Qualitative Studies 1998 Abstracts
Qualitative Studies Division
Grounded Moral Theory: A Feminist Way of Doing (Media) Ethics • Cindy M. Brown, South Florida • In this paper, I articulate the fundamentals of a bottom-up method of ethical inquiry that I refer to as grounded moral theory. Grounded moral theory, which consists of listening to people’s real-life concerns, generating recommendations to deal with these concerns, and extrapolating from recommendations and concerns to ethical theory, is placed into the context of feminist ethics. The method is based on philosophical ideals from an ethic of care and methodological notions about building theory from the ground up (Glaser and Strauss, 1967).
Vilification as a Rhetorical Strategy in Social Movements: A Comparison of Environmental and Wise Use Rhetoric • Cindy T. Christen, Wisconsin-Madison • This paper uses the controversy surrounding natural resource management in the U.S. to examine vilification as a rhetorical strategy in social movements. Using the framework proposed by Vanderford (1989), examples of the vilification practices of wise use advocates and environmentalists are identified and compared. Based on the analysis, implications are drawn regarding the functions of vilification in the confrontation between environmental and wise use movements.
Hegemony and the Re-Creation of Dominant Culture: A Critique of Hollywood’s Cinematic Distortion of Women of Color and Their Stories • Brenda Cooper, Utah State • An investigation of male directors’ film translations of three texts written by women of color • Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, and Tina Turner’s I, Tina • explicates how marginalization and omission function as hegemonic devices to renarrate the women’s writings. The result is depoliticized film narratives that minimize, or mute altogether, pivotal elements of the women’s texts and lives, including their complex voices and unconventional beliefs regarding the role of gender, race, and spiritualism, thus demonstrating the semiotic power of film to construct cultural meanings and to perpetuate society’s existing dominant ideological ideals.
Memory and Record: Evocations of the Past in Newspapers • Stephanie Craft, Stanford • This paper explores how history is evoked and invoked in journalistic writing, and the implications of different conceptualizations of “history” for the study of collective memory and news. The paper examines how other scholars have traced the contours of history and memory and attempts to find a space for journalism within that discussion. Second, this paper offers a preliminary attempt to apply those concepts to news stories and identify questions for further examination.
A Critical Assessment of News Coverage of the Ethical Implications of Genetic Testing • David Craig, Oklahoma • Using ethical theory as an analytical lens, this paper assesses news coverage of the ethical implications of genetic testing through an in-depth textual analysis of 31 broadcast and print stories by major news organizations in 1995 and 1996. Consequentialist concerns, especially avoidance of harm, were prominent in most stories, but deontological references were often lacking. Ethical themes, sometimes emerging as direct questions to readers, underlined the choices facing individuals and society.
On the Possibility of Communicating: Critical Theory, Feminism, and Social Position • Fabienne Darling-Wolf, Iowa • This paper is an investigation of the epistemological significance of social position. Starting with early critical communication research, I explore the development of this concept in feminist scholarship, particularly feminist cultural studies. I argue that looking back at critical communication research might provide useful insights on some of the most pressing theoretical dilemmas of contemporary feminist thought, and help take the identity politics debate beyond academic discourse into politically grounded everyday practices.
Community Radio and the Development of Empowering Institutions: The Case of CKRZ and the Six Nations Reserve • Charles Fairchild, SUNY-Buffalo • CKRZ-FM was created to serve the needs of the Six Nations and New Credit Reserves. The station has so far succeeded in pursing its goals because it is an example of empowering community development. The station was created and is controlled by community members and it has evolved within a framework of values that has long been in place in these communities and which remains a vital force in the social lives of residents.
Social Movement Organization Collective Action Frames and Press Receptivity: A Case Study of Land Use Activism in a Maryland County • Brian B. Feeney, Temple University • In this study focus groups were used to interview members of social movement organization (SMO), real estate developers and the local newspaper editor in a case study of land use politics in a suburbanizing Maryland county. The study found that SMOs have a greater barrier to entry to the newsnet to overcome, requiring them to act as surrogate reporters. Also, both groups complained of poor reporting due to the newspaper’s use of inexperienced reporters.
Being There: Using Ethnographic Methodology in the Study of Electronic Communities • Mark Geise, Houston and Bette Kauffman, Northeast Louisiana University • The authors explore issues of ethnography as applied to two Internet newsgroups. Historical and theoretical constructions most applicable to adapting the methodology to cmc are examined. Modifications and implementations, including a description of the text-based Internet communication and gaining entry to the alt.cyberpunk community are discussed. It examines problems encountered in soliciting informants and how an acceptable “look” is constructed. It speculated about “being there” in a cmc environment and future applications of “electronic ethnography.”
Essential & Constructed: Community and Identity in an Online Television Fandom • Cinda Gillilan, Colorado • Television zine fans create community based on identification with media-mediated images/stories online, and as internet use increases there communities grow larger, more diverse and more intimately connected. The paper examines how one online fan community manipulates material and symbolic discourses to produce belonging and meaning for its participants. The ability to define our lives/values is not a release from hegemony, patriarchy, heterosexism, etc., but it is a matter of (em)power(ment).
Interior Design Magazines as Neurotica • Kim Golombisky, South Florida • Interior design magazines equate home with leisure, a fantasy for female readers with jobs and families. Women’s magazines typically compel women to become neurotic about housekeeping and family. But decorating magazines represent neurotica, an erotic ideal of home wiped clean of the family who makes housework. However, this resistant version of home still encourages domesticity by erasing not only the family but also the reader’s labor that keeps the home so attractive.
Self as Panoptician: The X-Files, Spectatorship, and Discipline • John M. Groves, Oregon • Cultural studies research on television has often taken the form of textual or reception analysis that examines the television production as if it were a written text. This paper looks at the serial plot of the X-Files, but places that plot within the non-diegetic context of the viewing experience. The cinematic ‘look’ of the show creates a coherent ‘spectator’ position, calling for application of psychoanalytic film theory. This effect works with the conspiracy-oriented plot to create a viewer/text interaction which inverts subjective relations to discipline.
An Alternative to “Alternative Media” • James Hamilton, SUNY Geneseo • This study argues that traditionally conceived “mass” media are inherently incapable of playing a significant role in assisting alternative social and political movements, due to the necessary professionalization of their practice and the resulting separation of media workers from the people for whom they write. It concludes by suggesting an alternative basis for a theory and the practice of alternative media that may better fit the realities of political movements today.
Literary Journalism as an Epistemological Moving Target Within a Larger “Quantum Narrative” • John C. Hartsock, SUNY Cortland • The discourse of “literary journalism,” among other names, has proved difficult to define and identify. This paper suggests that such a circumstance is due to its being a kind of epistemological moving target and thus difficult to classify. It explores evidence of this, characterizes the form as a “narrative of the inconclusive present,” and ultimately locates it as a moving epistemological target within a larger “quantum narrative.”
Building a Heartline to America: Quiz Shows and the Ideal of Audience Participation in Early Broadcasting • Olaf Hoerschelmann, North Texas • This article investigates the development of quiz shows as experimental forms to explore the relationship between broadcast institutions, media texts, and audiences. During this period of instability in the broadcast industry, quiz shows create a particularly close and involved relationship with radio and television audiences. While early quiz shows thus offer unusual forms of interaction and participation for the audience, the stabilization of the network system in the early fifties changed the form and meaning of the genre and limited the audience to a more restricted viewing position.
Searching for a Voice of Authority: Journalism Between the Modern and Postmodern • Rick Jackson, Washington • Journalism, buffeted by hostility from the outside and by crumbling confidence from within, appears to be experiencing a crisis of cultural authority. This crisis emerges amid a complex set of tensions, what James Carey calls “between the modern and postmodern.” Though these tensions erode journalism’s epistemological confidence, the emergence of new models of journalism (public journalism) and professional conventions (narrative writing techniques) suggest ways in which journalism can begin to repair its cultural authority.
I Love Lucy and Ethel Mertz: An Expression of Internal Conflict and Pre-Feminist Solidarity • Darlene Jirikowic, Wisconsin-Milwaukee • While feminist literature has clearly documented both the pre-feminist and hegemonic influence in post-war comedies such as I Love Lucy, this paper intends to illustrate the importance of a supporting character such as Ethel Mertz. The internal conflict that marked women’s lives sometimes took the shape of feminine discourse between a key comedic character and secondary female character. It is through that dialogue, the interplay between the two women, that the complexity of postwar tension becomes apparent.
The Cadaverous Bad Boy As Dream-Shadow Trickster: Why Freddy Krueger Won’t Let Teens Rest In Peace • Paulette D. Kilmer, Toledo • The slasher films in the Nightmare on Elm Street series gained popularity about twenty years ago by featuring campy dialogue, a rogue anti-hero and a new dimension for terror: sleep. The villain, Freddy Krueger, quickly became a pop-cultural celebrity with his own TV show and line of merchandise. The paper examines that guru of gore in Jungian terms to place him in the ongoing process of myth making that defines humanity. The Freddy Krueger films embody parables about coming of age in a scary, technological world.
Messing: Information, Liminality, Dread • Nathaniel Kohn, Georgia • Written as a screenplay. A series of scenes. Known in Hollywood as a sequence. With/out con/sequences. Moving across borders. Thresholding. From conscious to unconscious. From mediated to permeated. In the second person, between first and third. Dialogic. Unsettling. Destablizing. In/form/ation, overloading, assualting. The dread, consuming. Autoethnography. Scenes from a. A so-called. Get a. Driving without a. Etc.
‘Brokaw on the Holodeck:’ The Future of the News Story in Cyberspace • Jack Lule, Lehigh University • In early 1997, Janet H. Murray, Senior Research Scientist in MIT’s Center for Educational Computing Initiatives, published a remarkable book, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Murray offered a vision of the computer as a spellbinding storyteller. She identified the aesthetics of digital narrative • it characteristic means of capturing beauty and giving pleasure. And she suggested rich paths for the future of narrative in a digital age. The purpose of this paper is to explore the implications of Hamlet on the Holodeck for the future of the news story.
Table for One: TV Screen as Eating Companion in a Public Space • Michael L. Maynard, Temple • This pilot study reports how students who eat in a campus food court that includes a large television screen configure themselves so as to face the screen. Based on qualitative analysis of how the screen interacts with students who are alone or in groups, the following roles were coded: screen as attention-getter, scene dominator, time marker, hypnotist, distracting element, eating companion, sleep inducing agent, seducer, ice breaker, time-filler, agent of conformity, non-demanding companion and keeper of social rhythm.
They’re Ba-ack: “Ghost Mate Movies” As Expressions of Mass Dreams and Cultural Norms • Patrick Meirick, Marquette University • This paper explores how “ghost mate movies” • movies in which a dead lover returns to the bereaved partner as a ghost • reflect both cultural norms about bereavement and group fantasies about recovering the lost mate. The movies fill an information void left by the death taboo. British and American ghost mate movies reinforce norms about detaching from the dead and moving on with life, but a Brazilian one suggests detaching from the dead isn’t necessary.
Earth First! and the Boundaries of Postmodern Environmental Journalism • Rick Clifton Moore, Boise State University • Modernistic assumptions have long been fundamental to journalistic practice. As those assumptions are increasingly questioned, scholars should consider the implications of alternative foundations, especially as they relate to communicating about important social issues. In this paper the author offers a theoretical discussion and brief qualitative analysis to better understand what postmodern communication (most visibly on the internet) might look like and the difficulties ahead for environment groups if they adopt anti-foundational and anti-narrative communication patterns.
Into the Field: A Narrative Account of Doing Audience Ethnography • Patrick D. Murphy, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville • This paper is a narrative account of the early stages of an ethongraphy of television viewers in central Mexico. The narrative details the events that shaped the direction of the inquiry, acknowledges the visibility and self-interest of the ethnographer, and describes the selection of and movements within the audiences represented in the study. The account demonstrates how the methodology which was developed was not based on a systematic design for finding a research “sample,” but rather the result of emerging relationships and contextual processes.
Reframing a House of Mirrors: Communication and Empowerment in a Community Leadership Program • Eleanor Novek, Monmouth University • Scholars assert that communities strengthen themselves by bringing residents together and mobilizing them to solve local problems. How does this happen? What communication practices enable individuals to act together for the common good? This paper explores the development and implementation of a community leadership program in the northeastern United States from a communication perspective, in order to help grassroots practitioners maximize the application of meaning production and discursive reframing as communication strategies for empowerment.
“Can We Be Excellent and Equal Too?” Cultural Capital, Silent Sponsors and Early PBS • Laurie Ouellette, Rutgers • Drawing from Bourdieu’s theory of class reproduction, this article examines cultural and economic contradictions underscoring early conceptions of PBS as an equalizing educational force. Comparing the debut of Sesame Street and Civilisation, I show how the goal of improving the lot of disadvantaged children ran counter to the motives of “silent sponsors” seeking to reach upscale consumers. This tension was compounded by class hierarchies constructed around PBS in the popular press and in station program guides.
“Gotcha!”: Sensationalism, Discourse and Public Affairs • Peter Parisi, Hunter College • Although sensationalism is typically equated with lurid, frivolous subject matter, research suggests it can also heighten public affairs expos s. Using discourse analysis, this paper examines these possibilities in a New York tabloid newspaper’s stories on Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s harassment of a gadfly who exposed an illicit traffic trap. Examining reporting, columns, editorials and headlines, it shows how sensationalism mutes and suppresses key public interest issues. The paper concludes exploring the possibility of counter-hegmonic sensationalism.
The Mythos of Cyberspace: Acceptable Use Policies and the Ideology of the Internet • Randall Patnode, North Carolina The rhetoric of the Internet suggests that the new medium will provide a host of benefits to society, including more democratic participation and grater economic prosperity. Beneath the rhetoric, however, is an ideology that often runs counter to these ideals. This paper argues that the underlying ideology of the Internet can be seen in the content of acceptable use policies used by public libraries and K-12 schools.
Korean Rap at the Cusp: A Proposal for Analyzing Relations of Power Soon-Chul Shin and Elizabeth P. Lester, Georgia • Among the many cultural products, pop music plays a uniquely significant role in terms of everyday life practices. One of the most distinctive characteristics of pop music is its “transnationality.” This paper focuses on the relationship between the pop music genres, rock and rap, and an issue of identity in Korean teen culture. U.S. rock and rap have been successfully articulated in the Korean pop field, and the Korean “teen bloc” has positively negotiated with the transnationality of U.S. pop culture.
The Cable Collective as Public Space: “New Directions for Women” • Linda Steiner, Rutgers University • Assuming that something like the public sphere is indispensable to democratic political practice, the question addressed here is whether the work of a collective that produces “feminist television programs” can be seen as representing agency in the public sphere. This paper highlights the efforts of group that produces, under the aegis of the National Organization of Women, a series called “New Directions for Women.” The programming is cablecast on cable television public access channels in three states.
Communications Policy Through Thick and Thin: Thick Descriptions as a Methodology for Democracy • Brad Thompson, Pennsylvania State University • This paper proposes the use of anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s “thick description” as a methodology for communications policy research. Ethnographies employing thick description would give voice to the concerns of ordinary citizens. They also would help make policy more accessible so the public could participate more meaningfully in policy making, thus enhancing prospects for democracy. A literature review found no instances of authors explicitly employing thick description in mass communications policy research.
Parental Support in an Information Age: Lessons from Parental Mediation of Rental Videos • Ron Warren, Arkansas • The onset of an “Information Age” poses new questions for parents’ control over children’s media use. This paper notes the increasing frequency with which parents rely on the physical environment of their home and media mix to help control children’s media habits. Through qualitative interviews of four families about their use of rental videotapes, the author concludes that there are important elements to be considered in future studies of new technology in the home.
Negotiated Fun? Audience Responses to TV Nation • Rita Zajacz, Indiana University • A racially mixed and two all white focus groups provided polyvalent interpretations of two TV Nation segments, which used humor and documentary techniques to get their strong political point across. While the racially mixed group discusses racism and the participants connected the topic to their lives, the all white groups provided an oppositional reading by attacking the motivation of the director and by attacking the structure of the segment they disagreed with.
Print friendly
