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Dr. John Duncan appointed as a Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, OU Health Sciences Center, College of Medicine, where he teaches courses on the neurobiology of addiction, psychopharmacology of non-therapeutic drug use, and medical ethics. John is also an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary and Cultural Studies in the College of Liberal Studies t the University of Oklahoma. He has worked with CLS as a professor since 1997 and is the recipient of their 2003 “Kenneth E. Crook Distinguished Faculty Award,” for Excellence in Teaching and Meritorious Service to the University and the 2004 “Superior Teaching Award.”
In August of 2007 John retired after 27 years in law enforcement from the Oklahoma State Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Control as the Medical Director. Although he worked as an undercover agent for years, the past 13 years were as an agency administrator, where he was responsible for agency direction and vision and programmatic development, specifically in the medical communities. He is the author of much of Oklahoma drug law.
Additionally, John is a consultant for the US Department of State and has traveled throughout the former Soviet Eastern-Block countries helping develop approaches to address issues of ethics and governmental corruption. He has served on a White House Commission that developed model legislation, is currently a member of the Advisory Council for Alcohol and Drug Abuse for the Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services, has served as a member of the Governor’s Committee on Substance Abuse, was the Vice-Chairman of the Oklahoma Drug and Alcohol Policy Board, and is a member of the Oklahoma Epidemiological Workgroup. |
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Neuromarketing, Coercive Advertising, and Autonomy:
How Media Shapes our Thought and Behavior
May 18-22, 2009
at the University of Oklahoma
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We are creatures surviving within a media jungle. Dark and mysterious, it’s flora and fauna permeate every dimension of our being, articulate our horizon of choices, and expand out to the very extent of our grasp, both physically and imaginatively. It is where we encounter not only ourselves, but others within a complex and endless “image-laden” simulation that tells us what is real and what is not, good and bad, right and wrong. In today’s postmodern culture, we evaluate ourselves, buy products, wear clothes, embrace behavioral patterns, and live our lives according to media image. In the 1960’s, Marshall McLuhan, the famous media critic, observed that “electronic media are extensions of the human central nervous system.” If he is correct, those who control media have direct access to our minds, enabling them to control us by piquing desire, creating beliefs, and constructing model behavioral patterns. Contemporary neuroscience and sophisticated brain-imaging capabilities open new vistas for mind-control that designs and orchestrates consumer behavior. Media influence is overwhelming and drives the design of day-to-day behavioral therapies that envelope human possibility in consumer consciousness and structured patterns of activity and belief. Thought control has never been as possible as now, and, given that the media control is primarily by self-interest groups, moral questions about coercion, power, and influence as they relate to individual liberty are inevitable.
This is a course about the philosophy and psychology of media culture –about how it constitutes who we are. In this seminar, we will read about and discuss the nature of media and its influences upon the human mind, the nature of consumerism as the primary infrastructure which drives media images, and we will attempt to develop strategies for responsible thinking in this challenging environment.
Click here for syllabus
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The Class Reading List: (These books and articles supplied
by OSLEP)
- Consumer Culture and TV Programming: Critical Studies in Communication in the Cultural Industries, by Robin K. Andersen, 1995. Westview Press. ISBN: 0813315425
- Buy-ology: Truth and Lies about why we Buy, by Martin Lindstrom, 2008. Doubleday Publishing Group. ISBN: 978-0-385-52388-2
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