Caught! When 'their' literacy is not yours - audience research as a troublesome practice.
Seminar by Joke Hermes
In the mid 1980s there was a widely shared optimism about audience research in cultural studies. Janice Radway's Reading the romance, David Morley's Nationwide studies, Ien Ang's work on Dallas suggested that 'making contact' with users of popular culture was enough to gain access to processes of meaning making. Janice Radway was not a romance reader, David Morley was not lower class. Granted Ien Ang loved to watch Dallas. Her interpretative framework though was vastly different from most of the Dallas viewers who wrote her letters. The beauty of these ground-breaking studies is that they offered a combination of authenticity in the reported views, ideas and sentiments of the audiences studied and strong theorization of that material. The authors did justice to their interviewees while offering their own framework to understand other people's understanding of popular media.
When I interviewed women's magazine readers by the end of the 1980s, I often felt myself at a loss in conversation with readers. 'Making contact' is certainly not as easy as it sounds. Still later, training students to do qualitative research, it was even more clear that there is both a need for self-reflexivity on the part of the researcher and a need to realise that making contact is not always what you want to do as a researcher and as a human being. Sometimes we enter the field knowing that we'll be talking with people who hold abhorrent views. E.g. the case of a German colleague, a feminist, who decided to do research amongst anti-abortion protesters. Often, however, we are confronted unexpectedly with a vast difference in repertoires and literacies that belie the optimism the early qualitative audience research studies inspired: making contact can be hard.
In this seminar there will be room to explore the double project of qualitative media research: 1. to cross intercultural barriers in making contact with audience members; 2. to do theoretical justice to the audience material gathered. Both parts of the cultural studies project involve reflection on the notion of 'literacy'. Can literacy be understood as hierarchically layered knowledge and competence? I.e. is literacy ultimately structured as a social-cultural pyramid of sorts, or is it more akin to an archipelago, consisting of numerous differently sized islands? Can the researcher assume that she or he will be able to translate correctly what others say? Ultimately these are questions grounded in the philosophical problematic of relativism, which posits that the notions of translatability and understanding across cultures is idealistic at best. This seminar will focus on what empirical means we have at hand, as researchers, to both honour the integrity of audience research and come to terms with hearing people say things in interviews that are horrible, offensive or that sound downright stupid but which apparently make sense to our interviewees.
