The practice of cultural studies / Richard Johnson ... [et al.].

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Johnson, Richard, 1939-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Culture--Study and teaching.

Culture.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xi, 300 p.) : ill.

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

London : SAGE, c2004.

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

Summary:

This is an overview of specific research traditions in cultural studies, whilst also situating those traditions in their historical context.

Contents:

Cover Page

Title

Copyright

Acknowledgements

Contents

Introduction

Part I Groundings

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

Asking the cultural question - seven different agendas

Historical contexts of the culture agenda

Cultural studies and social movements

Dominant misrepresentations and popular agency

Finding a philosophy? Cultural studies, feminist philosophy and hermeneutics

Relations to other academic disciplines

Explaining transdisciplinarity: a story in four acts

Implications of transdisciplinarity for method

Transdisciplinary strategies

Conclusion

2 Multiplying methods: from pluralism to combination

Methodological pluralism or a Method?

Objects and strategies of cultural research

Cultural circuits: cultural studies meets hermeneutics

Conclusion: combined and multiple methods?

3 Method and the researching self

'Inside culture': cultural research as a cultural circuit

Objectivism, self and other

From 'standpoint' to 'positionalities'

Making claims to truth: conventions and truthfulness

Is truth only a convention then?

'Reflexivity' versus the confessional

Realizing reflexivity: social, spatial, temporal and cultural aspects

Dialogue and difference

Accountability and responsibilities

Conclusion: the logic of combination

4 The research process: moments and strategies

Choosing and Developing a topic

Starting

Managing time

Working with others: supervisors and peers

Reviewing the literature, mapping the field

Developing research proposals

General models of researching

Starting from a source not data?

Sources and questions

Research, analysis and textuality

Contextualization and creating a distance

Writing as a moment - functions and forms.

Diversity in the writing process: planning and writing

Writing and the autobiographical voice

Writing ethics and politics: authorial power and its deployment

Part II Settings

5 Theory in the practice of research

Theory, fear and loathing

Theory as opposed to practice

Theory and practice as praxis

Theory and the empirical

Reading for theory as a method

The argument so far

Theory as abstraction

Levels of abstraction

Kinds of abstraction: strengths and limits

Conclusion: theorizing as a practice

6 Make space! Spatial dimensions in cultural research

Bringing place and space into focus

Complicated spatialities

Theoretical tools for researching spatiality

Spatiality as a metaphor for power

Virtual spaces, technologized places

Complex places

Bringing it all together again: transdisciplinary integrations

Conclusion: the return of abstraction

7 Time please! Historical perspectives

Thinking about time

Writing cultural histories part I: radical popular histories

Writing cultural histories part II: history's cultural turn

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

Public representations of the past and popular memory

Thinking historically: historicizing theory

Historicizing the present

8 Culture, power and economy

Cultural studies 'versus' political economy: failures of dialogue

Baselines: separating power and culture

Ideology analysis

Representation and the limits of ideology critique

Power and culture: expanding the agenda

Where does power lie? The popular and the dominant

Starting elsewhere: economies as culturally embedded

Economies as representation and discourse

Cultural and economic circuits: overlap, interdependence, identity?

The question of consumption.

Cultural conditions of economic systems

Changing determinations: the economy as culture

Part III Readings

Readings and meetings

Reading as method, method as reading

Plan of part III

9 Reading popular narratives: from structure to context

Structural readings: textual strategies

Structural readings: contextualizing strategies

Beyond structuralism: poststructuralist approaches

Combining methods

10 Reading texts of or for dominance

Reading texts of dominance: a possible reading path

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

How much text?

Which texts? Dialogue and dominance

Opening the text, starting the dialogue

Elaborating a (theoretically informed) reading

Moral absolutes, the 'other' and unconscious processes

Making a reading convincing

11 Reading fictions, reading histories

Fiction and/or history?

Cultural materialism: rereading literature

'New historicism' and historical discourse

Staging and silencing: explicit and implicit meanings

Elementary, my dear Foucault

Beyond a (national) boundary: post-colonial encounters

Part IV Meetings

12 Researching others: from autobiography to ethnography

The auto/ethno continuum as a process

The auto/ethno continuum as a range of methods

The indispensability of meetings in cultural research

Pathways in ethnographic and auto/biographical research: two checklists

Checklist 1: Interviews

Checklist 2: Memory work

Conclusion and some limits of the auto/ethno continuum

13 Representing the other: interpretation and cultural readings

Analysis as dialogue

Multiple readings, multiple theories

Reading for actors' meanings

Reading for cultural structures and processes.

Working the other way: individualizing conventional forms

Making yourself in and against the school

Reading for structure and context

The four dialogues of analysis: a checklist

Representing the other: dialogic implications

Representing across power: particular strategies

14 Remaking methods: from audience research to studying subjectives

'Indiscipline' and combination

Studying media audiences: promises unfulfilled?

Researching subjectivities: reflexive selves, discursive subjects

Conclusion: remaking methods

In conclusion

References

Index.

Notes:

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

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781446218655

1446218651

9780761960997

0761960996

9781848605145

1848605145

OCLC:

476176916