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CULTURE JAMMING AS CRITICAL PUBLIC PEDAGOGY 325

And Atkinson (2003) explains that culture jamming is based on the idea of

resisting the dominant ideology of consumerism and re-creating

commer

cial culture in order to transform society. Culture jamming includes such

activities as billboard “liberation,” the creation and dissemination of anti

advertising “subvertisements,” and participation in DIY (do-it-yourself)

political theater and “shopping interventions.”

Many culture jammers view themselves as descendents of the “Situation

ists,” a European anarchist group from the 1950s led by Guy Debord

(Harold, 2004). Members of this group created moments of what Bakhtin

(1973) and Kristeva (1986) would later call the “carnivalesque,” enacted to

fight against the “spectacle” of everyday life. The carnival, for Bakhtin

(1973), is created using folk humor positioned outside the officially sanc

tioned culture of those in power. The spectacle is everything?advertising,

television, and so forth?comprising society’s “spectacular level of com

modity consumption and hype” (Lasn, 1999, p. 100); it is a theatrical

performance that obscures and legitimizes “violent production and con

sumption” (Boje, 2001, p. 437). According to the Situationists, the spec tacle stifles free will and spontaneity, replacing them with media-sponsored lives and prepackaged experiences (Lasn, 1999). Like the Situationists, culture jammers reject the spectacle in favor of authenticity.

In this article we explore how two groups?Adbusters and Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping?use culture jamming as a means of

resisting consumerism; we chose these groups because they

are among the

more widely known and enduring culture jamming groups. To frame our

research, we draw from cultural studies and the critical curriculum litera

ture focusing on public pedagogy. Specifically, we ground our work in a

“Gramscian” cultural studies framework. This perspective conceptualizes

popular culture as an active process, where cultural commodities and

experiences are not

simply passively consumed, but are the raw materials

people use to create

popular culture, within various contexts of power

relations (Storey, 1999, 2006). From this view, popular culture is a promi nent

sphere in which inequalities of class, gender, race, and sexuality are

made meaningful or

brought to consciousness; it is also an arena for power