I haven't been able to log on to the OISE Vax for a week. This afternoon I went through my backlog. It's great to see this list so lively. Just a few catch up replies: On Sat. March 23 I asked if anyone had read David Scholle's article " Resistance: Pinning Down a Wandering Concept in Cultural Studies Discourse" in the Journal of Urban and Cultural Studies Vol. 1 no. 1 Jeremy replied he had not seen this journal and wondered where it came from. It is published by the Department of English, University of Mass. - Boston, Harbor Campus, Boston, Mass. 02125-3393. The article tries to develop a critique of the way the term resistance has been used by a variety of people using notions of discourse theory to critique conventional sender-message-receiver models of communication re: cultural commodities like film and tv. Hans Borchers, if you are still there, I think Remote Control: Television, Audiences and Cultural Power is a great book. A number of people here at OISE have been reading and discussing several of the articles. I'd recommend it for anyone interested in -not only audience response to soap operas- but general current issues in audience research. As a couple of Canadians have indicated the status of our copyright laws re: using films and tv programs is in a state of repressive chaos. Much rumor, much fear. I know that some high school principals have locked away the video tapes English department media studies teachers had been using with their classes until the law is clarified further. Our Tory government [otherwise known as "Progressive-Conservatives"] decided to deal with fair use in two parts. The first step was to cover print material. The bill on this aspect has been passed and implemented - despite a "freedom to read" educational lobby. The law covering non-print media has been long promised but is still to come. If I can get more time in the coming weeks, and if there is still interest, I will try to provide more detailed info. I like Fiona's `what do we get from the discourse of discourse theory' question. For me this translates into how can discourse theory [or any other theoretical framework] help in thinking clearly about a problem. I want to come at this very indirectly for awhile: Speaking of problems that need some clarity, let me pose one that one of our doctoral students [Judith Robertson -University of Ottawa, Faculty of Education] and I are trying to think through. The problem is set in the context of using popular film re: teachers and teaching in the context of teacher education. Picking up on Ian Ang's work on the way audiences use soap operas, Judith and I have been wondering about the way teacher films are taken up by beginning teachers. Ang's work emphasizes that many people use soap operas and their characters to engage in the work/play of phantasy. In other words, the issue is not whether soap operas are taken as representations of "reality", but rather that they offer a set of imaginative possibilities which often, in their texture, tone, and emphasis, offer - in their use- both a critique of current material and social realities and a set of discursive resources for constructing new [though imaginary and often unrealized] possibilities. Well, we have been working through a project of integrating student responses to films such as Stand and Deliver, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Sylvia, etc. into credit courses in teacher training programs. Such responses indicate how such films do or do not enter into the imaginative play of teachers-in-becoming and in the formation of identities as teachers. Judith has collected and developed an annotated bibliography of over 100 feature length fictional narrative films in which a teacher or teachers are central. She is gaining experience re: how different groups of students respond to the narrative and representational structures in these films. But we find we need more clarity regarding how to think about how and with what limits and effects films provoke the processes of phantasy and imagination. Outside of the now conventional psycho-analytic treatments of this issue from the 70's and 80's has anyone see any good discussions of this lately? I think that relating questions of discourse - issues of meaning at the level of the semiotic - to such problems requires re-configuring discussions of the regulation and production of discursive resources which a viewer might use in the process of meaning making to include questions of affect, psychic investment and the operation of that which may - most of the time- be unconscious. This is getting a bit long...but one final note: Ben Alpers ...I greatly appreciated your historical comments. I don't think there's a need to apologize for historical discussions in "screen-l". I'd welcome more comments that can help us "historicize" our conversations. Roger Simon Ontario Institute for Studies in Education [log in to unmask]