Rather than defining, or 🎯 pinning down, our key terms, we’ll aim to open them up: to explore various conceptions of method, theory, and their relationships, including both prescriptive and exploratory, purposefully promiscuous approaches. We’ll also consider why it’s important for us to know who these methodologists and theorists are, and the subject positions from which they think and write, in order to understand the methods and theories they espouse.
IN-CLASS WORKSHOP:
- We’ll talk about developing research questions that integrate theory and method; and we’ll identify the myriad factors that drive and frame our research.
TO PREPARE FOR TODAY:
- REMINDER: Please remember to sign up for your liaison group! 🙂
- Share one of your three reading responses by noon, if you like.
- Let’s start with one “textbook” approach to the selection of methods and theories, then explore more capacious alternatives: Bonnie Brennen, “Getting Started” in Qualitative Research Methods for Media Studies (Taylor & Francis, 2022): 1-15.
On Method [total pages: ~54]:
- Now, please introduce yourself to John Law, then read his “After Method: An Introduction” in After Method: Mess in Social Science Research (Routledge, 2004): 1-12 [stop at “STS”].
- Introduce yourself to Saidiya Hartman, then read “A Note on Method” in her Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (W. W. Norton, 2019): xiii-xv.
- Meet Max Liborion, then read the Introduction to their Pollution is Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2021): 1-37 [you’ll encounter tons of footnotes, which should prompt you to think about citation as an ethical method!]. You might also want to check out Liboiron’s Civic Lab for Environmental Action Research and its methods.
- Optional: For more resources, see my “What Is Method?” Arena channel.
On Theory [total pages: ~28]:
- Meet Andrea Ballestero, then read her “Theory as Parallax and Provocation,” in Boyer, Faubion, and Marcus, eds., Theory Can Be More Than It Use to Be: Learning Anthropology’s Method in a Time of Transition (Cornell University Press, 2015): 171-80.
- If you don’t already know her, please meet bell hooks, then read her “Theory as Liberatory Practice,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 4:1 (1991): 1-12.
- Optional: For more, see my “On Theory and How to Read It” Arena channel.
On Connecting Theory and Method [total pages: ~20]:
- On the entanglement of theory, method, and form: Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, “Saidiya Hartman,” BOMB (October 24, 2022).
- I invite you to read my “World in Box,” Places Journal (May 2024) for three reasons: because it might give you a little taste of what I do; because it employs a mix of methods (textual + visual critical analysis, archival research, ethnography, and interviews); and because those methods were chosen to allow me to activate multiple theoretical frames of mediation: supply chains / media distribution/ media logistics, media production / media industries, media consumption, environmental / elemental media, etc.
- Optional: For more on posing questions, see our Arena channel on, well, “On Asking Questions.”
I’ll share these in class:
- Meet Andrew Ross, then read his short contribution to Amitava Kumar’s “For Graduate Students,” Everyday I Write the Book: Notes on Style (Duke University Press, 2020): 152-3.
- Introduce yourself to Jack Halberstam, then read his brief contribution to Amitava Kumar’s “For Graduate Students,” in Everyday I Write the Book: Notes on Style (Duke University Press, 2020): 157-8.
- Meet Kyla Wazana Tompkins, then read her “We Aren’t Here to Learn What We Already Know,” Los Angeles Review of Books (September 13, 2016) (thanks to Megan Gallagher for the reference!).