CS235 EXAM

Culture as verb and noun (Gray/lecture)

This model is based upon the ontological premise that the symbolic construction of social reality occurs through the materiality of culture and cultural practices.

What is culture? (Gray, pg.12):

“Culture is not a free-floating set of ideas or beliefs, nor is it exemplified only by a canon of great works of art or literature”. Culture is “broadly the production of meaning or ‘signifying practice’ that happens at every level of the social and at every moment within the cultural process. (Gray, pg.12). Culture is both a noun and verb, objects and subjects, artifacts and action

The social and the textual (Gray/lecture)

Gray locates the nexus of culture as a noun and verb, as embodying the symbolic and the material, at the intersection of the “social and the textual” (13) “Popular media forms and other ‘texts’ are entwined in our everyday lives, they provide a shared social and cultural currency and their images, catch-phrases and characters often settle into the sediment of popular memory” (14-15) “We draw upon the rich resources of narrative, image, and style that circulate with the symbolic worlds of media in thinking about who we are and who we might become” (15)

Experience and the articulation of identity (Gray/lecture) Active audiences (Gray) Immersion in the field (Walsh) Ethnography (Walsh/Lingel/lecture)

Observations may be: Structured (strict interview protocols) or unstructured (loose methods). The aim is to be “naturalistic” - in a natural setting (not in trying to model the natural science) Ethnography is distinctive in three ways:

1. there are no distinct stages of theorizing, hypothesis construction, data gathering and hypothesis testing (which is deductive). Instead, the research process is one of constant interaction between problem formulation, data collection and data analysis. The analysis of data feeds into research design; data collection and theory come to be developed out of data analysis and all subsequent data collection is guided by the emergent theory (which is inductive)
2. Ethnography brings a variety of techniques of inquiry into play, involving attempts to observe things that happen, listen to what people say and question people in the setting under investigation. So, it involves, as McCail and Simmons put it: genuinely social interaction in the field with the subject of study… direct observation of relevant events, some formal and a great deal of informal interviewing, some counting, collection of documents and artifacts, and open-endedness in the directions the study takes (1969:1)
3. the observer is the primary research instrument, accessing the field, establishing field relations, conducting and structuring observation and interviews, writing field notes, using audio and visual recordings, downloading relevant electronic material, reading documents, recording and transcribing and finally writing up and publishing the research. So, ethnography has a large constructional and reflexive character, it is essentially the observer who stands at the heart of ethnography and its open-ended nature

Can Lingel’s Digital Countercultures be considered to be an ethnography?

Although Lingel’s work would probably not be considered an ethnography by anthropologists, it certainly meets the definition in the “Doing Ethnography” chapter in Seale (pgs. 258-274) Jessa Lingel about her work and ethnography: “I would not call my work ethnographic. I did not spend sustained periods of time living with these communities as part of my research process. In this sense, I am inspired by and rely upon the tools of ethnography without necessarily meeting the standards for traditional definitions of this method” Identify of researcher and nature of the research may be: Overt (identity of the researcher is known at least to some participants). Both Dunn and Lingel were known to the denizens of their field sites as researchers Covert (identity of the researcher is disguised). This is ethically dubious from the perspective of contemporary research ethics. Again, there can be varying degrees of the positioning of the researcher, rather than a neat dichotomy “Members” and “Strangers” (Walsh)

Members living inside the culture of their group treat it as simply how the world is and do not reflect on the presuppositions on which it is based or the knowledge which it entails. But the stranger entering such a group does not have this insider’s sense of the world and instead finds it strange, incoherent, problematic and questionable. Yet, the stranger can become a member of the group through participation, becoming transformed into an insider, inhabiting it in the same taken-for-granted way as existing members. At the same time, being a stranger creates an attitude of objectivity because the stranger must carefully examine what time, being a stranger creates an attitude of objectivity because the stranger must carefully examine what time, being a stranger creates an attitude of objectivity because stranger must carefully examine what seems self-explanatory to the members of the group. The stranger knows that other ways of life are possible

Anthropological Strangeness (Walsh/Lingel/lecture)

The ethnographer first enters the field like a stranger making the familiar strange or unfamiliar That is, she or he “tries to treat the familiar world of its members as anthropologically strange, to expose its social and cultural construction” (Seale, 258-259)

Participant-Observation (lecture/Walsh/Lingel)

Participant observation is a key mode of ethnographic research participation: trying to understand what people in the field say and do by becoming involved in their social practices Observation: looking at these social practices from a more detached perspective The role/position of the researcher may be: external (to the group/culture under study- Jessa Lingel) or internal (participant in the group/culture - Sam Dunn) NOTE: There may be varying degrees of participation. P/O is not an either/or proposition

Thick Description (lecture/Walsh)

 This leads Geertz to the view that the task of ethnography is to produce its own distinctive form of knowledge, which he calls thick description

The Interview Society (Lecture and Gibbs Video)

Interviewing is one of the primary methods of qualitative research and ethnography, in particular, It is a process of “dyadic” relational communication (except focus groups) With a predetermined purpose Designed to explore the meaning of social and cultural practices Involving the asking and answering of questions One of the key methods that Lingel uses in her study is the qualitative interview

Three fundamental questions (ontological/epistemological/methodological) of research (lecture/Gray/Lingel) What can be known? (ontology) - Ex; What can we learn about power, culture and the internet from the case of the social media influencers in Follow Me - The Truth About Social Media? How do subcultural communities use the social-technical affordances of the internet and other digital media forms to create identities of alterity in Lingel’s Digital Subcultures? What is the relationship of the knower to the known (epistemology) - Ex; is the maker of Follow Me an observer or a participant? Where along the continuum of the method participant-observation in Lingel is located? How does this affect her capacity to engage in an “empathetic understanding” (Verstehen) of the “authenticities” and “alterities” of subcultural identity? How do we find things out (methodological) - What specific qualitative research techniques do we use: ethnographic observation? Film and visual documentation? Focus groups? Qualitative interviews? Life histories? A combination of these and/or others? Evaluative criteria in qualitative research: reliability; validity, representativeness, and generalizability; objectivity and subjectivity; ethics and the politics of research (lecture/Gray/Seale/Lingel) Checking the reliability of a particular interpretation may be difficult because of missing data. Representativeness, the typicality of crucial items of data, may be hard to establish. It may not be possible to investigate comparative cases in order to demonstrate validity. The generation of theories may not be the main aim of the researcher. The procedure of coding, whereby devices like typologies or careers may be developed, is the start of generating theory from data. Thus, ideally, theories are grounded in the data. Highly abstract theorizing, where concepts are not exemplified with data extracts, goes against the spirit of most ethnography Triangulation (Seale/Walsh/Gray) Involves comparing the results produced by one method or source of data with another to see if they agree. For example, report an exercise in which ethnographic studies of nine fishing communities in the Gulf of Mexico were compared with quantitative indicators to see if these agreed in their estimates of how vulnerable or resilient each community was in the face of natural or man-made disasters. They found agreement between the two data sources for seven out of the nine communities, explaining discrepancies as being due to the time lag in collecting quantitative indicators. Of course, a validation exercise like this is potentially limitless, as some third method of data source could introduce a different perspective. At most, if different data tally, the observer can feel a bit more confident in their inferences, but can hardly conclude that a final truth has been reached. Grounded Theory (lecture/Seale/Lingel) The discovery of grounded theory supplies a logic for ethnographic research and was originally aimed at giving it a scientific status. But whether this process of systematization is an entirely inductive and exclusively data-based method of theory generation, as Glaser and Strauss argue, is debatable. If the role of theory in structuring observation is recognized, then theory, common sense and other various assumptions precede theory generation, so the grounded theory has a constructive character and is not simply a data-based one. Whatever level of systematization takes place in the direction of theory construction, it is of value only if it offers a revealing purchase of the data.

Data collection vs. Data generation (Byrne/Gray) With structured interviews, the aim is to standardize them in order to enhance external validity, reliability and generalizability The intention, therefore, is that the interview should be neutral (that is to say, not influenced by the words, actions or position of the interviewer). The emphasis is on data collection and it is based on a realist (or naturalist) epistemological position Here, the social world is assumed to have an existence that is independent of the language used to describe it In contrast to this approach, an “idealist” (or interpretivism) account would see interview data as presenting one of many possible representations of the world. This latter approach tends to view the interview as a process of data generation rather than collection. Qualitative interviews and structured questions (Byrne/Gray) In qualitative interviews, the researcher is often regarded as a co-producer of the data, which is produced as the result of an interaction between the researcher and interviewees. Interviews as topic and resource (Gray), Interviews and reflexivity (Gray/Lingel) Gray (114-115) - Distinguishes between different modes or functions of the accounts of lived experience gathered through constructivist research methods such as interviews (or life stories or focus groups). Such qualitative data can be treated as a resource OR as a topic. “If we regard the interview as a resource, then we are most interested in how it increases our understanding of life experience and social worlds. It can enrich our knowledge about that world, that society, that culture and give us a sense of what it was like to be there” THIS IS THE AIM OF LINGEL’S INTERVIEWS IN DIGITAL COUNTERCULTURES. THEY ARE USED AS A MODE OF GAINING ANALYTICAL INSIGHT AND EMPATHETIC UNDERSTANDING INTO THE LIVED WORLDS OF BODY MODIFICATION ENTHUSIASTS, NEW JERSEY BASEMENT PUNK MUSICIANS, AND BROOKLYN DRAG QUEENS. HER INTERVIEWS MAXIMIZE INTERPRETIVISTS VALIDITY

Narrative, story-telling, and narrativity (lecture/Gray) There are three imbricated or overlapping registers of “storying the social”

1. Narrative- or the story that is told
2. Performance- or the telling of the story
3. Together, narrative (story) and performance (story-telling) compromise narrativity    Narrativity does not capture or reflect social meaning: rather, narrativity produces meaning and creates understanding. (topic vs resource, again)    Dwight Conquergood: “Knowledge is not so much stored in storytelling as it is enacted, reconfigured, tested and engaged by imaginative summonings and interpretative events in light of present situations. Active and emergent, instead of abstract and inert, narrative knowing recalls and recasts experience into meaningful signposts and supports for ongoing action”.    The social role of Stories and Narrative (lecture/Gray)    It is one of the most important ways in which symbolic meaning is produced in any given society and culture    Anthropologist Victor Turner, the word “narrate” is derived from the Latin verbs, narre, “to tell” and gnarus, “to know”    The narrative is a powerful way of knowing: in narrativity, the knowing is in the telling (ex; what stories do the social media influencers in Follow Me tell themselves about the kind of work do they d and what it means to them?)    Invocation, evocation and “speaking the self” (lecture/Gray)    Gray (111) The social is spoken through the self as subject; the self as subject is spoken through stories    How so? Narrativity involves two moments: evocation and invocation    We creatively evoke our identities through our own narratives and performances as we invoke repertoires of plots, storylines, characterizations, themes and settings that are specific to our larger cultural milieu.    C. Wright Mills: we invoke “history” (public narrativity) in order to evoke “biography” (personal narrativity)    The research process of stories and story-telling (Gray)    Researchers do not simply represent the voices of participants    Statements and words are selected to create an understanding of a particular phenomenon (the knowledge is disciplined)    At the same time, though, the author attempts to decenter authority by choosing fragments of the text to form an argument or observation of the world    Storytelling is a negotiation of power    Researchers listen to many voices and then choose among them when they pass their opinions on to others    People can speak but also can be spoken for    The fragmented narrative allows us to be self-reflexive: how we come to know something about another and, then, how we come to speak of this    Fragmented narrative as a method calls attention to itself in the process of meaning-making

Bricolage and fragmented narrative (lecture) One way of accounting for and being productive using multiple viewpoints on the topic is through bricolage and “fragmented narrative” In the arts, bricolage (French for “DIY”) is the construction or creation of work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available or a work constructed using mixed media. In cultural studies, bricolage is used to mean the processes by which people acquire objects from across different social groups and locations to create new cultural identities. In particular, it is a feature of subcultures such as the punk movement. Here, objects that possess one meaning (or no meaning) in the dominant culture are acquired and given a new, often subversive meaning (the basement as the site of resistance rather than leisure) Arrangement and rearrangement of disparate pieces of narratives (stories from people, movies, TV, radio) and building a different story Fragmented narrative can encourage multiple perspectives, but the interpretation is not unlimited, as the author still structures the experience of reading/viewing