Stuart Poyntz
Stuart R. Poyntz is Associate Dean, FCAT, Associate Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University, and President of the Association for Research in Cultures of Young People (http://arcyp.ca). His research interests include children’s media cultures, phenomenology and theories of the public, and urban youth media production. His new book, Phenomenology of Youth Cultures and Globalization: Lifeworlds and Surplus Meaning in Changing Times is published by Routledge.
Stuart recently completed the SSHRC-funded research project, Youth Digital Media Ecologies in Canada, and will begin a new research program in 2015, entitled Producing Youth: Informal Learning, the State, and Networks of Culture. He has an extensive background in the history of media literacy, is co-author of Media Literacies: A Critical Introduction (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012) and has published widely in a number of national and international journals, including Cultural Studies, the Journal of Youth Studies, the Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies, and the Canadian Journal of Education, as well as various edited collections.
Together with Dr. Michael Hoechsmann (Associate Professor, Faculty of Education, Lakehead University,) and Dr. Julian Sefton-Green (Principal Research Fellow, Department of Media and Communication Studies, LSE and Research Fellow, University of Oslo,) Stuart is the principal investigator of the YouthSites project. The YouthSites project examines the creative arts sector for youth from socially excluded backgrounds in Vancouver, Toronto and London over the last 25 years. We map the youth participation in out-of-school arts learning and investigate the structural relationship between the development of this sector and the changing role and meaning of creative education, as training for employment in the creative and cultural industries has become a priority across the sector. We focus on how the non-formal learning sector has been re-imagined and re-calibrated in policy debates, at the level of organizations themselves, and within the lives of participants, instructors and directors. At this historical conjuncture, schooling alone is not capable of providing a universal entitlement to the skills and knowledge required for participating in future societies. In response, societies around the world have directed widespread state investment in non-formal learning organizations across the creative arts. The YouthSites study investigates how this sector has changed and its role in the lives of socially disadvantaged youth across global urban communities.
Stuart has also been a Visiting Scholar at Griffith Institute for Educational Research and the Cultural Research Centre, Griffith University (Brisbane, Australia), and the Centre for Children and Youth Research, Queensland University of Technology (Brisbane Australia). Stuart also served as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Education, Recurring Questions of Technology Institute, University of British Columbia, as well as a Faculty Teaching Fellow at the Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology, Simon Fraser University.
Phone: 778-782-7293 (office)
Address: 8888 University Drive
Burnaby, B.C.
Canada. V5A 1S6
Stuart recently completed the SSHRC-funded research project, Youth Digital Media Ecologies in Canada, and will begin a new research program in 2015, entitled Producing Youth: Informal Learning, the State, and Networks of Culture. He has an extensive background in the history of media literacy, is co-author of Media Literacies: A Critical Introduction (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012) and has published widely in a number of national and international journals, including Cultural Studies, the Journal of Youth Studies, the Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies, and the Canadian Journal of Education, as well as various edited collections.
Together with Dr. Michael Hoechsmann (Associate Professor, Faculty of Education, Lakehead University,) and Dr. Julian Sefton-Green (Principal Research Fellow, Department of Media and Communication Studies, LSE and Research Fellow, University of Oslo,) Stuart is the principal investigator of the YouthSites project. The YouthSites project examines the creative arts sector for youth from socially excluded backgrounds in Vancouver, Toronto and London over the last 25 years. We map the youth participation in out-of-school arts learning and investigate the structural relationship between the development of this sector and the changing role and meaning of creative education, as training for employment in the creative and cultural industries has become a priority across the sector. We focus on how the non-formal learning sector has been re-imagined and re-calibrated in policy debates, at the level of organizations themselves, and within the lives of participants, instructors and directors. At this historical conjuncture, schooling alone is not capable of providing a universal entitlement to the skills and knowledge required for participating in future societies. In response, societies around the world have directed widespread state investment in non-formal learning organizations across the creative arts. The YouthSites study investigates how this sector has changed and its role in the lives of socially disadvantaged youth across global urban communities.
Stuart has also been a Visiting Scholar at Griffith Institute for Educational Research and the Cultural Research Centre, Griffith University (Brisbane, Australia), and the Centre for Children and Youth Research, Queensland University of Technology (Brisbane Australia). Stuart also served as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Education, Recurring Questions of Technology Institute, University of British Columbia, as well as a Faculty Teaching Fellow at the Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology, Simon Fraser University.
Phone: 778-782-7293 (office)
Address: 8888 University Drive
Burnaby, B.C.
Canada. V5A 1S6
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Books and Special Journal Issues by Stuart Poyntz
Theories and concepts are also a kind of map. They mark the contours of a domain, identifying its constituent parts and their relationships. They give us an idea of what to expect, and we use them to orient our way through the world of immediate social experience. They not only describe the paths we take but also help us figure out where it is we want to go. But it seems as though our maps have become less useful, less reliable, and less relevant today.
On the one hand, turn after turn within social and cultural theory has left many of us incredulous towards formal, grand theories. The postmodern critique was necessary, calling attention to the will to power lurking within theoretical paradigms that once seemed settled – and to the exclusions inherent in declaring something settled. But in its extreme forms postmodernism’s standpoint epistemologies left us suspicious of truth claims attempting to transcend personal and idiosyncratic experiences of the world, threatening to delegitimize any conceptual maps whatsoever.
On the other hand, many of the assumptions about the social world undergirding our inherited concepts need to be re-examined. Chief among these is the tidy identification of ‘cultures’ and ‘societies’ with nation-states. Such assumptions are increasingly untenable in the era of robust globalization: the processes that constitute ‘local’ phenomena are almost always transnational, as communication systems and commodity chains entangle us with global others in countless ways. Meanwhile, boundaries between domains of inquiry are increasingly porous. As a consequence, it now seems obvious and unavoidable that the cultural is the social is the political is the economic, and so on.
Thus, the contemporary situation is not merely postmodern but also in important respects ‘post-society’. Nonetheless, most of us still have some ambition to say things about the conditions under which we live. As meaning-making animals, we could hardly do otherwise. Indeed, risking performative contradiction, we rarely hesitate to do so in everyday life, reaching for familiar, ready-to-hand concepts to describe or explain some feature of our experience. But, while we are surrounded by the remains of premodern philosophy and modern social science, the contexts in which they were originally embedded, and from which they drew their logic, are no longer our context. Thus, the notions we intuitively deploy may not mean what we think they mean.
It is in this context that we see an ongoing need to interrogate our old concepts, refining them when possible and developing new ones when they are found lacking. The cultural studies tradition – theoretically and methodologically catholic, open to both imaginative theorizing and empirical testing – is particularly well positioned to generate new ways of characterizing our collective situation. It is in this spirit that we have assembled this special issue on scenes. It has three main objectives. The first is to collect empirical case studies of a variety of cultural scenes, showcasing the concept’s utility across a range of domains of social life. Second, we want to advance an analytical stance we call ‘scene thinking’. In each of the cases explored by our contributors, naming a group or cluster of activity a scene says something about how these concrete practices and spaces disclose the social’s inherent relationality. Third and finally, we hope that this revisiting and interrogation of scene models a theoretical practice that can rise to the challenge of social inquiry and cultural analysis in these times.
Research Projects by Stuart Poyntz
Institution of Co-Investigator(s): Dr. Mary Bryson, Professor and Director, Centre for Cross Faculty Inquiry, Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia
Funding: SSHRC - Conference Grant. Type: External. Involvement: Joint Investigator. Collaboration: Research and workshop contributor. Institution of Co-Investigator(s): In partnership with the Faculties of Education at the University of British Columbia and the University of Victoria (and national and international researchers)
Papers by Stuart Poyntz
Theories and concepts are also a kind of map. They mark the contours of a domain, identifying its constituent parts and their relationships. They give us an idea of what to expect, and we use them to orient our way through the world of immediate social experience. They not only describe the paths we take but also help us figure out where it is we want to go. But it seems as though our maps have become less useful, less reliable, and less relevant today.
On the one hand, turn after turn within social and cultural theory has left many of us incredulous towards formal, grand theories. The postmodern critique was necessary, calling attention to the will to power lurking within theoretical paradigms that once seemed settled – and to the exclusions inherent in declaring something settled. But in its extreme forms postmodernism’s standpoint epistemologies left us suspicious of truth claims attempting to transcend personal and idiosyncratic experiences of the world, threatening to delegitimize any conceptual maps whatsoever.
On the other hand, many of the assumptions about the social world undergirding our inherited concepts need to be re-examined. Chief among these is the tidy identification of ‘cultures’ and ‘societies’ with nation-states. Such assumptions are increasingly untenable in the era of robust globalization: the processes that constitute ‘local’ phenomena are almost always transnational, as communication systems and commodity chains entangle us with global others in countless ways. Meanwhile, boundaries between domains of inquiry are increasingly porous. As a consequence, it now seems obvious and unavoidable that the cultural is the social is the political is the economic, and so on.
Thus, the contemporary situation is not merely postmodern but also in important respects ‘post-society’. Nonetheless, most of us still have some ambition to say things about the conditions under which we live. As meaning-making animals, we could hardly do otherwise. Indeed, risking performative contradiction, we rarely hesitate to do so in everyday life, reaching for familiar, ready-to-hand concepts to describe or explain some feature of our experience. But, while we are surrounded by the remains of premodern philosophy and modern social science, the contexts in which they were originally embedded, and from which they drew their logic, are no longer our context. Thus, the notions we intuitively deploy may not mean what we think they mean.
It is in this context that we see an ongoing need to interrogate our old concepts, refining them when possible and developing new ones when they are found lacking. The cultural studies tradition – theoretically and methodologically catholic, open to both imaginative theorizing and empirical testing – is particularly well positioned to generate new ways of characterizing our collective situation. It is in this spirit that we have assembled this special issue on scenes. It has three main objectives. The first is to collect empirical case studies of a variety of cultural scenes, showcasing the concept’s utility across a range of domains of social life. Second, we want to advance an analytical stance we call ‘scene thinking’. In each of the cases explored by our contributors, naming a group or cluster of activity a scene says something about how these concrete practices and spaces disclose the social’s inherent relationality. Third and finally, we hope that this revisiting and interrogation of scene models a theoretical practice that can rise to the challenge of social inquiry and cultural analysis in these times.
Institution of Co-Investigator(s): Dr. Mary Bryson, Professor and Director, Centre for Cross Faculty Inquiry, Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia
Funding: SSHRC - Conference Grant. Type: External. Involvement: Joint Investigator. Collaboration: Research and workshop contributor. Institution of Co-Investigator(s): In partnership with the Faculties of Education at the University of British Columbia and the University of Victoria (and national and international researchers)
Sponsored by the Centre for Culture, Identity and Education (CCIE) and the David Lam Chair in Multicultural Education.
At the UBC Liu Institute Gallery in Vancouver.