1. Ways Studying Media is Similar to Other Academic Disciplines

(Part 1 – audio file generated at crikk.com)

As you approach the coming semester, I invite you to recognize how studying media resonates with topics and research approaches across a wide variety of academic disciplines. Recognizing these similarities can help you appreciate the multifaceted nature of media studies and its connections across the liberal arts – likely including your own personal interests. This broad array of connections and interdisciplinary approaches is one of my favorite dimensions of the field, and points to the ways media are deeply embedded in almost every aspect of contemporary human experience.

1. Interdisciplinary Nature:
Like fields such as environmental science or cognitive science, media studies draw on multiple disciplines including sociology, psychology, political science, and communication. This interdisciplinary approach allows for a more holistic understanding of how media operates and impacts society.

2. Research Methods:
Media studies utilize both qualitative and quantitative research methods, similar to disciplines like sociology and psychology. This includes content analysis, surveys, experiments, and ethnography to gather and analyze data.

3. Theoretical Frameworks:
Just as in fields like economics or political science, media studies rely on theoretical frameworks to understand complex phenomena. Theories such as the Agenda-Setting Theory or semiotics help explain how media influences individual identities and cultural practices.

4. Critical Analysis:
Like literature or philosophy, media studies involve critical analysis of texts, whether they are news articles, films, or social media posts. This critical lens helps to uncover underlying messages, biases, and power structures.

5. Historical Context:
Similar to history, media studies often place current media phenomena within a historical context to understand how past events and developments shape contemporary media landscapes.

6. Cultural Relevance:
Like anthropology, media studies examine the cultural impact of media, exploring how it reflects, shapes, and sometimes distorts cultural norms and values.

7. Ethical Considerations:
Media studies, like law or medical studies, grapple with ethical questions – issues such as media representation, privacy, misinformation, and the ethical responsibilities of media producers and consumers.

8. Technological Impact:
Similar to computer science or information technology, media studies analyze the impact of technology on society. This includes studying the effects of digital media, social networks, and emerging technologies like virtual reality.

9. Policy and Regulation:
Like public policy or law, media studies examine the role of regulation and policy in shaping media landscapes. This includes studying media laws, censorship, and the role of governmental and non-governmental organizations in regulating media content.

10. Behavioral Insights:
Similar to psychology or behavioral economics, media studies explore how media influences human behavior and decision-making. This includes studying the psychological effects of media consumption and the behavioral patterns of media audiences.

11. Global Perspectives:
Like international relations or global studies, media studies often take a global perspective, examining how media operates differently across various cultural and geopolitical contexts.

12. Communication Skills:
Similar to journalism or public relations, media studies emphasize the importance of effective communication skills, both in analyzing media content and in producing media messages.

13. Impact Assessment:
Like environmental science or public health, media studies evaluate the impact of media on society. This includes assessing the social, economic, and political effects of media coverage and media consumption.

14. Innovation and Creativity:
Similar to fields like art or design, media studies value innovation and creativity, particularly in the production of new media content and the development of new media technologies.

15. Societal Influence:
Like sociology or political science, media studies examine how media influences societal structures and norms, including the role of media in shaping public opinion, policy, and social movements.

2. So What is Critical Cultural Studies?

(Part 2 – audio file generated at crikk.com)

This is tough to pin down succinctly, in part, because critical cultural studies pays special attention to the many diverse, complex and often hidden factors shaping how we make sense of the world. No good cultural studies scholar wants to get caught oversimplifying “cultural studies” as a clearly definable, concrete thing with an explicit, origin etc.

Instead we want to point in many directions at the same time and weave together multifaceted descriptions – and these descriptions will vary from person to person. My own approach to critical cultural studies is shaped by my graduate studies in communication, my work as a documentary scholar, and my interest in media, gender and sexuality. And my perspective is also shaped by my personal identity and experience (white, male, academic, US citizen, etc.).

This sort of attention to personal identity and social position is important for critical cultural studies because these things affect the way we make sense of the world. Our identities and social positions shape and are shaped by the language, images and cultural practices we use. They are shaped by the presumptions we make about ourselves, others, and society, presumptions that are often unspoken and embedded in what people and institutions say and do. And all of this – identities, social positions, rituals, ways of communicating and interacting, unspoken presumptions, etc. – is bound up with other factors like economic and political structures.

There is a lot included here. It’s important to pause and note that the description of critical cultural studies in this essay is just a sketch of a very wide-ranging and complex perspective, a broad overview to help you get a feel for a very slippery topic. Please keep that in mind as you read!

There are three things then that I want to highlight in this brief introduction. First, I want to discuss “culture” as what we study. Second I want to discuss some of the key ideas that shape how we study culture. Thirdly, woven into the discussion of what we study and how we do it, is the question of why we study culture this way – the political dimension that is very important for the cultural studies tradition.

Culture – What We Study
Raymond Williams, an early influencer of British cultural studies, observed, “Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language” (1983b, 87). Culture can mean “high art” like famous paintings in a museum or a Beethoven symphony – the sort of thing we often associate with people who are “cultured” (cultivated). But culture can also mean the everyday language and practices that groups of people use to make their lives meaningful, “a whole way of life, material, intellectual, and spiritual” (Williams 1983a, xvi). In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s scholars like Williams and Stuart Hall became interested in the experiences of working class people in Britain, people whose lives had traditionally been ignored by academic research. Williams and his colleagues discovered that these people had created a rich cultural world for themselves. They had unique ways of making sense of their lives, speaking about their experience, interacting with others, and ordering their social world – these scholars thought this was as worthy of study as any other cultural reality. Some of this research became anchored in the Birmingham Center for the Study of Contemporary Culture. Scholars there found that the culture of the British working class (and other often-overlooked minority groups and sub-cultures) had important political and economic implications, sometimes challenging prevailing regimes of power, sometimes perpetuating them. Cultural studies scholars observed that minority groups and sub-cultures don’t just passively receive culture, but respond, react, and remake culture for themselves.

In practice today, cultural studies scholars still often explore everyday culture: what people say and write, the images they use and embrace, their rituals and habits, and so forth. Scholars look for insights about how ideas, attitudes, and social rules govern a peoples’ approach to the world, and how they reveal patterns of advantage and disadvantage that are at work in these cultural expressions or “texts” – all with an eye to providing those who are disadvantaged with “strategies for survival and resources for resistance” (Hall 1990, 22).

“In cultural studies traditions … culture is understood both as a way of life—encompassing ideas, attitudes, languages, practices, institutions, and structures of power—and a whole range of cultural practices: artistic forms, texts, canons, architecture, mass-produced commodities, and so forth” (Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler 1992, 5). But it is important to think of these cultural practices as more like dynamic processes than a series of things. Even when cultural objects seem fairly stable, like in the case of a book or media text, they exist and are used and become meaningful in fluid social contexts.

So, for example, I might study examples of who is typically depicted as “beautiful” in popular media. A critical cultural studies scholar carefully analyzes these images to discover patterns in order to gain some insight into underlying cultural expectations and values about beauty, expectations and values that might not be immediately obvious. Critical cultural studies scholars want to trace how these patterns become established, how they are supported and perpetuated; how they are complicated, challenged and resisted; and how they sometimes change. The goal is to call out the ways these patterns hurt some people and benefit others, with the hope of moving toward and embracing a more equitable, livable and peaceful cultural landscape.

It is likely clear to you then why many feminist scholars have aligned themselves with cultural studies and why feminist perspectives might be helpful in this sort of work. Feminism pays careful attention to the ways women are represented. The presumptions embedded in those representations about what it means to be a woman, social expectations for women, how women should be treated and so forth can have very demeaning implications that only become clear once we look at them carefully and think them through. Likewise there are deep connections between cultural studies and Queer Theory (attending to the cultural force of rules and presumptions about sexuality), and Post-Colonial Theory (following the legacies of European and American colonial rule lingering in patterns that privilege their perspectives and influence around the world).

Culture – How We Study It
For cultural studies scholars, there is no one set way of studying or analyzing expressions of culture. Researchers draw on a wide range of strategies.

Research methods used for cultural studies include ethnography, textual analysis, content analysis, semiotics, interviews, survey research, and reach for a wide variety of theoretical sources to help analyze culture. Strategies have been drawn from disciplines ranging from literary studies and philosophy to anthropology and sociology, and theoretical ideas have been drawn from resources ranging from Marxism and Psychoanalysis to Feminism and Queer Theory.

No one theory or methodological approach can be sufficient for cultural studies because the way we study something helps shape our outcomes – what we see depends on what we look at and how we look! Scholars have to remain open to the limitations and cultural assumptions built into their own ways of looking.

But cultural studies is also not just “anything.” When the various approaches come together we are left with a body of work that examines how cultural expressions and practices structure relationships between people, always with implications for social, economic and political power.

One way to think of how cultural studies is done is to think about the questions guiding the study. How does power operate? How are prevailing systems of power being reinforced, challenged, or responded to?

How are people (or sometimes animals or things) being located within a cultural system through the ways they are being represented? How are people being categorized – what are their possible identities? What does this make possible or impossible, or likely or unlikely? Who is advantaged? Who is disadvantaged or pushed to the margins? What alternative perspectives are included or made possible by the text?

After years of work, cultural studies scholars have identified some reoccurring identity categories that are particularly relevant to how culture in the modern world often works and how social power is organized. Race, economic class, gender, sexuality, age, and disability are often among the central organizing categories at work in cultural messages and practices. So much of the work you encounter in cultural studies will attend to these categories.

Finally, returning to a point made near the start of this essay, these categories work differently for people in different cultural locations. For each of us, our cultural locations matter – especially when they are tied to positions of privilege. So, for example, as a white man my perspective on culture is always bound up with the advantages tied to my social position. I can only see the ways that any cultural text or practice may disadvantage others by taking on their perspective – something I can only do in very limited ways. This means I need to adopt a position of humility, careful listening, and sometimes silence in the face of the perspectives of people who are disadvantaged when they speak about how power is working in cultural texts and practices. Conversely, my privileged perspectives are often already well known to people in more disadvantaged categories.

And for each of us, our cultural locations intersect. In some ways, race works differently for people who are rich than for people who are poor. Gender and disability can both change the operation and impacts of other social categories.

Some scholars note that there is species privilege too, which has profound implications for our planetary environment. As a human person I use what the world provides and interact with animals, resources and environmental systems from a place of privilege, often not attuned to the harms I cause. Increasingly, cultural studies invite us to embrace a transhuman perspective.

It can be hard to see beyond my own needs and perspectives. Another way to put this is the old saying that to someone with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When we study culture, we must pay attention to the tools we use, how we use them, and how that shapes our understanding.

References

Grossberg, Lawrence, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler. 1992. Cultural studies. New York: Routledge.

Hall, Stuart. 1990. “The emergence of cultural studies and the crisis of the humanities.”  The Humanities as Social Technology 53:11-23.

Williams, Raymond. 1983a. Culture and society, 1780-1950. New York: Columbia University Press.

Williams, Raymond. 1983b. Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society. New York: Oxford University Press.