Television Studies: Plural Contexts, Singular Ambitions?

Abstract

The study of television has steadily been establishing itself in the British university and college curriculum over the last 30 years, with an accelerated growth in the last decade. Drawing extensively on its prior identity as a research topic, television as a teaching topic has developed from a number of different points of growth, which have produced rather different versions of the scale, agenda and appropriate modes of inquiry, drawing on different literatures. So, for instance, one development has been out of the sociology of mass communications, particularly around issues of social control and influence but also the study of journalism. Another development has been out of English, with a cautious extension of interest from a base in drama, perhaps even reaching out to broader issues of popular entertainment. Film Studies, itself undergoing academic establishment across the same period, has often extended its boundaries to take in television, particularly television fiction, with varying degrees of emphasis (and, sometimes, suspicion). The broadly hybrid field of Cultural Studies, a seminal research focus in the 1970s and 1980s, becoming more strongly a pedagogic field in the 1990s, always worked with a conceptually rich address to the medium, the legacy of which continues. And of course, Media Studies, the essentially pedagogic hybrid that strengthened in the 1980s, in part emerging as a tighter and more vocationally-aware packaging of the Communication Studies that had developed from the early 1970s, had questions about television at its core. This account could be further elaborated by reference to the slighter but often quite significant inputs that emerged, for instance, from bases in political science, psychology and art history. Developed from such varied sites, with such a range of curricular identities (Placed alongside what else? In relation to what core theoretical frameworks?) and resourced by different literatures, with areas both of intensive cross-citation but also of mutual ignorance, the