Room 611: Wednesday, June 18. 2025

Today's schedule is BADC

B Block Criminology - Cindy, Casey, and Caylee Anthony...I want you to try to make sense of the crime (Casey and Caylee Anthony), the media's coverage of the crime (particularly Nancy Grace), feminist perspectives on criminology, the bad mother motif, Schadenfreude, and the way fictional crime media represented the story (Law & Order: Special Victim's Unit).

Remember this crime is relevant in that it represents a massive shift in what crimes are reported, spectacle culture and what is considered "newsworthy", how crime reporting changed with different media platforms, the polarization of society connected to injustice and outrage. Nancy Grace helped to shape a decade’s worth of suspected murderers and rapists in the public imagination, stressing their cruelty and alien coldness, tapping into a cultural enthusiasm for righteous witch hunts and armchair convictions (Lots more on this tomorrow and then next week with the documentary "15 Minutes of Shame")

Today we'll conclude with part 3 of the retrospective 2017 Investigation Discovery documentary Casey Anthony: An American Murder Mystery

And after watching some media coverage of the media coverage tomorrow (*cough cough Nancy Grace)...you'll have a massive wrap up question to answer for me:

Why do you think True Crime is such a popular content area/genre in mass media and what are the potential effects of consuming it? Are the voyeurisms of consuming the True Crime genre of media an example of curiosity or exploitation? Regardless of your opinion of Casey Anthony is it possible for her to escape the negative label of "Tot Mom" and will she ever be able to avoid the horrible mother image presented by CNN and Nancy Grace? Use examples from the Casey Anthony trial to explain your ideas. How does the concept of Schadenfreude and Cancel Culture apply to the Casey Anthony trial? Did the media shame, call out, or try to cancel Casey Anthony? How would low self-esteem make someone more likely to seek out schadenfreude-filled crime media? Is Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat) good or bad for criminal trials and the news/media coverage of them? Use examples from the Casey Anthony trial and from either Monica Lewinsky's story or those in the 15 Minutes of Shame video (Matt Colvin, Emmanuel Cafferty, or Laura Krolczyk) to explain your ideas

You should consider the following when answering your question:

Think about who reports information and how that information is used.
Think about your privacy and how you manage your on-line presence.
Think about how social media can be introduced as evidence at trials.
Think about how social media can be used for reporting during trials.
Do viewer/user comments about media coverage of a trial provide valuable feedback for discussion or not? Why?
Is public shaming protected by the right to free speech or is this a case where our old norms and principles have simply been exposed as unfit for a new era?

Remember, you'll get links to help on both Thursday and Friday and

Moms Love True Crime, But... Why?

Entertainment and Voyeurism: Our Obsession with True Crime, and the Lines We're Eager to Blur

And from Vice

While it may seem that cancel culture and call out culture align with the same purpose, both concepts differ in resolution. Call out culture has more of a direct focus on education and progress, provided the person being ‘called out’ has the desire to grow and learn from their wrongdoings or mistakes. Anyone can be called out, and by doing so, anyone can learn to educate themselves and/or change their perspective for the better. Cancel culture aims to rid the person on the receiving end of any kind of redemption. So while the two are similar, keep in mind that they both come to different conclusions. And if you’re going to cancel or call someone out, remember what you want from it.

And from Vox

All along, debate about cancel culture has obscured its roots in a quest to attain some form of meaningful accountability for public figures who are typically answerable to no one. But after centuries of ideological debate turning over questions of free speech, censorship, and, in recent decades, “political correctness,” it was perhaps inevitable that the mainstreaming of cancel culture would obscure the original concerns that canceling was meant to address. Now it’s yet another hyperbolic phase of the larger culture war. The core concern of cancel culture — accountability — remains as crucial a topic as ever. But increasingly, the cancel culture debate has become about how we communicate within a binary, right versus wrong framework. And a central question is not whether we can hold one another accountable, but how we can ever forgive.

Casey Anthony makes bombshell claims about daughter’s death in first ever on-camera interview

Nancy Grace Slams Peacock Casey Anthony Series

A Block Physical Geography - Today you have your quiz on Weather, Climate, and Climate Change. It's just 25 multiple selection questions with a weather forecast and you may use your note packages to help.

After, we look at the ethics associated with resource use focusing on the four ethical views on resource use (economic/exploitation; preservationist; balanced-multiple use; and ecological or sustainable), specifically focusing on water.

We'll talk about over-consumption and unsustainable resource use practices through the “Tragedy of the Commons”, popularized by Garret Hardin, in terms of resource use and management, using the example of water consumption connected to the Aral Sea. From National Geographic:

Actually a freshwater lake, the Aral Sea once had a surface area of 26,000 square miles (67,300 square kilometers). It had long been ringed with prosperous towns and supported a lucrative muskrat pelt industry and thriving fishery, providing 40,000 jobs and supplying the Soviet Union with a sixth of its fish catch...The Aral Sea was fed by two of Central Asia's mightiest rivers, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya. But in the 1960s, Soviet engineers decided to make the vast steppes bloom. They built an enormous irrigation network, including 20,000 miles of canals, 45 dams, and more than 80 reservoirs, all to irrigate sprawling fields of cotton and wheat in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. In the decades that followed, the Aral Sea was reduced to a handful of small lakes, with a combined volume that was one-tenth the original lake's size and that had much higher salinity, due to all the evaporation. As a result of the drying over the past decades, millions of fish died, coastlines receded miles from towns, and those few people who remained were plagued by dust storms that contained the toxic residue of industrial agriculture and weapons testing in the area.