This week we’ll discuss your preliminary interests, the purposes and possibilities of method, the relationship between method and methodology, the problems with methodological orthodoxies, and the new contexts in which research has to unfold – and new demands to which it should respond.
Agenda:
- Land Acknowledgement (and caveat: see Theresa Stewart-Ambo and K. Wayne Yang, “Beyond Land Acknowledgement in Settler Institutions,” Social Text 39:1 (2021)).
- Introductions (using Eugenia Zuroski’s “Where Do We Know From?” exercise)
- Semester Overview + Explanation of My Choices (re: balance of reading, reading responses, discussion, in-class activities, assignments, opportunities for interdisciplinary teamwork, fieldwork, etc)
I’ll be referencing the following materials in today’s class; you needn’t read them, but you’re welcome to!
Methodological Terminology:
- Michael Crotty, “Introduction: The Research Process,” in The Foundations of Social Research: Meaning and Perspective in the Research Process (Sage, 1998): 1-17. (See UMS_Methods_Sept22, 2014)
- Jane Stokes, Excerpts from “Getting Started,” How to Do Media and Cultural Studies (Sage, 2003): 17-33.
- Egon G. Guba and Yvonna S. Lincoln, “Paradigmatic Controversies, Contradictions, and Emerging Confluences,” in Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, eds., The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research, 3rd ed. (Sage, 2005): 195-6.
- Shawn Wilson, Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods (Fernwood, 2008): especially 33-42.
On Media Studies’ Methodological Legacies:
- Stefania Averback-Lietz, “Challenges of Doing Historical Research in Communication Studies: On the Necessity to Write a Methodologically Informed History of the Methods of Communication Studies,” History of Media Studies 1 (2021).
- Geof Bowker, “Emerging Configurations of Knowledge Expression,” in Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski and Kirsten A. Foot, eds., Media Technologies: Essays on Communication Materiality and Society (MIT Press, 2014): 99-118.
- Michael A. Elliott and Claudia Stokes, “What Is Method and Why Does It Matter?” American Literary Studies: A Methodological Reader (2002): 1-15.
- Shannon Mattern, “Critical Approaches,” Media Research Methods (2005).
- David W. Park and Jefferson Pooley, eds., The History of Media and Communication Research (Peter Lang, 2008).
- David Park, Jefferson Pooley, and Peter Simonson, “History of Media Studies, in the Plural,” History of Media Studies 1 (2021).
- Slavko Splichal and Peter Dahlgren, “Media Research Paradigms: Conceptual Distinctions, Continuing Divisions” in The International Encyclopedia of Media Studies (Wiley, 2013).
- Paul Saukko, “Combining Methodologies in Cultural Studies” in Doing Research in Cultural Studies (SAGE, 2003) [triangulated, prismatic, dialogic]: 11-35.
The Present Terrain:
- We can get a sense of what’s happening in a field by looking at its conference programs, its “calls for proposals” (CFPs), the catalogs for major presses (e.g., Duke, Minnesota, MIT Chicago, Stanford, Yale, UNC, Polity, etc). We’ll also look at the tables of contents of a range of journals, which might include Big Data & Society, Critical Inquiry, Feminist Media Histories, Film Quarterly, JCMS, Media+Environment, New Media & Society, Resonances, ROMchip, among others!
- What’s the role of artificial intelligence? Consider, for example, Nathi Magubane, “AI Could Transform Social Science Research,” Penn Today (June 17, 2023).