John Beck
Biographic Data
| ID | 3583976 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John Beck |
| GIVEN NAMES | John |
| FAMILY NAME | Beck |
| SIGNATURE | BECK J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cambridge |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8128-8194 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 158 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
The Art School Project
Radiation Nation
Review of: Radiation Nation: Three Mile Island and the Political Transformation of the 1970s , Natasha Zaretsky (2018) New York: Columbia University Press, 312 pp., ISBN 978-0-23117-980-5, h/bk, $120/£100 ISBN 978-0-23117-981-2, p/bk, $35/£32
On the Beach
The phrase “on the beach” originates as naval slang for being between assignments or unemployed and was used as the title for Nevil Shute's bestselling novel of 1957 about the last remaining survivors of a global nuclear conflict as they await their inevitable demise. The novel is about a certain kind of anxious passivity in the face of incomprehensible catastrophe, but it is also a narrative about work and idleness. As such, the idea of being “o…
The Time Capsule and the Cut-Up
The first feature film made about the design and deployment of the atomic bomb, The Beginning or the End (1947), begins with fake newsreel footage depicting the burial in a time capsule of a copy of the film and a projector to show it on. The scene, with its funereal overtones yet grim optimism that, even in the face of catastrophic destruction, the germ of civilization will endure, recalls the ceremonies surrounding the interment of the Westingh…
The Return of the Art and Technology Lab
In North America, there are over one hundred programs and labs committed to collaborative experimentation in art and technology. This article examines the current prominence of art and technology labs in the context of the resurgence of collaborative practice in the arts, not only between artists, but also among a wide range of cross-disciplinary groupings of designers, scientists, engineers, scholars, and others. The push for collaboration in th…
Cold War Legacies
Systems analysis, cybernetics, information theory - form the late 1940s through the 80s, these shaped military, business, government and academic thinking. Their influence on the arts is obvious, form the 'systems novels' of the 1960s and 70s to electronic music and from conceptual art to electronic media. The end of the Cold War did not end systems thinking; indeed, given the explosion of computer technologies into every aspect of contemporary l…
Introduction
High Formalism
Laura Kurgan’s Monochrome Landscapes (2004), first exhibited in the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, consists of four oblong Cibachrome prints derived from digital files sourced from the commercial Ikonos and QuickBird satellites. The prints are ostensibly flat, depthless fields of white, green, blue, and yellow, yet the captions provided explain that the sites represented are related to contested military, industrial, and cartogr…
The Call of the Anthropocene
In late 2012 a communications satellite called EchoStar XVI launched into space from Kazakhstan where it remains in a geostationary orbit around Earth. The satellite contains artist and geographer Trevor Paglen’s The Last Pictures, a collection of one hundred images, sourced from libraries and artists, microetched onto a gold-plated disc. Paglen’s project is both a continuation of, and a critical response to, the notion of the time capsule as a m…
Postcatastrophic Utopias
Space colonization and subterranean dwelling have been staples of speculative fiction since at least the nineteenth century, but the invention of nuclear weapons and the prospect of global environmental collapse have, certainly since the Cold War, made proposals offering vertical escape from the surface of the planet a matter worthy of serious consideration among engineers, planners, military strategists, and countercultural futurologists. The sh…
The Art School in Ruins
As the British government effectively privatizes higher education in the arts, humanities and social sciences, this article tours the monuments that remain (and some that do not) of the last great era in state-funded training in art and design in the UK: the time between the Second World War and the absorption of art schools into polytechnics and universities when institutions intended to provide artisanal training became the autonomously regulat…
Reinstating knowledge
This paper examines three recent accounts of what has allegedly gone wrong with the school curriculum in England in recent years and their prescriptions for remedying these ills – all three accounts sharing strong proposals to reinstate knowledge at the heart of the curriculum. These analyses, despite some significant similarities, come from very different political standpoints. They are: first, proposals by the current UK Secretary of State for …
In and Out of the Box
Bashir Makhoul's Beijing installation Enter Ghost, Exit Ghost is a maze made out of lenticular images of a Palestinian village that leads to a stack of cardboard boxes that could be a town, a military training camp, or just a heap of damaged packing containers. This article reads the installation through an initial misrecognition, seeing the boxes as a version of ancient Anasazi cliff dwellings. This displacement, where one place recalls somewher…
Concrete Ambivalence
The defensive systems of fortified bunkers built during the twentieth century have become, especially since the end of the Cold War, objects of troubled fascination for artists, architects, and archaeologists. Images of bunkers proliferate in contemporary art and photography, and the heritage business has become increasingly interested in exploiting public curiosity towards the remains of recent conflict. This article positions current work about…
On Latinidad
Signs of the Sky, Signs of the Times
From Alfred Stieglitz to Trevor Paglen, photographs of the sky have engaged with the relationship between abstraction and representation. This article argues that Stieglitz's attempt to convert the 'natural' abstraction of the sky into the 'cultural' abstraction of the modernist image opens a space through which recent photographers have moved to use the sky photograph as a means of interrogating issues of openness and concealment that are at onc…
Dirty Wars
Appropriating professionalism
The present paper examines efforts by government and government agencies in England to prescribe and control the knowledge base of a teaching profession that has, under successive New Labour administrations since 1997, been subjected to ‘modernisation’. A theoretical framework drawn from aspects of the work of Basil Bernstein, and of Rob Moore and Lynn Jones, is drawn upon to examine in some detail one key aspect of this ongoing process of govern…
Books
Governmental Professionalism
This paper draws on recent work by John Clarke and Janet Newman and their colleagues to analyse a relatively coherent governmental project, spanning the decades of Conservative and New Labour government in England since 1979, that has sought to render teachers increasingly subservient to the state and agencies of the state. Under New Labour this has involved discourse and policies aimed at transforming teaching into a ‘modernised profession’. It …
Education and the Middle Classes
This paper critiques what it sees as a tendency on the part of certain social researchers to engage in moralistic critiques of middle-class parents, especially in relation to the choices and actions of such parents within educational quasi-markets. It proceeds to a linked critique of the influence within education of certain aspects of the work of Pierre Bourdieu, with particular reference to the concepts of symbolic violence and the depiction of…
Velocities of Power
The fairground injunction to “scream if you want to go faster” has become one of the defining imperatives of advanced capitalism, the ambivalence of that scream both calling forth acceleration and announcing a terror at its prospect. Commentators on the radical time–space compression achieved by the technological developments of recent decades are as conflicted in outlook as their predecessors have been in marking the utopian and apocalyptic prom…
Resistance Becomes Ballistic
Richard C. Sarafian's Vanishing Point (1971) is the apotheosis of the Vietnam-era exploitation/arthouse existentialist road movies produced in the wake of Easy Rider. Vanishing Point is about speed and technology, surveillance and control, acceleration and catastrophe, roads, deserts, and perspective. It explores the compression of time through the acceleration of movement and measures the velocity of a counterculture that has “hopped up” the mac…
Knowledge, Power and Educational Reform
SECTION 1: Knowledge Structures and Epistemology 1. ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS: verticality of knowledge and the school curriculum 2. KNOWLEDGE STRUCTURES AND INTELLECTUAL FIELDS: Basil Bernstein and the sociology of knowledge 3. ON KNOWLEDGE STRUCTURES AND KNOWER STRUCTURES 4. CLIMBING THE LADDER OF KNOWLEDGE: Plato and Bernstein SECTION 2: Knowledge, Identity and Voice 5. POWER, PEDAGOGIC VOICES AND PUPIL TALK: the implications for pupil consul…
The assault on the professions and the restructuring of academic and professional identities
This paper draws upon a range of ideas and concepts developed by the British sociologist Basil Bernstein to examine recent challenges and changes encountered by members of professional occupations, including those who teach and research in higher education. The paper discusses and seeks to develop Bernstein's analysis of how particular structurings of knowledge may be related to the formation of occupational identities centred in what Bernstein r…
The assault on the professions and the restructuring of academic and professional identities
This paper draws upon a range of ideas and concepts developed by the British sociologist Basil Bernstein to examine recent challenges and changes encountered by members of professional occupations, including those who teach and research in higher education. The paper discusses and seeks to develop Bernstein's analysis of how particular structurings of knowledge may be related to the formation of occupational identities centred in what Bernstein r…
Makeover Or Takeover? The strange death of educational autonomy in neo-liberal England
This paper is concerned with the erosion of educational autonomy in Britain in recent years. Employing an analytical framework derived mainly from the recent work of Basil Bernstein, it examines ways in which weakened boundaries between the educational and the economic/political spheres may be linked to attempts by government in Britain to take over, to an unprecedented degree, domains where educators and producers of knowledge have in the past e…
Concrete Ambivalence
The defensive systems of fortified bunkers built during the twentieth century have become, especially since the end of the Cold War, objects of troubled fascination for artists, architects, and archaeologists. Images of bunkers proliferate in contemporary art and photography, and the heritage business has become increasingly interested in exploiting public curiosity towards the remains of recent conflict. This article positions current work about…
Appropriating professionalism
The present paper examines efforts by government and government agencies in England to prescribe and control the knowledge base of a teaching profession that has, under successive New Labour administrations since 1997, been subjected to ‘modernisation’. A theoretical framework drawn from aspects of the work of Basil Bernstein, and of Rob Moore and Lynn Jones, is drawn upon to examine in some detail one key aspect of this ongoing process of govern…
Governmental Professionalism
This paper draws on recent work by John Clarke and Janet Newman and their colleagues to analyse a relatively coherent governmental project, spanning the decades of Conservative and New Labour government in England since 1979, that has sought to render teachers increasingly subservient to the state and agencies of the state. Under New Labour this has involved discourse and policies aimed at transforming teaching into a ‘modernised profession’. It …
The Sacred and the Profane in Recent Struggles to Promote Official Pedagogic Identities
This paper begins by highlighting the concerns of a number of commentators about what they perceived as an unprecedented incursion of market-oriented instrumental values in higher education in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Bernstein's analysis of these issues is shown to draw upon Durkheimian concepts of the sacred and the profane. Similarities and differences between Durkheim's and Bernstein's definitions of these concepts are exami…
Reinstating knowledge
This paper examines three recent accounts of what has allegedly gone wrong with the school curriculum in England in recent years and their prescriptions for remedying these ills – all three accounts sharing strong proposals to reinstate knowledge at the heart of the curriculum. These analyses, despite some significant similarities, come from very different political standpoints. They are: first, proposals by the current UK Secretary of State for …
Signs of the Sky, Signs of the Times
From Alfred Stieglitz to Trevor Paglen, photographs of the sky have engaged with the relationship between abstraction and representation. This article argues that Stieglitz's attempt to convert the 'natural' abstraction of the sky into the 'cultural' abstraction of the modernist image opens a space through which recent photographers have moved to use the sky photograph as a means of interrogating issues of openness and concealment that are at onc…
Citizenship Education
The paper suggests three major reasons why the definition and development of citizenship education in British schools has proved problematic. First, guidance from official sources, and notably Curriculum Guidance 8 ‘Education for Citizenship’, has been seriously inadequate; secondly, the political and educational significance of the fact that citizenship is a prime example of an ‘essentially contested concept’ has not been sufficiently examined; …
The Call of the Anthropocene
In late 2012 a communications satellite called EchoStar XVI launched into space from Kazakhstan where it remains in a geostationary orbit around Earth. The satellite contains artist and geographer Trevor Paglen’s The Last Pictures, a collection of one hundred images, sourced from libraries and artists, microetched onto a gold-plated disc. Paglen’s project is both a continuation of, and a critical response to, the notion of the time capsule as a m…
Education and the Middle Classes
This paper critiques what it sees as a tendency on the part of certain social researchers to engage in moralistic critiques of middle-class parents, especially in relation to the choices and actions of such parents within educational quasi-markets. It proceeds to a linked critique of the influence within education of certain aspects of the work of Pierre Bourdieu, with particular reference to the concepts of symbolic violence and the depiction of…
Education and the Politics of Envy
This paper addresses the somewhat neglected topic of envy and its relationship to education and social inequality in Britain. Drawing on the work of Rawls, Runciman and Crosland, the paper proposes a distinction between envy as a vice and ‘justified resentment’ aroused by perceived injustices in the social distribution of primary goods, including education. Various pejorative uses of the term ‘the politics of envy’ in UK politics are examined. Th…
The Return of the Art and Technology Lab
In North America, there are over one hundred programs and labs committed to collaborative experimentation in art and technology. This article examines the current prominence of art and technology labs in the context of the resurgence of collaborative practice in the arts, not only between artists, but also among a wide range of cross-disciplinary groupings of designers, scientists, engineers, scholars, and others. The push for collaboration in th…
Postcatastrophic Utopias
Space colonization and subterranean dwelling have been staples of speculative fiction since at least the nineteenth century, but the invention of nuclear weapons and the prospect of global environmental collapse have, certainly since the Cold War, made proposals offering vertical escape from the surface of the planet a matter worthy of serious consideration among engineers, planners, military strategists, and countercultural futurologists. The sh…
Velocities of Power
The fairground injunction to “scream if you want to go faster” has become one of the defining imperatives of advanced capitalism, the ambivalence of that scream both calling forth acceleration and announcing a terror at its prospect. Commentators on the radical time–space compression achieved by the technological developments of recent decades are as conflicted in outlook as their predecessors have been in marking the utopian and apocalyptic prom…
Resistance Becomes Ballistic
Richard C. Sarafian's Vanishing Point (1971) is the apotheosis of the Vietnam-era exploitation/arthouse existentialist road movies produced in the wake of Easy Rider. Vanishing Point is about speed and technology, surveillance and control, acceleration and catastrophe, roads, deserts, and perspective. It explores the compression of time through the acceleration of movement and measures the velocity of a counterculture that has “hopped up” the mac…
"Teaching "The Americas
Citizenship Education
The paper suggests three major reasons why the definition and development of citizenship education in British schools has proved problematic. First, guidance from official sources, and notably Curriculum Guidance 8 ‘Education for Citizenship’, has been seriously inadequate; secondly, the political and educational significance of the fact that citizenship is a prime example of an ‘essentially contested concept’ has not been sufficiently examined; …
Labor Law, Industrial Relations and Employee Choice
Introduction and OverviewThe past two decades of industrial relations experience have had the cumulative effect of a widespread realization that discussion and debate over the nation©s labor laws and their administration are needed.Concerns have been growing about the costs to society of labor con flict, and questions have been raised as to whether there is a role for labor legislation in encouraging labor-management cooperation in order to enhan…
Should Homosexuality be Taught as an Acceptable Alternative Lifestyle? A Muslim perspective
This article focuses upon that part of Halstead and Lewicka's argument which contends that ‘a gay and lesbian world view’ on homosexuality is, at least in certain respects, incommensurable with a Muslim view. This thesis is challenged and certain educational implications of this challenge are explored. The view originally formulated by Patricia White that in liberal, democratic societies such as the UK ‘a school has no reason not to present homos…
Makeover Or Takeover? The strange death of educational autonomy in neo-liberal England
This paper is concerned with the erosion of educational autonomy in Britain in recent years. Employing an analytical framework derived mainly from the recent work of Basil Bernstein, it examines ways in which weakened boundaries between the educational and the economic/political spheres may be linked to attempts by government in Britain to take over, to an unprecedented degree, domains where educators and producers of knowledge have in the past e…
Moral Democratic Education and Homosexuality
This article takes issue with certain aspects of the argument put forward by John Petrovic in a recent issue of the Journal of Moral Education : that adherence to principles of democracy requires not only the positive portrayal of homosexuality in schools but also precludes teachers from expressing their beliefs against it. It is argued that certain of Petrovic's appeals to democracy are somewhat rhetorical, and that his fuller characterisation o…
The Sacred and the Profane in Recent Struggles to Promote Official Pedagogic Identities
This paper begins by highlighting the concerns of a number of commentators about what they perceived as an unprecedented incursion of market-oriented instrumental values in higher education in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Bernstein's analysis of these issues is shown to draw upon Durkheimian concepts of the sacred and the profane. Similarities and differences between Durkheim's and Bernstein's definitions of these concepts are exami…
Education and the Politics of Envy
This paper addresses the somewhat neglected topic of envy and its relationship to education and social inequality in Britain. Drawing on the work of Rawls, Runciman and Crosland, the paper proposes a distinction between envy as a vice and ‘justified resentment’ aroused by perceived injustices in the social distribution of primary goods, including education. Various pejorative uses of the term ‘the politics of envy’ in UK politics are examined. Th…
"Teaching "The Americas
The assault on the professions and the restructuring of academic and professional identities
This paper draws upon a range of ideas and concepts developed by the British sociologist Basil Bernstein to examine recent challenges and changes encountered by members of professional occupations, including those who teach and research in higher education. The paper discusses and seeks to develop Bernstein's analysis of how particular structurings of knowledge may be related to the formation of occupational identities centred in what Bernstein r…
Knowledge, Power and Educational Reform
SECTION 1: Knowledge Structures and Epistemology 1. ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS: verticality of knowledge and the school curriculum 2. KNOWLEDGE STRUCTURES AND INTELLECTUAL FIELDS: Basil Bernstein and the sociology of knowledge 3. ON KNOWLEDGE STRUCTURES AND KNOWER STRUCTURES 4. CLIMBING THE LADDER OF KNOWLEDGE: Plato and Bernstein SECTION 2: Knowledge, Identity and Voice 5. POWER, PEDAGOGIC VOICES AND PUPIL TALK: the implications for pupil consul…
Education and the Middle Classes
This paper critiques what it sees as a tendency on the part of certain social researchers to engage in moralistic critiques of middle-class parents, especially in relation to the choices and actions of such parents within educational quasi-markets. It proceeds to a linked critique of the influence within education of certain aspects of the work of Pierre Bourdieu, with particular reference to the concepts of symbolic violence and the depiction of…
Velocities of Power
The fairground injunction to “scream if you want to go faster” has become one of the defining imperatives of advanced capitalism, the ambivalence of that scream both calling forth acceleration and announcing a terror at its prospect. Commentators on the radical time–space compression achieved by the technological developments of recent decades are as conflicted in outlook as their predecessors have been in marking the utopian and apocalyptic prom…
Resistance Becomes Ballistic
Richard C. Sarafian's Vanishing Point (1971) is the apotheosis of the Vietnam-era exploitation/arthouse existentialist road movies produced in the wake of Easy Rider. Vanishing Point is about speed and technology, surveillance and control, acceleration and catastrophe, roads, deserts, and perspective. It explores the compression of time through the acceleration of movement and measures the velocity of a counterculture that has “hopped up” the mac…
Governmental Professionalism
This paper draws on recent work by John Clarke and Janet Newman and their colleagues to analyse a relatively coherent governmental project, spanning the decades of Conservative and New Labour government in England since 1979, that has sought to render teachers increasingly subservient to the state and agencies of the state. Under New Labour this has involved discourse and policies aimed at transforming teaching into a ‘modernised profession’. It …
Dirty Wars
Appropriating professionalism
The present paper examines efforts by government and government agencies in England to prescribe and control the knowledge base of a teaching profession that has, under successive New Labour administrations since 1997, been subjected to ‘modernisation’. A theoretical framework drawn from aspects of the work of Basil Bernstein, and of Rob Moore and Lynn Jones, is drawn upon to examine in some detail one key aspect of this ongoing process of govern…
Books
Concrete Ambivalence
The defensive systems of fortified bunkers built during the twentieth century have become, especially since the end of the Cold War, objects of troubled fascination for artists, architects, and archaeologists. Images of bunkers proliferate in contemporary art and photography, and the heritage business has become increasingly interested in exploiting public curiosity towards the remains of recent conflict. This article positions current work about…
On Latinidad
Signs of the Sky, Signs of the Times
From Alfred Stieglitz to Trevor Paglen, photographs of the sky have engaged with the relationship between abstraction and representation. This article argues that Stieglitz's attempt to convert the 'natural' abstraction of the sky into the 'cultural' abstraction of the modernist image opens a space through which recent photographers have moved to use the sky photograph as a means of interrogating issues of openness and concealment that are at onc…
The Art School in Ruins
As the British government effectively privatizes higher education in the arts, humanities and social sciences, this article tours the monuments that remain (and some that do not) of the last great era in state-funded training in art and design in the UK: the time between the Second World War and the absorption of art schools into polytechnics and universities when institutions intended to provide artisanal training became the autonomously regulat…
Reinstating knowledge
This paper examines three recent accounts of what has allegedly gone wrong with the school curriculum in England in recent years and their prescriptions for remedying these ills – all three accounts sharing strong proposals to reinstate knowledge at the heart of the curriculum. These analyses, despite some significant similarities, come from very different political standpoints. They are: first, proposals by the current UK Secretary of State for …
In and Out of the Box
Bashir Makhoul's Beijing installation Enter Ghost, Exit Ghost is a maze made out of lenticular images of a Palestinian village that leads to a stack of cardboard boxes that could be a town, a military training camp, or just a heap of damaged packing containers. This article reads the installation through an initial misrecognition, seeing the boxes as a version of ancient Anasazi cliff dwellings. This displacement, where one place recalls somewher…
The Call of the Anthropocene
In late 2012 a communications satellite called EchoStar XVI launched into space from Kazakhstan where it remains in a geostationary orbit around Earth. The satellite contains artist and geographer Trevor Paglen’s The Last Pictures, a collection of one hundred images, sourced from libraries and artists, microetched onto a gold-plated disc. Paglen’s project is both a continuation of, and a critical response to, the notion of the time capsule as a m…
Postcatastrophic Utopias
Space colonization and subterranean dwelling have been staples of speculative fiction since at least the nineteenth century, but the invention of nuclear weapons and the prospect of global environmental collapse have, certainly since the Cold War, made proposals offering vertical escape from the surface of the planet a matter worthy of serious consideration among engineers, planners, military strategists, and countercultural futurologists. The sh…
Political science (27 works) · Law (23 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Law (17 works) · History (14 works) · Politics (14 works) · Art (13 works) · Epistemology (12 works) · History (11 works) · Philosophy (11 works)