Culture jamming the ‘corporate assault’ on schools and children

Abstract

In contemporary times, organisations across all sectors of society have been encouraged to collaborate and be ‘part of the solution’ to childhood obesity. This has led to a proliferation of anti-obesity/healthy lifestyles programmes that are funded, devised and implemented by private sector players (e.g. McDonald’s, Nestlé) in schools across the globe. This corporate-friendly version of education attempts to erode the democratic purposes of public education, and at the same time, shape children as consumers. Drawing on the Foucauldian notion of the governmental assemblage, I argue that culture jamming techniques, such as pranking and détournement, may act as tactics within a broader critical pedagogy of consumption that both challenges and counter-exploits this new ‘brand’ of education and corporation. Culture jamming provides an opportunity to develop students and teachers as counter-political agents: those that contest anti-politics, create new truths, unmask corporate interests and ‘unsettle’ the corporatised education assemblage.

[As] corporate curricula continue to turn schooling into a propaganda ground for their own destructive interests, one solution is clearly to stop using them. Another is to provide teachers with resources for researching the agendas of the corporations that finance and distribute such products in public schools and museums so that the ideological functions of the curricula can be turned against themselves, and the corporation’s global agendas will be shown as contextualised and centred within the curricula. In this way, students can be shown how their interests and worldviews actually differ from the way their interests and worldviews are constructed in the curricula.

–Saltman and Goodman (2011: 53)

The ‘corporate assault’ on schools and children

In contemporary times, organisations across all sectors of society have been encouraged to collaborate and be ‘part of the solution’ to childhood obesity (see Powell, 2015; World Health Organization, 2015). Schools and corporations (as well as governments, charities, teachers, principals and students) have been somewhat unproblematically drawn into the ‘vortex’ of obesity solutions (Gard, 2011). This has resulted in a number of corporations (usually the same corporations blamed for exacerbating the ‘problem’ of childhood obesity in the first place, such as McDonald’s) devising, funding and implementing a vast array of anti-obesity/healthy lifestyle education programmes, resources, products, curricula, sponsorship and events in schools across the globe. For instance, Nestlé now claims to work ‘with 311 partners to deliver our Healthy Kids Global Programme in 84 countries’ (Nestlé, 2017). This programme aims to ‘help children achieve and maintain a healthy body weight … promote healthier lifestyles and diets for kids’ by ‘empowering teachers and schools’ so that ‘children and adolescents learn the basics of nutrition, develop a positive approach to food, and receive practical advice on improving eating and drinking habits’ (Nestlé, 2017; also, for a detailed examination of Nestlé’s corporatisation of health education, see Powell, 2014). The Coca-Cola Company, McDonald’s, Kellogg’s, General Mills, Unilever, other members of the International Food and Beverage Alliance, as well as organisations from sporting goods, insurance, healthcare and professional sport industries, also now provide (and publicise) a range of school-based ‘solutions’ to childhood obesity.

These types of corporatised, school-based programmes represent a particularly exploitative ‘assault’ (Boyles, 2008) on schools and students across the globe. This is a reform of public education (and public health) underpinned by a neoliberal political rationality that problematises the state and reorganises the rhetoric and programmes of government into alignment with notions of competitiveness, autonomy (of individuals and institutions), choice, enterprise, performance, standards and responsibility (for critiques of neoliberalism in public education, see Ball, 2012; Boyles, 2008; Saltman, 2010). The ‘neoliberal turn’ in public education (as well as public health policy) has sought to limit the fiscal role of the state and reshape policy in line with free market principles via such processes as privatisation, outsourcing, partnerships and commercialisation. While advocates for the neoliberal reform of education argue that the private sector is more efficient and effective than the public sector (e.g. Green, 2005), its critics share a concern that neoliberalism has taken hold of education and ‘by changing the nature and role of the state, neoliberalism has called into question the very aims and purposes of public education’ (Codd, 2008: 15). As Saltman (2011) writes, neoliberalism redefines education as being for the ‘corporate good rather than the public good … a new conflation of corporate profit with the social good’ (p. 13). In this way, the responsibility of public education to promote critical citizenship has been ‘assaulted’ by corporations for the development of profit, eroding the ability of teachers to prepare students to participate as democratic citizens (see Boyles, 2008; Saltman, 2010).

The boundaries between public and private interests continue to blur as different forms of strategic philanthropy (including corporate social responsibility) result in the ‘gifting’ of educational resources, programmes and personnel to schools (Saltman, 2010). As Ball (2012) argues, the promotion of ‘“market-based solutions” to “wicked” social and educational problems … fits within and fosters the neo-liberal imaginary’ (p. 66). Childhood obesity is one such ‘wicked’ problem that the private sector is particularly interested in providing educational solutions. However, as a number of scholars have pointed out, these types of programmes are not about corporate altruism to ‘fix’ a problem, but representative of private sector motives to build brand loyalty, improve public relations, secure self-regulation, and above all else, profit (see Ball, 2012; Boyles, 2008; Powell, 2015).

One significant effect of this combined corporate assault on schools and obesity is the recruitment and development of students as consumers. During previous ethnographic research with students, teachers and principals in three New Zealand primary (elementary) schools (see Powell, 2015), it was clear that corporations deploy a variety of ‘technologies of consumption’ (Miller and Rose, 1997), such as free gifts, sponsorship, product placement, philanthropy and educational resources to mobilise students ‘at a distance’ to become uncritical consumers of corporate products and the corporate brand image. These technologies of consumption often (but by no means always) worked to reinvent corporations and their products as ‘healthy’ and as a necessary solution to obesity and unhealthy lifestyles. Furthermore, technologies were also used in an endeavour to govern students and teachers to become uncritical consumers of corporate strategies, such as advertising, marketing, corporate social responsibility and public relations. As Rose (1999) argued, alongside neoliberal forms of governance there are ‘new forms of consumption … the regulation of habits, dispositions, styles of existence in the name of identity and lifestyle … the citizen is to become the consumer’ (p. 164–165). This is certainly the case in schools where corporatised anti-obesity/healthy lifestyles programmes are inextricably interconnected with technologies of consumption, a tactic ‘to market not a benign conception of health, but a particular brand of health … ultimately connected to consumer culture’ (Vander Schee, 2008: 5, emphasis in original).

A key starting point for writing this article was a concern that this new ‘brand’ of health, education and corporation is interwoven with new lifestyles and identities for children. The child-citizen is governed to become the child-consumer, while notions of individualism, self-responsibility, corporeality and consumerism reign supreme (Powell, 2016). However, there is a scarcity of research that has critically examined the ways in which teachers and students may push back against this particularly stealthy, supposedly healthy, corporatisation of education. This article takes seriously Sandlin and McLaren’s (2010b) challenge for educators ‘to explore the consumptive aspects of the everyday educational and learning sites that we teach in or learn in …. To investigate sites of hegemony as well as sites of resistance and contestation’ (p. 15). With this in mind, there are opportunities – and a need – for critical pedagogical practices to unmask corporate interests, to challenge the normalisation of corporate-friendly education and to democratise public education. Here, I aim to interrogate how techniques borrowed from culture jamming may help teachers and students fight back and speak out against the ‘corporate assault’ on schools and children.

Culture jamming: an introduction

In 1993, Mark Dery wrote an influential article Culture jamming: Hacking, slashing, and sniping in the empire of signs. He described early culture jammers as ‘Groucho Marxists’ waging acts of ‘artistic terrorism’ through a range of subcultural practices, including satire, appropriation art, Situationist détournement and graffiti. The term ‘culture jamming’ was picked up by the founders of the Adbusters magazine – Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz – who soon promoted their organisation as the ‘Culture Jammers’ Headquarters’ (see Delaure and Fink, 2017b). Lasn (1999) went on to publish a manifesto for culture jamming: Culture jam: the uncooling of America, in which he offered practical suggestions for culture jamming tactics and framed culture jamming as a radical, revolutionary act. Culture jamming was also picked up by Naomi Klein (2001) in her bestseller No Logo, in which she provided a brief history of ‘adbusting’, as well as an important reminder that culture jamming must be rooted in politics and activism in order to be a catalyst for meaningful political change.

Although the histories, intents and strategies of culture jamming are somewhat slippery and contested, Delaure and Fink (2017b) provide a useful definition of culture jamming as:

a range of tactics used to critique, subvert, and otherwise ‘jam’ the workings of consumer culture. These tactics include media pranks, advertising parodies, textual poaching, billboard appropriation, street performance, and the reclamation of urban spaces for noncommercial use. Using various forms of semiotic defamiliarization, culture jamming seeks to interrupt the flow of mainstream, market-driven communications – scrambling the signal, injecting the unexpected, jarring audiences, provoking critical thinking, inviting play and public participation. (p. 6)

Culture jamming is, therefore, not just ‘jamming’ in an obstructive sense, or even simply an anti-consumeristic sense, but a constructive, creative, political force that opens up possibilities for new ways of thinking, knowing and being (Delaure and Fink, 2017b). Dery (2017) argues, ‘If culture jamming is anything, it’s the dream of reclaiming our sense of ourselves as citizens in a culture that insists on reducing us to consumer – wallets with mouths, in advertising parlance’ (p. xv). In this way, culture jamming is also a ‘the insurgent political movement’, ‘a kind of “glutting” of the system … an amping up of contradictory rhetorical messages in an effort to force a qualitative change’ (Harold, 2007: xxvi–xxvii). Culture jamming also holds many possibilities to be employed as a ‘critical pedagogy of consumption’ (Sandlin and McLaren, 2010a) to challenge the global corporate assault on schools, disrupt attempts to fuse children’s identities with consumerism and to ultimately to enact democratic change.

The governmental assemblage

The ‘will to improve’ (Li, 2007c) the welfare of individuals and populations – such as those demonstrated by corporate efforts to ‘fight childhood obesity’ in schools – calls for the application of a particular way of thinking about government. Miller and Rose (1990) referred to this as the ‘mentalities of government’. Foucault coined the neologism governmentality to demonstrate this linking together of ‘gouverner’ (governing) and ‘mentalité’ (modes of thought). A key aspect of governmentality is how we reason or think about particular problems and practices of government: rationalities of government. The ways in which we think about government are inextricably tied to knowledge, power, truth and discourse, as well as the technical means by which conduct is conducted. This point is critical. An analytics of governmentality therefore requires a disentangling of the ways in which our thoughts, actions and self, have converged and intertwined with rationalities and technologies of government. Indeed, the notion of governmentality represents Foucault’s understanding that it is not possible to examine technologies of government without an analysis of the political rationalities that underpin them. The rationalities that underpin any problem of government are not merely represented in ‘thought’ or ‘discourse’ alone; they must be rendered thinkable (Miller and Rose, 2008) and technical (Li, 2007a). As Foucault (1984) suggests, technologies of government are a pragmatic rationality shaped by a conscious aim. In other words, technologies of government are how government is ‘done’ and how rationalities are actualised (Inda, 2005).

In Foucault’s (1991) first definition of governmentality, he described it as comprising an ensemble of knowledges, tactics, practices, rationalities and institutions that attempt to regulate individuals and populations. This concept of the ensemble is a useful starting point for an analytics of governmentality (see also Leahy, 2012). The word ‘ensemble’ relates to Foucault’s (1980, italics in original) notion of a dispositif or apparatus, which he describes as

firstly, a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions – in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Secondly, what I am trying to identify in this apparatus [dispositif] is precisely the nature of the connections that can exist between these heterogeneous elements. Thirdly, I understand by the term ‘apparatus’ [dispositif] a sort of – shall we say – formation which has as its major function at a given historical moment that of responding to an urgent need. (p. 194–195)

This ensemble of heterogeneous elements is discussed by Deleuze (1992) and Guattari (with Deleuze, 1987) as agencement or ‘assemblage’. Following Leahy (2012) and Li (2007b), I draw on the notion of ‘assemblage’ as a key analytical tool through which to critically examine corporatised education programmes in schools – and enable students and teachers to do the same.

In order to do this, I offer an analytics of assemblage that pays much closer attention to the practices of assemblage – ‘how’ elements of the assemblage may or may not be made to ‘cohere’ (see Li, 2007b). In this way, the term ‘assemblage’ needs to be thought of, and examined, as both a noun and a verb. As a noun, it may be conceptualised as an already formed cluster of practices, organisations, discourses, rationalities, technologies, subjectivities, regulations and moralities. For instance, children are assembled as consumers when multiple elements join together: neoliberalism, obesity discourse, biopedagogies, obesity interventions, public health organisations, scientific knowledge, government policies, corporate social responsibility programmes and external ‘experts’ (Powell, 2015). Viewing assemblage also as a verb – ‘to assemble’ – encourages a richer, more in-depth examination of how these various elements are – and may be – brought together to direct conduct towards deliberate, albeit unpredictable, ends (Dean, 2010). Although my previous analysis of school-based, corporate-influenced ‘solutions’ to obesity examined how these practices and policies have converged with numerous, often disparate, elements and actors (Author), what follows is an exploration of how new elements may be connected to and ‘congeal’ (Leahy, 2012) with the corporate education assemblage for democratic purposes: practices for re-assemblage.

Li’s (2007b) critical examination of community forestry management in Canada offers six practices of assemblage: forging alignments, rendering technical, authorising knowledge, managing failures and contradictions, anti-politics and re-assemblage. The first practice, forging alignments, is the ‘the work of linking together the objectives of the various parties to an assemblage, both those who aspire to govern conduct and those whose conduct is to be conducted’ (p. 265). Here, we can ask how the objectives of corporations and schools have become aligned with one another. The second practice of assemblage is termed rendering technical. This involves ‘extracting from the messiness of the social world, with all the processes that run through it, a set of relations that can be formulated as a diagram in which problem (a) plus intervention (b) will produce (c), a beneficial result’ (p. 265). How is childhood obesity, as a problem, rendered technical by corporate-led, school-based ‘solutions’? Authorising knowledge is the third of Li’s assembling practices, where there is a ‘requisite body of knowledge; confirming enabling assumptions; containing critiques’ (p. 265). How do corporate resources reproduce ‘authorised’, expert knowledge on obesity and education? The fourth practice involves managing failures and contradictions, ‘presenting failure as the outcome of rectifiable deficiencies; smoothing out contradictions so that they seem superficial rather than fundamental; devising compromises’ (p. 265). In other words, how are any failures of the corporatised governmental programmes (e.g. to make children healthier, less obese, more active, or better educated) or contradictions (e.g. a fast food corporation teaching students about health) presented? Anti-politics is a crucial practice of assemblage, where political questions are re-posed as technical matters, shutting off potential challenges to dominant discourses and power relations that benefit particular authorities (e.g. corporations) at the expense of marginalised groups. How do corporations or teachers or students ‘pose’ the problem of obesity, the corporate solutions and the effects of these various governmental interventions? Finally, Li describes re-assembling as a key practice for ‘grafting on new elements and reworking old ones; deploying existing discourses to new ends; transposing the meanings of key terms’ (p. 265). How are discourses of health re-assembled, re-worked, re-formed and re-placed through the various educational ‘solutions’ to obesity, or by techniques of culture jamming?

Practices of assemblage ‘draw heterogeneous elements together, forge connections between them and sustain these connections in the face of tension’ (Li, 2007b: 264). They are also practices that provide insights for critical educators who endeavour to ‘unsettle’ the assemblage (Youdell, 2011); a tool to understand how critical pedagogies of consumption – culture jamming, pranking, détournement (Delaure and Fink, 2017a) – may be deployed to develop students as counter-political agents who redefine democracy and education as a deeply political, rather than economic, concept (Apple, 2011).

Culture jamming: unsettling the corporate education assemblage

There are two key relay points in the corporate education assemblage that are susceptible to fracture; two connections that may be placed under significant strain with the intention of breaking, forcing a re-assemblage (Li, 2007b) that may work in the interests of students and the democratic purposes of education, rather than the interests of multinational corporations. The first relay point is in the subjectivities of the students, in particular their understanding of the corporate interest in ‘teaching’ them how to be consumers of ‘healthy’ products and brands. The second relay point to be targeted is the technologies of consumption – the actual resources, programmes, events, curricula, gifts and advertising that attempt to shape children and childhoods to align with the goals of neoliberalism and consumerism. Both these relay points can be threatened by employing culture jamming as a means to enact critical pedagogies of consumption; practices that hold some promise to re-assemble various elements of the assemblage and re-democratise public education.

Saltman and Goodman (2011) assert that schools must aim to become ‘places where students learn to renegotiate their relationships to corporate-sponsored ideologies and to formulate possibilities for oppositional strategies’ (p. 53). In addition, Sandlin and McLaren (2010b) argue ‘that we need to take consumption seriously within education, and that we need to move towards not only understanding how consumption operates as pedagogy, but also understanding what a resistant ‘critical pedagogy of consumption’ might look like’ (p. 15). What follows in this section is an exploration of how two culture jamming practices – pranking and détournement – might be used to enable students to actively subvert pedagogies of ‘healthy’ consumption and resist the attempts of corporations to shape students as ‘healthy’ consumers.

Pranking: intensifying failures and contradictions

Li (2007b: 265) describes managing failures and contradictions as a key practice that holds the governmental assemblage together. For instance, in prior research students and teachers noted significant contradictions when ‘health’ education programmes were sponsored by a food and beverage corporation (e.g. Frucor), featured branded products (e.g. Just Juice®) or delivered directly by a corporation (e.g. McDonald’s) (see Powell, 2016; Powell, 2018). However, these contradictions were often successfully ameliorated by teachers and external education providers who rationalised that the sponsorship did not really ‘matter’, that the education provided to students was actually trying to reduce students’ consumption of ‘unhealthy’ food and drink or that marketing did not affect students’ ‘choices’ of consumption.

Rather than only looking at how the assemblage was made to cohere through management of such contradictions, we can investigate how culture jamming may be used to intensify the contradictions or failures. Pranking is one potentially valuable strategy. Harold (2017) defines a prank, in the culture jamming sense, as both folding and adornment. In regard to the latter, a prank may be defined as a kind of visible, exaggerated, stylistic, mischievous act that produces some type of change; an ‘augmentation of dominant modes of communication that interrupts their conventional patterns’ (Harold, 2017: 71). According to Harold (2017), pranking may also be defined as a wrinkle, or fold, producing a ‘qualitative change by turning and doubling a material or text … not through the addition of novelty, but through reconfiguration of the object itself’ (p. 72). In both definitions, and in the context of culture jamming, pranking is not simply an opportunity for opposition to consumer culture in schools and wider society, but a means to experiment, improvise and interpret pedagogies of consumption.

Take one rather obvious pedagogy of consumption – Ronald McDonald visiting schools. Despite McDonald’s CEO – Don Thompson – assuring shareholders: ‘We don’t put Ronald out in schools’ (Golin, 2014), Ronald McDonald continues to regularly appear in schools (see, for example, www.wheresronald.com). If McDonald is willing to exploit schools for commercial gain, then it is reasonable, indeed fair, for schools to be able to counter-exploit McDonalds for educational outcomes. This leads to a fruitful opportunity to intensify tensions between the purposes of corporations and schools: the pranking of Ronald McDonald.

Picture this: a primary school has requested for Ronald McDonald to visit and teach students about healthy lifestyles. A local journalist has also been invited to report on McDonald’s ‘socially responsible’ programme. Ronald performs his various songs/dances/speeches about being active and making healthy choices, then asks: ‘Any questions?’ The students in Room 2 are prepared. All of their hands point to the ceiling. ‘Yes?’ questions Ronald, pointing at one Room 2 student in the front row. The student asks: ‘Why are you teaching us about being healthy?’ Before Ronald has a chance to reply, another student calls out their question: ‘Are your burgers healthy?’ Then another: ‘Why do you still buy pork from farmers who use gestation crates?’ And another and another and another: ‘Is obesity really a matter of choice?’ ‘What is the impact of McDonald’s on the environment?’ ‘Why do you give out free meal vouchers at soccer games?’ ‘Why don’t you use only fair-trade products’ ‘Why do you advertise sliced apples to children?’ ‘What preservatives do you put in nuggets?’ ‘Why do you continue to divide your free toys into “boys” and “girls” toys?’ ‘How much money does McDonald’s spend on corporate social responsibility compared with all other advertising?’ ‘Is there any faecal matter in the meat or the ice?’ ‘Do we even need McDonald’s at all?’

The corporation’s mode of communication – sending a corporate mascot into schools to deliver its public relations and brand image strategies is folded back on itself. The normalisation of schools as a site to promote a multinational fast food company is challenged and ‘made strange’. As Ozanne and Murray (1995) stated, for consumers to ‘become’ more critical or radical they must form ‘a different relationship to the marketplace in which they identify unquestioned assumptions’ (such as the assumption that McDonald’s ‘cares’ about students’ health and education) ‘and challenge the status of existing structures as natural’ (p. 522). Furthermore, the contradiction of a multinational fast food company ‘teaching’ students about health is intensified. Foucault (cited in Deleuze, 1999) argued, do not use ‘political action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought. Use political practice as an intensifier of thought’ (p. vii). Rather than merely opposing the power of corporations and consumer culture, pranking counter-exploits the power relations, placing the assemblage under increased tension and making it more susceptible to fracture.

However, it must be made clear that this, or any, prank does not necessarily constitute critical pedagogy. As Kinchloe (2008) explains, ‘Teaching a critical pedagogy involves more than learning a few pedagogical techniques’ (p. 8). It is therefore essential for critical pedagogues ‘to appreciate a variety of perspectives on the way knowledge is produced and deployed’, to ‘work hard to gain insight from various cultures and knowledge producers’ (e.g. youth culture, advertisements, state curricula, corporate-produced educational resources) and ‘to push the boundaries of knowledge, to go to new epistemological places, and to employ the insights gained for the larger social good’ (Kinchloe, 2008: 9). In this way, critical practitioners who employ pranking as a tactic of critical pedagogy need to also have an in-depth understanding of how diverse knowledge is produced (e.g. by experts, corporations, youth culture, marginalised groups), but also a range of other complex forms of power and politics, such as the political structure of a school or classroom (which may include different curricula, policies, teaching practices); public pedagogies outside of school (e.g. TV, radio, Internet, music, gaming); and the intersection of gender, sexuality, race, class, ability and others. Of course, this is not a simple or straightforward process. It is, however, a challenge for teachers and students ‘to dive into this complex domain of knowledge and knowing and social action it requires’ (Kinchloe, 2008: 9).

The small example of pranking Ronald McDonald demonstrates a tactic that could be effectively used in a broader critical pedagogy of consumption. However, if a teacher simply decided to spoon-feed students with questions to ask Ronald, this is likely to act as yet another technocratic means to maintain the status quo. In order to ensure that culture jamming ‘works’, a critical pedagogue would engage students in numerous learning opportunities underpinned by key tenets of critical pedagogy. The teacher may have supported students to pose problems and generate a variety of themes that are important to them in their everyday lives (e.g. the impact of fast food production on local and global environments and communities); enabled students to conduct their own research and critically analyse evidence that related to the well-being of themselves and others (e.g. animal welfare, pollution, climate change, nutrition, advertising); developed students’ interest, excitement, commitment and love for learning; and fuelled their desire to address any perceived injustices by taking social action (see Kinchloe, 2008). In this way, pranking could be a useful pedagogical tool that helps students understand the complexities of consumerism and consumption, how it may shape their knowledge of health, self and others, as well as to resist the potentially dangerous effects of corporate power. Critical pedagogy has the difficult task of balancing the need to develop students’ intellect with the need for transformative social change.

Détournement: re-assembling pedagogies of consumption

Détournement is a process of ‘mining’ text from mainstream consumer culture, appropriating these texts and then transforming them in order to ‘turn culture back on itself’ (Delaure and Fink, 2017b: 13). First used by Situationist International – a collective of radical intellectuals, political theorists and avant-garde artists in the late 1950s to early 1970s – détournement roughly translates as misappropriation, subversion, hijacking or detour (Harold, 2007). By (mis)appropriating existing materials, such as a billboard, a poster or a television advertisement, the aim is to revert or subvert the meaning – a ‘subvertisement’ (see Serazio, 2017). The point of this type of ‘deceptive’ détournement (Debord and Wolman, 1956) is to not simply challenge a particular branded product or corporation, but to spark critical reflection of consumer culture – and capitalism – more generally (Harold, 2007).

So what might this look like as a critical pedagogy of ‘healthy’ consumption? One possibility is enabling students to target and subvert the actual ‘healthy lifestyle’ resources and curricula that corporations provide to schools. This could prove to be particularly effective when appropriating the ‘official’ plans to govern (e.g. promoting health, fighting obesity, being a responsible corporate citizen) and then making the hidden interests of the corporation (i.e. to defer attention from less agreeable practices, improve public relations, increase brand trust and loyalty, and profit), visible. A useful participatory means to rework commercially driven messaging in schools is a form of ‘invitational culture jamming’ (Lambert-Beatty, 2010), such as the use of speech bubbles. The Bubble Project (www.thebubbleproject.com), founded by Ji Lee, aims to transform ‘corporate monologues’ and the corporate assault on public spaces by opening up public dialogue. Anyone can download, print then stick blank paper speech bubbles onto public advertisements, creating a space for the public to turn into culture jammers and challenge the naturalisation of advertising in everyday spaces.

By way of example, a teacher in New Zealand may be working with class that includes a number of indigenous Māori students. The teacher, enacting critical pedagogical strategies, is working with students to help them understand the complex ways that power works to produce certain knowledges about health as being ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, as well as the impact these knowledges have on their own and others’ health and well-being. Given that Western views of health tend to privilege biomedical science, individualism and the non-fat body, and that these views also dominate public health imperatives within and beyond the school, the students critically examine how corporatised ‘health education’ programmes may work to colonise indigenous knowledge and act as an element of corporeal colonisation (Hokowhitu, 2014). The students are supported to critically analyse the health resources provided to them through various corporate philanthropy and corporate social responsibility strategies (for a critique of these strategies, see Powell, 2018), and notice that there is an overwhelming focus on eating, exercise and body weight as the main indicators of health and well, as attempts to promote certain corporations as healthy and caring. The unidimensional focus on tinana (physical dimension of well-being) in the resources is perceived by the students as being in tension with how they understand and practice health, that other vital elements of health, such as wairua (spiritual), hinengaro (mental and emotional), whānau (close and wider family), te whenua (the land, identity and belonging), te reo (language), te taiao (the environment) and whanaungatanga (extended family and relationships) are ignored, if not subjugated (for further details on Māori understandings of health, see Cram et al., 2003; Durie, 2004). Further class discussions and student investigations reveal the complexities of health. The teacher and students develop an increased awareness of – and frustration with – a range of powerful political, social, cultural, historical, economic and environmental forces that shape already marginalised people’s ability to ‘be healthy’, including stealthy advertising practices, food insecurity, the destruction of the environment and exploitation of workers.

One strategy to help inform a critical pedagogy of consumption could be the culture jamming practice of detournement, in this case, the simple act of teachers and students sticking speech bubbles to the corporate-friendly resources ‘gifted’ to their school. For instance, Nestlé New Zealand produced and promoted a health resource called ‘Be Healthy, Be Active’. Although Nestlé New Zealand (2011) claims that ‘The content of the programme is not commercial in nature’, some of the students notice that resources have Nestlé-branded products placed within them (see Powell, 2015). This form of product placement and branding appears to contradict one of the central assurances of Nestlé’s Healthy Kids Global Programme: ‘NO product branding’ (Nestlé, 2017). Students could place speech bubbles next to images of active children, or where teachers are informed that although students’ eating ‘might be an issue related to money or access to food …. The focus should be about making the student responsible for their learning and actions’ (Nestlé New Zealand, 2011: 16, my emphasis). Then other students (or teachers) could add their own text to the speech bubbles, such as: ‘Ignore poverty, just be more responsible!’, ‘How does this relate to my wairua?’, ‘Be active: Stop Nestlé using palm oil’; ‘Here’s another issue relating to money and access – Nestlé making billions from bottling water it pays almost nothing for’; or ‘This is commercial in nature!’.

There are, of course, a plethora of other ways that teachers and students may rework advertising and marketing messages in schools and the wider community. Students could hijack hashtags (see Delaure and Fink, 2017b), for instance, by sabotaging the #NestléneedsYOUth (a hashtag designed to promote a Nestlé’ initiative to assist young people to leave school and get into work), providing links to Amnesty International’s (2016) report that connects the business practices of Nestlé (and other corporations) to child labour rights abuses on palm oil plantations in Indonesia. Students could create their own online games that mimic corporate games that attempt to responsibilise students for their (ill)health and (un)healthy choices (see, for example, www.healthyactivekids.com.au). Or they could create new voiceovers for television/online advertisements that attempt to promote The Coca-Cola Company as ‘healthy’, such as the YouTube subvertisement: The Honest Coca-Cola Obesity Commercial (Pemberton, 2013).

By employing the notion of assemblage, we are able to see that government is neither the sole preserve of an overarching monolithic state nor an oppressive corporation. It involves the interweaving of rationalities, technologies, subjectivities, discourses, truths and knowledges, albeit ‘officially’ conceived by a number of organisations and individuals with the will to constrain, configure and direct subjects’ thoughts, habits, aspirations and beliefs. In the case of school-based anti-obesity/healthy lifestyles education programmes, a multiplicity of public, private and voluntary sector organisations and actors (including schools, teachers and students) are assembled together in the attempt to regulate the lives of students and adults ‘at a distance’. Indeed, what defines contemporary power relations is that they tend to not act directly on others, but ‘upon their actions: an action upon an action, on existing actions or those which may arise in the present or the future’ (Foucault, 1982: 789).

To be able to re-assemble the governmental assemblage – the corporate education assemblage – students and teachers must critically examine and challenge the relations of power between the governors and the governed. Li (2007b) describes re-assembling as a key practice for ‘grafting on new elements and reworking old ones; deploying existing discourses to new ends; transposing the meanings of key terms’ (p. 265). While this practice of assemblage was positioned by Li as a way of demonstrating how the assemblage congeals and coheres, it is also a practice that provides teachers with an opening to re-assemble corporate education in ways that meet students’ needs and interests, both in terms of their intellect and desire to create social change. By working alongside students to (sometimes literally) graft certain discourses to the corporate education assemblage, the corporate-friendly resources become abnormal, the ultimate end to these forms of stealthy advertising is sabotaged, and the relay points that hold the corporate education assemblage together are placed under significant stress and strain.

Conclusion: culture jamming the anti-politics machine

Across the globe, there continues to be multiple corporate assaults on schools and on childhood in an attempt to govern students to become ‘healthy little consumers’ (Powell, 2016). If teachers simply – uncritically – use the various corporate-produced programmes to teach students about health (or, for that matter, any issue), then important political questions relating to corporations, advertising, students, health and education are reposed ‘as matters of technique; closing down debate about how and what to govern and the distributive effects of particular arrangements by reference to expertise; encouraging citizens to engage in debate while limiting the agenda’ (Li, 2007b: 265). Ferguson (1994) described this as ‘the anti-politics machine’, where solutions to wicked problems fall within the repertoire and expertise of the organisations with the most to gain (and the most to lose) from any challenges to the status quo.

The anti-politics machine can be seen by the ways that powerful private sector players now have a key role in shaping the ‘problem of’ and ‘solutions to’ children’s (fat) bodies, (un)healthy lifestyles and education in schools. Through the practice of anti-politics, the school-based solutions to children’s ‘unhealthy’ thoughts, bodies and lifestyles tend to exclude policies and politics that contribute to childhood inequalities, such as the privatisation of education, the continued self-regulation of the advertising industry or the influence of multinational corporations on global and national public health policies. Anti-politics governs teachers, principals, CEOs and students to ‘exclude the structure of political-economic relations from the diagnoses and prescriptions’ (Li, 2007c: 7) about health, education and marketing. Any potential debate about problematic politics and policies is shut down by the private sector and their corporate programmes, silencing discussions about, and challenges to, dominant discourses of health, the place of corporations ‘teaching’ students in schools, and the broader forces that shape students’ health and education, such as poverty, taxation or regulatory controls. The anti-politics machine attempts to restrict debate about how to govern, who to govern and what to govern.

Positioning culture jamming as a counter-political device opens up opportunities to ‘unsettle’ (Youdell, 2011) or ‘convert’ the assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). As Li (2007c) reminds us, the use of expertise to render problems technical and anti-political ‘is not a secure accomplishment’, but an on-going project: ‘Questions that experts exclude, misrecognize, or attempt to contain do not go away’ (p. 10). With this in mind, culture jamming acts as a pedagogical strategy to ensure these questions remain; to discover how to make these questions audible, visible and ‘teachable’; to understand how teachers may challenge – and encourage their students to critique – this corporate ‘brand’ of health and education. This is a new brand of counter-politics (see Youdell, 2011).

Within a school and classroom context, culture jamming has the propensity to become a ‘powerful pedagogy through the ways in which it seeks to foster participatory cultural production, engages with the learner and the “teacher” corporeally, and aims to foster the creation of a community politic’ (Sandlin and Milam, 2008: 332). Through culture jamming, teachers and students are able to create the conditions that enable challenges to expert diagnoses and dominant discourses and make deliberate attempts to destabilise and covert the assemblage. These are challenges that the authorities cannot necessarily or easily contain, control or close. As Foucault (1984) stated, power is productive, able to be ‘exercised from innumerable points’ and is not necessarily hierarchical, to be imposed on populations and individuals from ‘above’ (p. 94). However, further research still needs to be conducted to critically examine how teachers actually use techniques gleamed from culture jamming to create new ‘truths’, take critical action and engage in other forms of counter-politics.

Although corporatised pedagogies are ‘intimately connected with commodified consumer culture and therefore [represent] a site for potential corporate exploitation of youth identities’ (Vander Schee and Boyles, 2010: 17), teachers and students can counter-exploit corporate programmes ‘as object lessons for students’ critical analysis’ (Boyles, 2005: 218–219). By supporting schools to enact culture jamming as a critical pedagogy of consumption, students and teachers could be empowered to recognise the complexities of health, obesity and the ‘logic’ of marketing and consumption. Students would not be cajoled into merely learning, rehearsing and regurgitating corporate messages about health, where the only route to good health is through taking more responsibility to make the ‘correct’ consumer choices. Instead, teachers and students would question why some of the wealthiest corporations are promoting a corporatised version of health to students in schools. They may ask how these stealthy forms of marketing affect the health, well-being and lives of students all over the world. And teachers and can discuss, debate and take critical, collective action and re-brand health and education in ways that is relevant to their everyday lives.