Revolting Youth

The Conflicted Representation of Students in Netflix’s The Chair

Dados Bibliográficos

ID22169485
AutoresMark Readman (0000-0003-0463-5663, National Film and Television School, autor correspondente)
Ano2025
Volume7
Fascículo2
Data de publicação2025-07-31
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoOpen Screens (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 2516-2888 • E-ISSN: 2516-2888
EditoraOpen Library of the Humanities (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.16995/os.11707
OpenAlexW4406082749
IdiomaEN
Referências citadas9

The Netflix series The Chair (2021), created by academic Annie Julia Wyman, and actor, writer, producer Amanda Peet is set in the privileged enclave of an American liberal arts college. The anxieties portrayed in The Chair are varied, but the primary one is the students. Students in this story determine directly or indirectly who is vulnerable to firing and the shape of the curriculum; academics are terrified to be alone with a single student in case of accusations of sexual impropriety; and in the central story students exercise political power through their condemnation of an academic who gives a mock Nazi salute in a class. The Chair’s main characters are in awe of, and often contemptuous of the student body in whom, despite their protestations that they lack a voice, the power to censure and censor resides. The show invokes wider contemporary discourses about the resilience of the young, the effects of social media, the decontextualisation of events, struggles over meaning, and the elision of morality and identity. This analysis of the representation of students in The Chair reveals a complex and conflicted set of ideas about generational differences, the marketisation of Higher Education, and the nature of knowledge in the academy; it also examines the mobilisation of liberal and conservative critiques of students and reveals both to be ultimately unsustainable

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