Cultural Studies Research Research Articles

‘What is the meaning of a safety-pin?’ Critical literacies and the ethnographic turn in contemporary art

In this contribution we address the concept of critical literacies by analyzing how symbolic representations within subcultures can be understood as an engagement with specific literacy practices. For some time now, cultural studies researchers with an interest in literacy have depended upon ethnographic methods to document how members of subcultural communities mobilize literacy practices to achieve critical ends. But the extent to which ethnography actually grants researchers access to subcultural perspectives on literacy has come into question. In this article, we aim to problematize and thematize the ethnographic perspective on literacy in general – and subculture as a situated literacy practice in particular – by critically assessing contemporary art practices that focus on the representation of subcultural identities. We therefore specifically look at artwork by Nikki S. Lee, who focuses on subcultures in her work through ‘going native performances’.

Reassessing Food Safety, Risk and Globalization in China and Japan

In recent years, the number of food safety incidents in East Asia has led to increased concerns about threats to food safety in the region. Indeed, following the 2008 melamine scandal in China and the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant accident in Japan, these concerns are now at unprecedented levels. This article presents an overview of research in social and cultural anthropology, sociology and area studies on food safety and food sovereignty in China (excluding Taiwan) and Japan. One research area captures emerging research on consumer education initiatives and environmental networks that provide guidelines to food preparation skills and food choices. A second research area addresses providence and efforts of culinary heritage preservation that are linked to national identity building and revitalization, in particular in economically disadvantaged areas. As anthropologist Sidney Cheung has argued, recent trends in research on food have shifted from an analysis of food as a marker of social status towards environmental and health issues that are not linked to social status and have an impact on all consumers.

Men nurturing through food: Challenging gender dichotomies around domestic cooking

Sociological and cultural studies research suggests that men and women cook differently. However, this research rarely takes into account men's and women's different levels of responsibility for the practice and how this might affect cooking approaches. This study investigates this culinary gender dichotomy through the experiences of men with significant domestic cooking responsibilities. Using interviews, cooking observations, and meal diaries from 30 such men from Toronto, Canada, I examine the extent to which they drew on traditionally ‘masculine’ and traditionally ‘feminine’ approaches to food. While most men did draw on traditional masculinities, many of the same men also drew on traditional femininities. Further, I observed the most ‘feminine’ approaches among men with the heaviest responsibilities for feeding others, including men who, previous to taking on these roles, saw cooking in more masculine ways. The data illuminate how social roles and responsibilities, as they intersect with interactional positionings and identities, shape gendered cooking approaches.

Late Antique Iran and the Arabs: The Case of al-Hira

AbstractThis article reevaluates our evidence for the interaction of Arab and Iranian elements in the Arab frontier-state of al-Hira, a state in late antiquity, which can be seen as a paradigmatic “third space” of special cultural dynamics. First, it sums up our evidence about the political and commercial ties connecting the Lakhmid principality and the Sasanian Empire; next, it focuses on the possible agents of cultural exchange between the two; finally, we direct our attention to the cultural spheres themselves and the issue of where and how Iranian-Arab transculturation as a process can be detected in the Hiran context. The article argues for a cautious reassessment of the material in light of current research in cultural studies. This is significant in its wider historical perspective, as such a process might have prepared the path for later developments in Islamic times, when the apogee of Arab-Iranian interaction is supposed to have taken place, i.e., in Abbasid Iraq.

Successful Life in Eighteenth-Century Colonial Virginia: A Sampling of Death Notices in The Virginia Gazette

Researchers in contemporary and historical cultural studies have discovered the obituary genre as a valuable source of evidence on a number of levels. Over the last 15 years, some have examined death notices as cultural representations of gender; others have approached them as instruments of shaping collective/group memory. Obituaries have been critically investigated for specific cultural meanings and values: death, grief, virtue, work, and wealth.3 American cultural history has also benefited from the study of obituaries in a multitude of media forms; yet such works are few in general and virtually nonexistent for the American colonial period. The earliest obituary included by Gary L. Long in his study of the relationship between personal identities and social structure comes from the year 1856. Janice Hume, who wrote more generally about obituaries as reflection of changes in American culture, placed the lower time limit of her sample in the year 1818.5 The present foray into the world of obituaries, death notices and announcements in an American colonial newspaper has been inspired by the fine results

The active audience, again: Player-centric game studies and the problem of binarism

This article intervenes in video game studies’ recent turn to (and enthusiasm for) player-centered approaches to understanding video games’ social, cultural, political, and economic implications. Such approaches repudiate ostensibly formalist or ‘structural’ game studies and insist that analyses of gaming situations emphasize ways in which gaming subjects’ playful acts of appropriation or subversion allow those subjects to resist complete determination by game-structures and act ultimately as arbiters of a video game’s meaning, utility, or effectivity. The author demonstrates how player-centered discourses in video game studies participate in a rich history of ‘active audience’ research in media and cultural studies. Arguing that research on player practices does not completely escape the forms of reductionism it sets out to avoid, the author offers additional conceptual tools for engaging the complexity of contemporary gaming situations. The article concludes with a discussion of ways in which one such situation − gold farming − might be examined as an assemblage through an approach that responds to this complexity and avoids a particularly constraining model of agency inherent in player-centric game studies.

Twitter Archives and the Challenges of "Big Social Data" for Media and Communication Research

Twitter Archives and the Challenges of "Big Social Data" for Media and Communication Research

Cultural Studies and/of Economic Rights: Neglect and Promise

This article theorizes the historical non-relation between cultural studies and economic rights discourse, tracing it to ideal typical distinctions between economy and culture in early cultural studies; Karl Marx's influence on Left thought generally via his critique of bourgeois rights; and Foucauldian governmentalist treatments of rights as neoliberal technologies of control and treatments of economy as having no agency of its own but rather as an effect of governmentality. It then introduces a case-study conjunctural history of American economic rights as a history of present American citizenship and politics in order to demonstrate the historically contingent articulations of individual freedom, government, and economic relations, which are not easily explained by the Marxist or Foucauldian vocabularies. The conjunctural history provides cultural studies research with a new perspective for attention to radical democracy and critiques of neoliberal capitalist policies without surrendering the utility of rights to (neo)liberalism.

Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue

This paper explores the construction of identity in online communities and websites for social purposes, and its consequences in terms of how one’s online identity may be utilized to such an extent that one’s real-world identity is either enforced or eroded. It does so by investigating the very nature of Identify, coming predominantly from a cultural studies research and philosophical view, although it also cites some parallel findings in Information Systems (IS) research. In the Section Something Old, the author investigates the concept of identity in the real world, then investigates it in the online world in the Section Something New. Section Something Borrowed examines how an individual positions oneself including who one associates with and why one flags it so to others. And finally this paper looks at some consequences unfolding in our time (in Section: Something Blue), citing several pointed examples for illustration purposes, where values that have been migrated from the real world are amplified via the Internet, causing all sorts of actions and consequences both online and offline. These issues and actions revolve around control and disclosure of ones identity that has consequences upon reputation and trust, and how responsibility needs to be brought forward into how one: positions oneself, manages ones own identity, and acts appropriately in and beyond the Internet. Above all of these, the author concludes, is the responsibility of understanding the nature of identity itself.

Hanno Hardt

An internationally renowned scholar, Professor Hanno Hardt played a pivotal role in the development of critical media studies. His research in critical theory, labor history, and cultural studies i...

Eating Roo: Of Things That Become Food

The other GFC, the global food crisis, has brought a renewed public and academic attention to questions of what we eat, where it comes from, how much it costs, and whether it is sustainable. Diseases of over-eating mingle with starvation and, although globally disconnected, are often caused by malnutrition: the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples' health still comes down to colonial staples of white flour, white sugar, and white power (to coin the title of Tim Rowse's 1998 book). (1) Coinciding, in ways that are more than coincidental, with a growing awareness and at times panic about global warming and climate change, people are becoming attuned to how what we always deemed as edible (corn, soya) are being turned into non-edible things like bio-fuels. And as one of the most virulent forms of globalisation, there is a seemingly endless circulation of food scares about things we had thought were edible--chickens that carry flu, cows that turn mad, eggs that are bad. Studying food has never been so crucial, or so complex. Over the last several years, I have been working to bring together my previous research in feminist cultural studies--with a particular focus on subjectivities, practices and the materiality of culture--to bear on questions of food. What I am calling alimentary cultural studies of necessity studies the whole gamut of factors and feeling associated with the production and consumption of food. It must consider the places where food is produced, where it is eaten, how natural entities are transformed into commodities within a context of globalisation and local communities. In addition, questions of uneven distribution and inequalities are never far from the surface. As a project (2) it roams widely over different disciplines and areas of study: to name a few, I take from rural sociology, history, social anthropology, human and non-human geography -or what is called more-than-human geography--ethology, economics, and community development. Moving the study of food beyond the cultural makes intuitive sense, and is supported by a wealth of research; it also makes sense to put the cultural squarely back into agri-culture. As John Law and Annemarie Mol so beautifully put it, animals and humans have a long history of being coupled within what they call 'metabolic intimacy'. (3) Their analysis of the outbreak of pig foot and mouth disease in the UK in 2001 centres on what happened when the dictates of boiling pigswill were recklessly ignored. Pigs have long lived in close proximity with people--a fact rendered spectacular by porcine xeno-transplants. More prosaically the cottage pig was a common feature of many households where the pig would eat (what humans deemed) were the inedible remains of dinner. (4) Commonsense dictated that these remains were boiled before being fed to the pig, hence the term 'pigswill'. However greed and haste resulted in the case that they study, when a pig farm neglected to boil the industrial quantities of catering waste, and the pigs developed foot and mouth. The waste must have contained contaminated animal flesh, most likely cheap meat from countries in the South where foot and mouth is endemic. With the banning of feeding pigs with boiled swill, the industry turned to feeding them animal meal--made of corn and soya. So more waste of human meals is added to the overflowing landfills, and vast tracts of land pump out food that won't be fed to humans anywhere, let alone to those that produce it. The global state of eating gets ever more complicated--and sad. (5) Arguments such as Mol and Law's join a growing literature that attempts to cross many boundaries: the edible and non-edible, the North and the South, the industrial, the ethical, the structural, the governmental, the personal and the practical. As Emma Roe puts it: 'how do things become food? How do things become edible?' (6) Food, things that become edible or inedible, casts anew debates about the local and the global, and foreground 'disjuncture and difference in the global agricultural economy', and flag that 'one man's imagined food is another man's political poison' (to paraphrase Appadurai's 1990 influential argument on the imaginary within globalisation). …

Impact

Impact

Un]Comfortable in My Own Skin

This article offers a reflexive [re]discovery of my own Whiteness, my own Southern-ness, and my own masculinity through ethnographic engagement with the “New Sporting South”; reporting on the juxtaposition of my new [critical performance scholar] self onto the spaces and social relations once inhabited by my old [working class, parochial, “Southern”] self. Although this article is primarily a retrospective on my return to Southern sporting fields in Mississippi, Tennessee, and North Carolina, it is also a critical inspection of the performative politics of engaged cultural studies research on the body. For mine is a political project, bent on contextualizing, and thus problematizing, the seemingly banal nature of Southern sporting fixtures such as college football and stock car racing. The more time I spent in these spaces of the New Sporting South, “observing” the sport cultures from which I sprung, the better I was able to trace a series of ostensibly inescapable patterns of oppression: (a) the cultures of racism, sexism, and patriarchy are still highly active within these local sporting spectacles; (b) my White skin, Southern drawl, “hillbilly” vernacular, and masculine deportment allowed access to the most exclusive/divisive of these social spaces (whereas others might have been denied); (c) to prolong engagement with various groups, I was forced to “perform” my “old” Southern self (laughing at racist jokes, admiring Confederate-flag emblazoned garb, and so on); and (d) in an effort to create change (through critical interrogation of the sporting empirical), I was most often “read” as a [re]productive agent of these regressive cultural politics. To this end, I argue that any politically-“progressive” outcomes from this type of qualitative research must be weighed against the symbolic violence created therein.

Representations of (new) Black masculinity: A news-making case study

Representations of Black masculinity in popular culture remain a focal point of social science and cultural studies research. Yet, research shows that Black men are negatively portrayed in news stories. Therefore, when a series on Black men, conceived and carried out primarily by a Black journalistic team, was published in a national agenda-setting newspaper, The Washington Post, it was important to question if Black masculinity was represented in this same light or represented in other, more positive ways. The purpose of this research was to investigate whether the series succeeded in reshaping the image of Black men and to what extent it exhibited Jackson and Dangerfield’s five factors of Black masculine positionality. The study found that slightly more than 50 percent of the stories presented a counter-stereotype, showing complexity in Black men’s lives. However, some stories left Black men ‘voiceless on the sidelines’. The study illustrates the difficulties even a well-planned series can face when trying to break out of conventional reporting tendencies.

CONVERGENCE CULTURE AND THE LEGACY OF FEMINIST CULTURAL STUDIES

This essay elaborates upon some of the feminist legacies underwriting the work of Henry Jenkins, particularly the 2006 book, Convergence Culture, to develop a set of priorities for media and Cultural Studies research following in its wake. Focusing on critical uses of the term ‘subculture’, and its convenient fit with Internet scholarship to date, and moving to an analysis of the notion of ‘participatory culture’, we question how easily the practices of online media consumption can be separated from the wider structuring conditions of everyday life. Our recent research on fan communities and information workers highlights the labour and leisure conditions contributing to the experience of online community, fan-based or otherwise. These contrasting examples show the many non-voluntary dimensions that accompany participation in ‘convergence culture’, and how these are experienced in specific ways. The gendered intimacy of fan fiction communities and the coercive nature of technologically mediated white collar employment each reveal the stakes involved in allowing the practices of a minority to stand as the optimistic vision of the imminent media landscape.

(Young) Men behaving badly: dangerous masculinities and risk of drowning in aquatic leisure activities

Participation in aquatic leisure and recreation activities is generally perceived as a positive indicator of a healthy lifestyle, yet it can have fatal consequences, especially for males. This paper uses the notion of ‘dangerous masculinities’ to help explain heightened risk of drowning among young men during their aquatic leisure activity. The paper draws on data obtained from several New Zealand studies based on surveys (for example, the New Zealand Youth Water Safety Survey 2003). While use of such evidence in sociological analysis is unusual, its value in providing baseline information on a widespread societal problem is not intrinsically implausible in cultural studies research. Evidence of practices and beliefs that put young men at greater risk during aquatic activity abounds. For example, male youth were twice as likely as female youth to dive headfirst into an unknown depth of water (males 13%, females 6%) and swim outside a patrolled area at a surf beach (males 24%, females 12%). Few previous studies have looked at aquatic leisure as a gendered activity even though aquatic leisure is a primary site for masculinization because of its inherent risk taking, its hazards and dangers, and its often very public challenge to one's physicality. By using aquatic leisure activity as an empirical site for exploring the connections between dominant versions of what it means to be male and its potential impact on male drowning, it is hoped that those charged with researching leisure and recreation activities and with engaging in the prevention of drowning will be better informed.

The new media environment: an introduction

Acknowledgements. 1. Introduction: Modern Life Is a Media Experience. A Tale of Two Hurricanes. What Is a Media Environment? The Importance of Changing Media Environments. The electronic media. Media in the Twenty-First Century: What Has Changed? The age of the Internet. Conclusion 2. Ownership and Control in the New Media Environment. Patterns of Media Ownership and Control. Ownership and Control of the Media: Assumptions andRealities. Alternative models of media ownership. Who owns the media? Ownership and control in a global context. Does It Matter? The Consequences of Concentration and Conglomeration. The argument for market-driven media. The argument against market-driven media. What this means today. Conclusion. 3. Media and Democracy. Introduction. Changing Media Environments and Changing DemocraticPolitics. Why nervous liberals are still with us: The enduring problem ofpropaganda. John Dewey and the reconstruction of media and democraticpolitics. Empirical research: How do media actually affect citizens? Television and the Age of Broadcast News . Politics in the New Media Environment. Conclusion. 4. Studying Popular Culture: Texts, Reception, and CulturalStudies. Introduction: Hollywood and Representations of Reality. Media Studies and the Study of Reception: A Brief History of ItsMethods and Findings. Conclusion. 5. Studying Inequalities: Class, Gender, Race, and Sexuality inMedia Studies. A Critical Perspective on Inequality in Media Studies. The Frankfurt School. Cultural studies Media studies research findings on class,gender, race, and sexuality. Gender in Media Studies Research: Are Gender Roles CulturallyReproduced? Film and gender: Issues of reception and representation. Television and gender: Issues of reception andrepresentation. Media and Race. Sexuality. Conclusion. 6. Studying Media Texts and Their Reception in the New MediaEnvironment. Transformative Images in the New Media Environment. Globalization and the new shape of media identities. Media Reception Research in the New Media Environment. Global reception in the new media environment. Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Class Inequality in NewMedia Reception: A New Study. New Studies: Gender and Social Class Identities in the New MediaEnvironment. Politics, Media Impact and Use, and the New MediaEnvironment Old and New Media in the Individualized Media Environment: TheNew Media Environment Is Never Just New Media Bias in old media and new. Civic engagement in the new media environment. Americans and Political Discussion: How the New MediaEnvironment Is Changing the Civic Landscape. Conclusion. 7. Conclusion. We Are Living in a Mediated Age. The Complexity of Our Relationship With the Media. Human Agency in Media Decisions and Directions. In Closing: The Case of the RFID. Index.

Balancing McLuhan With Williams

The article titled “Realising Virtual Reality: A Reflection on the Continuing Evolution of New Media,” presented a technological deterministic analysis on the evolution of virtual reality. A major criticism of the technological deterministic viewpoint is that it does not consider context of use and human agency. Looking specifically at the work of Raymond Williams and other British Cultural Studies researchers, this response argues for a more balanced viewpoint of technology, determined more so by cultural use than by technological enforcement.

“Wandering and Wondering”: Theory and Representation in Feminist Physical Cultural Studies

In this paper we explore the potential of physical cultural studies for collaborative, interdisciplinary, theoretically-informed, reflexive research on the physically active female body. We use the metaphors of “wandering and wondering” to interrogate our experiences of movement within and across physical cultural fields and academic borders. Grounded in an ethnographic narrative approach, we revisit the ways in which different aspects of our identities were highlighted during our waka ama, snowboarding and basketball experiences. Drawing upon feminist readings of Bourdieu’s work, we challenged each other to reflect critically upon previously unquestioned or unexplored aspects of our subjectivities. While the paper focuses on the results of these discussions, we also offer insights into the collaborative process. Ultimately we argue that sharing narratives of our experiences and exploring them further with theory offers a good place to begin new interdisciplinary conversations that may push physical cultural studies research in new directions.

Communicating the environment: Guest editors’ introduction

The articles gathered together in this special issue were submitted in response to a call for manuscripts, issued in 2009, on ‘Communicating the environment’. While the recent decade has seen the rise to dominance of ‘climate change’ as a focus for media, public and political environmental concern, as well as for science/social science research on the environment, the call for papers deliberately aimed more broadly at attracting contributions from the wider field of social science, media, communication and cultural studies research on environmental communication. The articles brought together here thus represent a rich and exciting range of research foci and, equally important in our view, of theoretical frameworks and research approaches to the study of environmental mediation and communication. Comprising a range of different national and media foci, they offer analyses of a diverse range of media forms including film/animation, television, promotional videos, newspapers and magazines, and with contributions by scholars from New Zealand, Canada, the US, the UK, Belgium, Denmark and Germany. The environmental issues examined range from climate change, nuclear power and agricultural biotechnology, to media portrayals of ‘nature’ and ‘environment’. Not surprisingly, given the rise of ‘framing analysis’ in the last two decades, several of the articles draw on, deploy and advance ‘framing analysis’, while often combining the insights from theories of ‘framing’ with content analysis and discourse analytical approaches. In our view, a particular strength of this special issue is