The practice of cultural studies / Richard Johnson ... [and others].

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Johnson, Richard, 1939-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Culture--Study and teaching.

Culture.

Physical Description:

xi, 300 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

London ; Thousand Oaks, Calif. : SAGE, 2004.

Contents:

Part I Groundings

1 Cultural studies and the study of culture: disciplines and dialogues 9

Asking the cultural question - seven different agendas 10

Historical contexts of the culture agenda 14

Cultural studies and social movements 14

Dominant misrepresentations and popular agency 15

Finding a philosophy? Cultural studies, feminist philosophy and hermeneutics 16

Relations to other academic disciplines 19

Explaining transdisciplinarity: a story in four acts 20

Implications of transdisciplinarity for method 22

Transdisciplinary strategies 24

2 Multiplying methods: from pluralism to combination 26

Methodological pluralism or a Method? 26

Objects and strategies of cultural research 27

Cultural circuits: cultural studies meets hermeneutics 37

Conclusion: combined and multiple methods? 42

3 Method and the researching self 44

'Inside culture': cultural research as a cultural circuit 44

Objectivism, self and other 46

From 'standpoint' to 'positionalities' 48

Making claims to truth: conventions and truthfulness 50

Is truth only a convention then? 51

'Reflexivity' versus the confessional 52

Realizing reflexivity: social, spatial, temporal and cultural aspects 53

Dialogue and difference 57

Accountability and responsibilities 59

Conclusion: the logic of combination 60

4 The research process: moments and strategies 62

Choosing and Developing a topic 63

Starting 64

Managing time 65

Working with others: supervisors and peers 66

Reviewing the literature, mapping the field 68

Developing research proposals 71

General models of researching 73

Starting from a source not data? 74

Sources and questions 74

Research, analysis and textuality 75

Contextualization and creating a distance 77

Writing as a moment - functions and forms 78

Diversity in the writing process: planning and writing 80

Writing and the autobiographical voice 81

Writing ethics and politics: authorial power and its deployment 82

Part II Settings

5 Theory in the practice of research 87

Theory, fear and loathing 87

Theory as opposed to practice 89

Theory and practice as praxis 90

Theory and the empirical 93

Reading for theory as a method 97

The argument so far 98

Theory as abstraction 98

Levels of abstraction 99

Kinds of abstraction: strengths and limits 100

Conclusion: theorizing as a practice 102

6 Make space! Spatial dimensions in cultural research 104

Bringing place and space into focus 105

Complicated spatialities 107

Theoretical tools for researching spatiality 108

Spatiality as a metaphor for power 110

Virtual spaces, technologized places 112

Complex places 113

Bringing it all together again: transdisciplinary integrations 117

Conclusion: the return of abstraction 118

7 Time please! Historical perspectives 119

Thinking about time 120

Writing cultural histories part I: radical popular histories 123

Writing cultural histories part II: history's cultural turn 124

The argument so far: history and cultural studies - convergence and tension 126

Public representations of the past and popular memory 127

Thinking historically: historicizing theory 129

Historicizing the present 130

8 Culture, power and economy 135

Cultural studies 'versus' political economy: failures of dialogue 136

Baselines: separating power and culture 137

Ideology analysis 139

Representation and the limits of ideology critique 140

Power and culture: expanding the agenda 142

Where does power lie? The popular and the dominant 143

Starting elsewhere: economies as culturally embedded 145

Economies as representation and discourse 146

Cultural and economic circuits: overlap, interdependence, identity? 148

The question of consumption 149

Cultural conditions of economic systems 150

Changing determinations: the economy as culture 151

Readings and meetings 153

Reading as method, method as reading 153

Plan of part III 154

9 Reading popular narratives: from structure to context 157

Structural readings: textual strategies 158

Structural readings: contextualizing strategies 162

Beyond structuralism: poststructuralist approaches 167

Combining methods 168

10 Reading texts of or for dominance 170

Reading texts of dominance: a possible reading path 171

Why (not) texts? The value of a textual approach to an analysis of anti-terrorism 173

How much text? 176

Which texts? Dialogue and dominance 178

Opening the text, starting the dialogue 179

Elaborating a (theoretically informed) reading 182

Moral absolutes, the 'other' and unconscious processes 183

Making a reading convincing 184

11 Reading fictions, reading histories 187

Fiction and/or history? 187

Cultural materialism: rereading literature 189

'New historicism' and historical discourse 193

Staging and silencing: explicit and implicit meanings 194

Elementary, my dear Foucault 197

Beyond a (national) boundary: post-colonial encounters 198

Part IV Meetings

12 Researching others: from autobiography to ethnography 205

The auto/ethno continuum as a process 206

The auto/ethno continuum as a range of methods 208

The indispensability of meetings in cultural research 209

Pathways in ethnographic and auto/biographical research: two checklists 216

Checklist 1 Interviews 217

Checklist 2 Memory work 220

Conclusion and some limits of the auto/ethno continuum 222

13 Representing the other: interpretation and cultural readings 225

Analysis as dialogue 225

Multiple readings, multiple theories 226

Reading for actors' meanings 227

Reading for cultural structures and processes 229

Working the other way: individualizing conventional forms 230

Making yourself in and against the school 231

Reading for structure and context 233

The four dialogues of analysis: a checklist 234

Representing the other: dialogic implications 237

Representing across power: particular strategies 239

14 Remaking methods: from audience research to studying subjectives 243

'Indiscipline' and combination 243

Studying media audiences: promises unfulfilled? 245

Researching subjectivities: reflexive selves, discursive subjects 255

Conclusion: remaking methods 266.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [270]-289) and index.

ISBN:

0761960996

0761961003

OCLC:

53192014