Media Ethnography Research Articles

Beyond the audience

This article considers the place of the ‘everyday’ and ‘practice’ in media ethnography and audience research in cultural and media studies as well as this tradition’s relationship to textual analysis. Drawing on an auto-ethnographic study of the author’s family, the research considers the way in which they made meanings with the preschool children’s television programme Teletubbies. The analysis considers how television viewing is regulated discursively across a number of different sites that constitute ‘parenthood’. In this respect, Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’ is developed to account for the ways in which the textual and discursive address articulates with, develops and reproduces the family’s childcare practices. The research also presents a method of analysis that explores the micro-example to ‘write singularity’ and suggests the benefits of exploring the ways in which meanings are made beyond the moment of reception. As such, a case is made for the need to move beyond conceptualizations of ‘the audience’.

Transnational dimensions of the digital divide among Salvadoran immigrants in the Washington DC metropolitan area

Abstract In this article I explore some dimensions of digital divide among Salvadoran immigrants in the Washington DC metropolitan area. Three main issues are addressed: the configuration of social networks, local axes of inequality and the transnational forms of appropriation and usage of the Internet and other Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Based on a media ethnography approach, the analysis combines structuration theory with diasporic media studies. It includes an examination of Internet communications, Salvadoran diasporic websites, the use of mobile phones and teleconferencing, and the transnational dimensions of the digital divide. The study's findings include the limited accessibility to the Internet and ICTs among Salvadoran immigrants, the importance of understanding the transnational dimensions of the digital divide (particularly in terms of generation) and the need to design and implement communication and technology policies in the Salvadoran transnational society.

Media, Biases, Environments

MEDIA ECOLOGY ASSOCIATION CONVENTION NEW YORK, NEW YORK JUNE 22-26, 2005 From June 22-26, 2005, scholars from around the globe gathered at Ford-ham University in New York City for the Association's sixth annual convention with the theme of Biases of Media. The expression Media Ecology is the term Neil Postman used in 1970 to designate the then newly formed PhD program at New York University. This program began to study media and communication technologies from a broad-based, multidisciplinary, and socio-historical perspective. Seven years ago, the Association (MEA) was founded to bring together the New York, Toronto, and St. Louis schools, along with others who shared an interest in the media ecology intellectual tradition. This year's convention--larger than ever, including the addition of an extra day of workshops and lectures--was a high-power event of scholarly presentations, engaging discussions, and artistic productions. Convention participants met and interacted with scholars, artists, and activists from the fields of anthropology, graphic arts, philosophy, physics, theology, sociology, media, and communications. They also attended a wide range of events spanning political, theological, economic, philosophical, scientific, and artistic dimensions. Featured presentations focused on the works of Walter J. Ong, Harold A. Innis, Postman, and of course, Marshall McLuhan. Among the featured speakers were noted scholars such as James Carey, Frank E. X. Dance, Paul Levinson, Eric McLuhan, Paul Soukup, and Sarah van den Berg. Smaller break-out sessions addressed a wide range of media ecology interests: the dimensions of faith and the sacred in communication, the study of visual communication, the relations between communication and culture, ancient and modern rhetoric, the relevance of general semantics, digital technologies, and the implications of new and emerging media. There were also more directed workshops including one on mime and McLuhan by Wayne Constantineau, a workshop on general semantics-based media literacy given by Gregg Hoffmann, and a media ethnography workshop by John Carey. Mary Ann Allison, this year's winner of the Harold A. Innis Award for Outstanding Thesis or Dissertation in the Field, offered a workshop on virtual community, Mark Dery led another on the sexual grotesque online, and Paul Guzzardo from the MediaARTS Alliance presented on art and surveillance. Patricia Keeler helped to demonstrate the labyrinth as sacred space. The convention was bookended by sessions on media authorship and creativity featuring such writers and video artists as Marleen Barr, Leslie Carroll, Michael Joyce, Andrew Postman, Meir Z. Ribalow, Douglas Rushkoff, Katie Salen, David Shenk, and Marina Zurkow. The conference also featured a few performative events, including a screening of this year's winner of the John Culkin award, a video documentary entitled A Conversation with Neil Postman (2003), and a wonderfully amusing live musical performance entitled Media Unplugged by Bill Bly and John McDaid. …

Research Beyond the Pale: Whiteness in Audience Studies and Media Ethnography

This article examines the role of whiteness as a structuring absence to ethnographic audience research. After ignoring whiteness altogether, media ethnographers have tended to essentialize whiteness within narratives of structural dominance or individual vulnerability. Using poststructuralist theories of language, whiteness, and hegemony, the author argues that these narratives for whiteness can be traced to experiences in the field that are shaped by historical and institutional forces outside of the field. Researchers both perform whiteness in the field, by claiming its privilege and hiding its visibility, and codify whiteness for others to identify outside the field. To illustrate, the author examines “narcissistic whiteness” and “defensive whiteness” as two articulations that are visible in her own field notes, interpreted through unifying narratives and rearticulated through an alternative reading of the notes.

Research Beyond the Pale: Whiteness in Audience Studies and Media Ethnography

Research Beyond the Pale: Whiteness in Audience Studies and Media Ethnography

BLAK SCREENS AND CULTURAL CITIZENSHIP

Research into how the “media worlds” of Indigenous feature filmmaking came into being in Australia is part of the broader project of the burgeoning work in the ethnography of media, which turns the analytic lens of anthropology on the production, circulation and consumption of media in a variety of locales, in this case asking what role these media play in the discursive evolution of new ways of conceptualizing diversity, contributing to the expanding (if contested) understandings of Australia as a culturally diverse nation, something that activist filmmakers have long understood. Their films contribute to that process not only by offering alternative accountings that undermine the fictions presented by unified national narratives as they play on screen; their work (in both senses of the word) also demonstrates that a textual analysis is not sufficient if it does not also take into account the “off screen” cultural and political labor of Aboriginal activists whose interventions have made this possible. More broadly, I underscore the importance of media and those who make it as critical to understanding how contemporary states and their citizens negotiate diversity.

Development of Local Radio in Southeast Turkey

This article examines the emergence of local radio in a rural southeastern Turkish city called Sanllurfa in the early 7990s following the end of the state's media monopoly on broadcasting. Informed by a media ethnography conducted there in 2001, this article discusses local debates over the content and quality of local radio and the influence of the state's official cultural policies on the programming decisions of local radio owners, managers, and DJs. This paper also illustrates Turkish young people's local and national radio preferences, their responses to local programming and on-air personalities, and the meaning of music and local radio in their lives.

The Ethnography of Media

Lila Abu-Lughod. Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 324 pp. Lila Abu-Lughod's Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt joins a steadily growing body of ethnographies on the effects of mass media. In this case the focus is mainly on how two communities of women—maids employed by wealthy, mostly foreign, patrons in Cairo, and rural villagers—respond to narrative genres. The book also seeks to draw the perspectives of television producers into the analysis. Dramas of Nationhood is an excellent ethnography, and should find a wide audience in several fields. Though the book is not without flaws, and perhaps some missed opportunities, it is undoubtedly a strong contribution to Middle East studies and anthropology, as well as gender and media studies. Media ethnographies—of the television medium in this case—must find ways to bring starkly disparate scales of social action into coherent focus. The political, economic, and social agendas that shape the social fields of television are equally difficult to reconcile in an ethnographic focus. To make an ethnography conform to the conventions of the genre it must give a convincing sense of "placing television more seamlessly within the sort of rich social and cultural context that the sustained anthropological fieldwork that has been our ideal since Bronislaw Malinowski is uniquely able to provide" (32). [End Page 819] But how does one aspire to such an ideal when the contexts range from offices of the powerful in the Egyptian Radio and Television Union, to the most intimate spaces of the home? What draws communities of viewers together? How to reconcile between an ideological agenda of an independent writer, the privately owned means of transforming the writer's vision into a television narrative, and the state-owned means of disseminating the narrative? What does one make of a standardized text broadcast to millions, and yet experienced by some viewers not as a discrete narrative event, but as part of what Raymond Williams once called an "irresponsible flow of images and feelings" (1975:92): irresponsible, and yet carefully planned for the purpose of assimilating "content" to marketing agendas? And how does one account for the audiences' apprehension of narratives through the marketed personalities of the actors rather than through the writers' intentions? The comforting frameworks of conventional ethnography are often inapplicable. Television consumers are difficult to define as a well-bounded community. Groups that are discrete by criteria other than their orientation to television (e.g. Muslims and Christians) might well share interpretive frameworks that transcend their communities. However one defines a group, its boundaries can extend frustratingly beyond a social scale accessible by the sort of personal interaction prized by anthropology. The relationship of audiences to producers further complicates the identification of a discrete community. In their own self-imposed terms many television producers seek to standardize identities or to impose standardized ideals, and yet audiences can simultaneously facilitate such homogenizing agendas and impede them, or indeed reinterpret them according to their own needs and experiences. Television is everywhere and nowhere at the same time, and hence maddening as an object of study. Yet Abu-Lughod argues convincingly that television has become, albeit unevenly and in locally specific ways, a crucial element in forming modern subjectivities. In so doing she is in agreement with many (perhaps most) anthropologists. And to a large extent the frustrations of defining the limits of a television community are generic to contemporary approaches to fieldwork and to debates over the usefulness of "culture" as a bounded concept. In terms of television, for most of the discipline the issue is now less the importance of the phenomenon than how to approach it. Abu-Lughod acknowledges the complexity of television as an ethnographic object, and seeks to negotiate it in a number of ways. One is to center the work on female informants who are marginal in various ways to a discursive modern nationalist ideal type that is...

International Communication, Ethnography, and the Challenge of Globalization

This article articulates media ethnography with international communication theory in the context of globalization. It explores the history and regional trajectories of media ethnography, as well as anthropology's epistemological and political issues of representation that have become relevant to media studies. The authors argue that rethinking the limits and potential of media ethnography to address cultural consumption also necessarily involves considering how ethnography can serve to engender a vision of international communication theory grounded in the practices of everyday life. This reformulation is crucial at a time when some media scholars celebrate difference via microassessments of postcolonial locales and the plurality of cultures without attempting to consider global structural concerns. In fact, the authors argue, if media ethnographies are rigorously developed, they can offer international communication theory the material to bridge the gap between meaning and structure without losing site of the complexity, context, and power imbalances inherent in processes of globalization.

Media worlds: anthropology on new terrain

List of Illustrations Preface Introduction I. Cultural Activism and Minority Claims 1. Screen Memories: Resignifying the Traditional in Indigenous Media Faye Ginsburg 2. Visual Media and the Primitivist Perplex: Colonial Fantasies, Indigenous Imagination, and Advocacy in North America Harald E.L. Prins 3. Representation, Politics, and Cultural Imagination in Indigenous Video: General Points and Kayapo Examples Terence Turner 4. Spectacles of Difference: Cultural Activism and the Mass Mediation of Tibet Meg McLagan II. The Cultural Politics of Nation-States 5. Egyptian Melodrama--Technology of the Modern Subject? Lila Abu-Lughod 6. Epic Contests: Television and Religious Identity in India Purnima Mankekar 7. The National Picture: Thai Media and Cultural Identity Annette Hamilton 8. Television, Time, and the National Imaginary in Belize Richard R. Wilk III. Transnational Circuits 9. Mass Media and Transnational Subjectivity in Shanghai: Notes on (Re)Cosmopolitanism in a Chinese Metropolis Mayfair Mei-hui Yang 10. A Marshall Plan of the Mind: The Political Economy of a Kazakh Soap Opera Ruth Mandel 11. Mapping Hmong Media in Diasporic Space Louisa Schein IV. The Social Sites of Production 12. Putting American Public Television Documentary in Its Places Barry Dornfeld 13. Culture in the Ad World: Producing the Latin Look Arlene Davila 14. And Yet My Heart Is Still Indian: The Bombay Film Industry and the (H)Indianization of Hollywood Tejaswini Ganti 15. Arrival Scenes: Complicity and Media Ethnography in the Bolivian Public Sphere Jeff D. Himpele V. The Social Life of Technology 16. The Materiality of Cinema Theaters in Northern Nigeria Brian Larkin 17. Mobile Machines and Fluid Audiences: Rethinking Reception through Zambian Radio Culture Debra Spitulnik 18. The Indian Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Or, What Happens When Peasants Get Hold of Images Christopher Pinney 19. Live or Dead? Televising Theater in Bali Mark Hobart 20. A Room with a Voice: Mediation and Mediumship in Thailand's Information Age Rosalind C. Morris Contributors Index

Feminist Media Ethnography in India: Exploring Power, Gender, and Culture in the Field

This article is a self-reflexive account of one postcolonial feminist media scholar’s research among young middle-class women in urban India who read Western romance fiction. Urging feminist scholars to pay attention to the politics of representation of audiences in media studies, the article explores power imbalances in the field that arise due to social constructions of gender, ethnic, class, and sexual identities. The article reflects on failures, successes, and dilemmas experienced during the research process to show that feminist media ethnographies are embedded within discourses of power. By examining the multiple positionalities occupied by the researcher in relation to people encountered in the field, this account challenges binary distinctions between categories such as Self/Other, native/Westerner, and insider/outsider. In concluding, the article underscores the implications of research by non-Western feminist scholars in their own cultures for postcolonial feminist ethnography, feminist media ethnographies, and for media reception research on globalization in the cultural studies tradition.

When the Camera Won't Focus: Tensions in Media Ethnography

(2001). When the Camera Won't Focus: Tensions in Media Ethnography. Feminist Media Studies: Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 307-322.

Positioning Media Ethnography at Disciplinary Intersections

Positioning Media Ethnography at Disciplinary Intersections. Purnima Mankekar. Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. 429 pp.

Film Swapping in the Public Sphere: Youth Audiences and Alternative Cultural Publicities

The article discusses questions concerning the cultural public sphere in relation to empirical material from a media ethnography of young menąs use of extremely violent action and horror films on video, and how the young men’s cultural practices, including media reception and film swapping, relates to their cultural production in the form of fanzines and amateur video films. The aim is to analyse this practice of film swapping, fanzine writing and amateur video making, in terms of cultural publicness, in order to shed light on those micro processes of communication that result in the formation of public spheres of various kinds. In the first part of the article some theoretical implications of the concepts cultural and political public spheres are discussed. Then follows a discussion on the internal communicative patterns within this alternative cultural public sphere, organised informally around fanzines and amateur video festivals. The dynamic relation between this alternative public sphere and other public formations, alternative as well as dominating or bourgeois, is then dealt with, and the different approaches among the various individuals is discussed. This is then followed by a discussion on the alternative cultural public’s relation to the market and state systems. Lastly, some general conclusions are drawn, covering the need to analytically separate cultural and political public spheres in order not to forget the task of the cultural public in mediating between market system and lifeworld, and thus not to dismiss the political implications of the cultural.

Media Cultural Studies' Uncomfortable Embrace of Ethnography

This article explores ethnography's place in media cultural studies by examining obstacles that have frustrated ethnographic practice. The author argues that although audience ethnographies developed in cultural studies have nourished theory, most disparage fieldwork in favor of more abstract theoretical exercises. Resistance studies, postmodernism, and anthropology's encounter with post-structuralism are examined in relation to this tendency in cultural studies. Conclusions are drawn that some ethnographers already offer new methodological approaches that could provide a point of departure for the reinvestment in media ethnography. However, to make these approaches useful, audience ethnographers must reconsider the heuristic value of doing fieldwork. Moreover, new ethnographies could help contextualize and strengthen the more abstract theorizing of cultural studies by providing links and revealing tensions between private appropriations and structural determinations.

Reading the Media and Myself: Experiences in Critical Media Literacy with Young Arab-American Women

Previous articleNext article No AccessReading the Media and Myself: Experiences in Critical Media Literacy with Young Arab-American WomenJennifer Bing-Canar, and Mary ZerkelJennifer Bing-Canar Search for more articles by this author , and Mary Zerkel Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 23, Number 3Spring, 1998Feminisms and Youth Cultures Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/495286 Views: 18Total views on this site Citations: 16Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1998 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: Learning Disciplinary Knowledge, (Apr 2022): 465–578.https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108888295.028Erica Rosenfeld Halverson, Kimberly M. Sheridan Arts Education and the Learning Sciences, (Apr 2022): 560–578.https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108888295.034Jiwon Yoon Media Literacy with New Immigrants, (May 2019): 1–6.https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118978238.ieml0128Damiana Gibbons Pyles A social semiotic mapping of voice in youth media: the pitch in youth video production, Learning, Media and Technology 42, no.11 (Nov 2015): 8–27.https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2016.1095209Negin Dahya Critical perspectives on youth digital media production: ‘voice’ and representation in educational contexts, Learning, Media and Technology 42, no.11 (Feb 2016): 100–111.https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2016.1141785Erica Rosenfeld Halverson, Kimberly M. Sheridan Arts Education and the Learning Sciences, (Sep 2014): 626–646.https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139519526.037Cindy Cruz LGBTQ Youth of Color Video Making as Radical Curriculum: A Brother Mourning His Brother and a Theory in the Flesh, Curriculum Inquiry 43, no.44 (Jan 2015): 441–460.https://doi.org/10.1111/curi.12022Kate Pahl My Family, My Story: Representing Identities in Time and Space through Digital Storytelling, Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education 113, no.1313 (Apr 2011): 17–39.https://doi.org/10.1177/016146811111301302Erica Rosenfeld Halverson Film as Identity Exploration: A Multimodal Analysis of Youth-Produced Films, Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education 112, no.99 (Sep 2010): 2352–2378.https://doi.org/10.1177/016146811011200903Erica Rosenfeld Halverson, Rebecca Lowenhaupt, Damiana Gibbons, Michelle Bass Conceptualizing Identity in Youth Media Arts Organizations: A Comparative Case Study, E-Learning and Digital Media 6, no.11 (Jan 2009): 23–42.https://doi.org/10.2304/elea.2009.6.1.23Ahlam Muhtaseb, Lawrence R. Frey Arab Americans’ Motives for Using the Internet as a Functional Media Alternative and Their Perceptions of U.S. Public Opinion, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13, no.33 (Apr 2008): 618–657.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2008.00413.xDeAnne K. Hilfinger Messias, Louise B. Jennings, M. Elizabeth Fore, Kerry McLoughlin, Deborah Parra‐Medina Societal images of youth: representations and interpretations by youth actively engaged in their communities, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 21, no.22 (Mar 2008): 159–178.https://doi.org/10.1080/09518390701217466Lucila Vargas Transnational Media Literacy, Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences 28, no.22 (May 2006): 267–285.https://doi.org/10.1177/0739986305285823Vicki Mayer When the Camera Won't Focus: Tensions in Media Ethnography, Feminist Media Studies 1, no.33 (Jan 2001): 307–322.https://doi.org/10.1080/14680770120088918Vicki Mayer Capturing cultural identity/creating community, International Journal of Cultural Studies 3, no.11 (Jul 2016): 57–78.https://doi.org/10.1177/136787790000300104Allison Sterling Henward Ariel and Buzz Lightyear are Coming to School, (): 96–111.https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-61350-317-1.ch005

Media ethnography in virtual space: Strategies, limits, and possibilities

For more than twenty years, ethnography has been used to study audience interpretation and social action. With the advent of the Internet, this approach is now being applied to the cultural practices of computer‐mediated communication. This article appraises some strategies for studying a new cultural arena in which aspects of embodiment and identity differ significantly from traditional media reception. Four areas of ethnographic engagement with virtual contexts are examined: the nature and boundaries of virtual community, the social presence of participation, social strategies of entry and membership, and technical utilities of data generation. Ethical issues and future possibilities for research are also discussed.

Media Ethnography - An Other Story?

Depuis quelques annees ethnographie est devenu un terme a la mode dans le domaine des etudes de medias qualitatives. L'auteur de cet article retrace tout d'abord l'historique de son developpement, puis il met en evidence l'heritage feminin dans les etudes de medias, et definit enfin le concept ethnographie des medias. Une presentation des etudes ethnographiques de medias dans les pays scandinaves vient clore cet article.