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Can entertainment challenge divisive ideologies? Can we use theater, film, games, novels, and stories disarm the ideologies of fear?
Ideological Battlegrounds: Entertainment to Disarm Divisive Propaganda introduces and develops Ideologically Challenging Entertainment (ICE) to challenge "us versus them" narratives. ICE counters polarizing perspectives by embracing multiple valid viewpoints without losing sight of facts. Additionally, this book explores the first ICE production, Two Merchants, The Merchant of Venice adapted to challenge ideologies related to the Arab-Israeli Conflict. A mixed-methods study of audience responses to this production showed that a significant number of audience members reconsidered their views, not only about the Arab-Israeli conflict but also about ideological divisions that were more personally relevant.
Ideological Battlegrounds is unique, both in its conceptualization of entertainment as a means to address local and global conflicts and in its provision of evidence for the power of performance as a tool for confronting and influencing ideological change.This book offers a new approach to bridging dangerous ideological chasms that, without significant intervention, will only continue to worsen.
List of contents
Part I: The ICE Paradigm
Chapter 1: Ideology and Entertainment
Chapter 2: Language
Chapter 3: Ideology and Conflict
Chapter 4: The Moral Imagination
Chapter 5: Narrative Entertainment
Chapter 6: Complexity
Chapter 7: Ethics
Chapter 8: Build Relationships
Chapter 9: Represents and Challenges Situations and Identities
Chapter 10: Identities
Chapter 11: Imagined Identities
Chapter 12: Multiple Perspectives
Part II: Creating and Understanding Two Merchants
Chapter 13: Creating Two Merchants
Chapter 14: Characters
Chapter 15: Two Merchants Design and Technical Elements
Chapter 16: Results
Chapter 17: Understanding the Results
Chapter 18: ICE and the Future
Epilogue: Reflections of a Director/Researcher: Limits and Obstacles
About the author
By Dana L. Solomon
