3 Icons + 3 Interests
I needed a bit of a break from writing and betaing, so I took
celisnebula up on the 3+3 meme.
Here are the 3 icons she chose:
Primordial Soup is one I love it because it's a play on both Warhol's postmodern art with it's awareness of the iconography of commercial advertising and being a science geek - the idea that lighting struck a pool of primordial soup and here we are!
The second is Spacecat. Again, it combines my love of two seemingly disparate things - cats and science fiction. And look - it has a little ray gun and space booties!
My default icon comes from one of those great 70s covers of Philip K. Dick's Ubik. Funny and horrifying, it explores a world wherein the afterlife is turned into a commercial enterprise, with the infinitely mutating product Ubik offering a faint hope of salvation against encroaching entropy. It's most effective form is the one that comes in a spray can!
As for interests, cultural materialism is one of the first types of cultural theory created. I focus on Raymond Williams, who is interested in taking the Marxist concepts of ideology and hegemony and discussing how they function throughout culture (instead of limiting them to the economic only). He created the idea of counter-hegemony - the thought that small groups with differing ideas can rise up and influence dominant hegemony. It's what I named my lj after. But cultural theory is also what lets people study trends in pop culture to see what it says about society - this was always looked down upon before.
Epistemology is the study of how we obtain knowledge and brings me back to Philip K. Dick. All of his novels deal with both ontological and epistemological concerns - we don't know what reality really is and we can't trust the information we're receiving about what reality we're in. I find that fascinating. If you haven't read him, his work is a very direct influence on the Matrix, so you can see these ideas there.
Gender theory has emerged as a newer trend in academia. It studies many different ideas about how gender functions and is performed within society. Some of this overlaps with feminism, and some of it also does work that looks at the difficulties men have living up to ideals of masculinity. I tend to focus on the first type.
Well - I think this might make up for the fact that I haven't done a swotty post lately!
So, if you'd like to do the same, leave a comment, and I'll pick 3 icons and 3 interests for you to explain.
celisnebula up on the 3+3 meme.
Here are the 3 icons she chose:
Primordial Soup is one I love it because it's a play on both Warhol's postmodern art with it's awareness of the iconography of commercial advertising and being a science geek - the idea that lighting struck a pool of primordial soup and here we are!
The second is Spacecat. Again, it combines my love of two seemingly disparate things - cats and science fiction. And look - it has a little ray gun and space booties!
My default icon comes from one of those great 70s covers of Philip K. Dick's Ubik. Funny and horrifying, it explores a world wherein the afterlife is turned into a commercial enterprise, with the infinitely mutating product Ubik offering a faint hope of salvation against encroaching entropy. It's most effective form is the one that comes in a spray can!
As for interests, cultural materialism is one of the first types of cultural theory created. I focus on Raymond Williams, who is interested in taking the Marxist concepts of ideology and hegemony and discussing how they function throughout culture (instead of limiting them to the economic only). He created the idea of counter-hegemony - the thought that small groups with differing ideas can rise up and influence dominant hegemony. It's what I named my lj after. But cultural theory is also what lets people study trends in pop culture to see what it says about society - this was always looked down upon before.
Epistemology is the study of how we obtain knowledge and brings me back to Philip K. Dick. All of his novels deal with both ontological and epistemological concerns - we don't know what reality really is and we can't trust the information we're receiving about what reality we're in. I find that fascinating. If you haven't read him, his work is a very direct influence on the Matrix, so you can see these ideas there.
Gender theory has emerged as a newer trend in academia. It studies many different ideas about how gender functions and is performed within society. Some of this overlaps with feminism, and some of it also does work that looks at the difficulties men have living up to ideals of masculinity. I tend to focus on the first type.
Well - I think this might make up for the fact that I haven't done a swotty post lately!
So, if you'd like to do the same, leave a comment, and I'll pick 3 icons and 3 interests for you to explain.