactions, exposing the cultural
misrecognition of disabled people in mainstream attitudes. Finally we raise important
questions about the industry’s resistance to the increasingly social and political
disability related content of these and other genres.
January 29th -Seminar : Investigating the Value of Media Research. Can and
should media research be valuable to marginalised groups?
If so, how? This final session will address a range of issues which have emerged
throughout the seminars, bringing together several seminar themes and examples from
a wide range of media research on marginalised groups.