Researching intersectionality in media studies: Theoretical approaches, methods and applications in communication and media research practice

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-360
Author(s):  
Assimina Gouma ◽  
Johanna Dorer

Abstract Intersectionality is a critical approach to theorizing and exploring the interlocking of social inequality categories such as gender, race, ethnicity, class and sexuality in various levels of policies, social discourses, institutions and subject positionings. While social discourses do not arise in isolation from an all-encompassing media world, media, as co-producers of social power relations, are particularly interesting for the concept of intersectionality. However, the intersectional approach is rather a research field at the margins of German communication studies. This article discusses the theoretical prerequisites and methodological implications of intersectionality and provides examples of how an empirical implementation is possible in media research.

Author(s):  
Lesia Heneraliuk

The paper offers to extend the historical time frame of modern cross-media studies formation. The start of this research direction dates not from the 1950-60s, as it is usually considered to be, but from the early 20th century, the ‘synthesis epoch’. Development of neosyncretism was accompanied by creating bright theories in aesthetics and art criticism and promoting the concept of arts’ interaction by the humanities. Three scholars — H. Wolfin, M. Dessoir, and A. Warburg were the pioneers of the modern interdisciplinary research field. The author considers that the range of influences on the cross-media studies in literary criticism should be broadened with the works of philosophers and art critics who started to use the cross-media strategies (not the term itself) when analyzing the works of literature and arts. The leading role belonged to the Iconology school (E. Panofsky, R. Wittkower, E. Gombrich et al.). Their methods were based on applying tools of various disciplines. In the first place, they took into account connections between literature and visual arts. Henceforth, philology interpolated the iconological method into visual and comparative studies. One of the contemporary leading cross-media researchers, W. J. T. Mitchell, named his first book “Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology” (1986). In the middle of the 20th century, philosophy had a considerable influence on the cross-media research formation. In particular, literary critics referred to phenomenology (the works by M. Dufrenne, R. Ingarden. M. Merleau-Ponty) and actualized the analysis of interacting arts once more. A visual turn in culture caused growing attention to the issues of apperceptive cross-sensual experience. The newest works in the fields of perception psychology, gestalt psychology, neurolinguistics, and neurophysiology also support the general cross-media theory. It is possible that, due to the mutual influences of sciences, a uniform platform for studying syncretic phenomena will be created.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Starosielski

Abstract This article poses the question: what are the ends of media studies? It discusses a turn to “nature” and the elements that has pushed media studies beyond its traditional objects and subjects. While the conceptualization of environments and bodies as communicative substrates offers new avenues for media research, mediation has also been taken up in a wide range of disciplinary and intellectual contexts. Rather than establishing limits or an essential core of media studies, the article suggests that media scholars take an etic orientation and attend to the questions whose invisibility is constitutive of the field. Using the example of undersea cable systems, the article describes some of the many conceptual, institutional, and pedagogical ends of media analysis.


2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 272
Author(s):  
Alan Cocker

Reinventing the Media, by Graeme Turner. London: Routledge. 2015. 158 pages. ISBN 978-1-138-02070-2AS A member of a School of Communication Studies seeking to refresh its curricula, the publication of Graeme Turner’s book Re-Inventing the Media is very timely. According to the publishers, Turner ‘takes on the task of rethinking how media studies approaches the whole of the contemporary mediascape.’ This statement should not lead the reader to expect that Turner is arguing for a root and branch overturning of how we approach and teach the media. Instead. it can be argued that this is rather a sober ‘re-think’ that seeks to address both the elements of change and continuity in teaching communication or media studies today.


2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 165-187 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ágnes Pethő

Abstract The article attempts a brief overview and evaluation of the main theoretical approaches that have emerged in the study of cinematic intermediality in the last decades since intermediality has become an established research term in media studies. It distinguishes three major paradigms in theorizing intermedia phenomena and outlines some of the directions of change in the intermedial strategies of recent films. It identifies in contemporary cinema a tendency to add new dimensions to the relations of in-betweenness regarding both the connection of cinema to reality and its inter-art entanglements. Finally, the article describes a new type of intermediality, which integrates elements of trans-textuality, creating a format of expanded cinema within cinema. This strategy is presented in the context of Eastern European cinema through a short case study of Cristi Puiu’s film, Sieranevada (2016).


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 72-87
Author(s):  
Victoria A. Chervaneva ◽  

The status of the language of folklore is a theoretical problem of Folklore Studies that has a long history, but it has become even more relevant recently due to the expansion of the Folklore Studies research field. Traditionally, characteristic features of the language of folklore were defined in relation to dialect and literary language, and the researchers supposed that the language of folklore is supradialectical phenomenon, like the literary language of dialect speakers. However, observations of linguistic organization of oral prose with a focus on reliability (mythological stories, etc.) show that these theoretical approaches are not applicable to such texts. The language of these texts is the colloquial (dialect, vernacular, or literary) speech existing in a dialogic mode and possessing all the structural features of spontaneous colloquial speech. The article suggests to distinguish between “the language of folklore” and “the language of folk tradition”, that is, the language of the genres of traditional folklore (songs, epics, fairy tales, etc.) – structurally ordered, “polished” by numeroius repetitions in the process of transmission, with a clearly expressed aesthetic function, and the language of everyday communication in which texts expressing traditional knowledge emerge and exist.


2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 204-215
Author(s):  
Halina Grzymała-Moszczyńska ◽  
Maria Kanal

The goal of our article is to present the subject of forced migration as a very interesting and socially relevant research field that could contribute to further development of the psychology of religion. We focus on further development of the toolbox of the psychology of religion, seeking further application of Sunden’s role theory and introducing new approaches originating from indigenous and environmental psychology. After a short review of existing research, new theoretical approaches, and methodologies are presented, along with suggestions for improving the validity of qualitative research pertaining to the role of religion at all stages of the migration process.


Author(s):  
Manuel Menke ◽  
Christian Schwarzenegger

It is an old, yet, accurate observation that the ‘newness’ of media is and most probably will continue to be a catalyst for research in media and communication studies. At the same time, there are numerous academic voices who stress that studying media change demands an awareness of the complexities at play interweaving the new with the old and the changes with the continuities. Over the last decades, compelling theoretical approaches and conceptualizations were introduced that aimed at grasping what defines old and new media under the conditions of complex, disruptive media change. Drawing from this theoretical work, we propose an empirical approach that departs from the perception of media users and how they make sense of media in their everyday affairs. The article argues that an inquiry of media change has to ground the construction of media as old or new in the context of lifeworlds in which media deeply affect users on a daily basis from early on. The concept of media ideology (Gershon, 2010a, 2010b) is used to investigate notions of ‘oldness’ and ‘newness’ people develop when they renegotiate the meaning of media for themselves or collectively with others. Based on empirical data from 35 in-depth interviews, distinct ways how the relativity but also relationality of old and new media are shaped against each other are identified. In the analysis, the article focuses on the aspects of rhetoric, everyday experiences, and emotions as well as on media generations, all of which inform media ideologies and thereby influence how media users define old and new media.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 357-370 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens Schröter

AbstractIn the call for the special issue for the EAEPE Journal, we can find the word “scenario.” The question is if the authors can imagine scenarios in which “potential strategies for the appropriation of existing capitalist infrastructures […] in order to provoke the emergence of post-capitalist infrastructures” can be described. Obviously, the call verges on the border of science fiction—and this is not a bad thing. Diverse strands of media studies and science and technology studies have shown (e.g., Schröter 2004; Kirby 2010; Jasanoff and Kim 2015; McNeil et al. 2017) that not only the development of science and (media) technology is deeply interwoven in social imaginaries about possible outcomes and their implicated futures, but there is a whole theoretical tradition in which societies as such are fundamentally constituted by imaginary relations (Castoriadis 1975/2005). But in all these discussions, one notion very seldom appears: that of an “imaginary economy,” meaning a collectively held system of more or less vague or detailed ideas, what an economy is, how it works, and how it should be (especially in the future; but see the somewhat different usage recently in Fabbri 2018). The aim of the paper is to outline a notion of “imaginary economy” and its necessary functions in the stabilization of a given economy, but even more so in the transformation to another economy—how should a transformation take place if there’s not at least a vague image where to go? Of course, we could also imagine a blind evolutionary process without any imaginary process but that seems not to be the way in which human societies—and economies—work. Obviously a gigantic research field opens up—so in the proposed paper, only one type of “imaginary economy” can be analyzed: It is the field that formed recently around the proposed usages and functions of 3D printing. In publications as diverse as Eversmann (2014) and Rifkin (2014), the 3D printer operates as a technology that seems to open up a post-capitalist future—and thereby it is directly connected to the highly imaginary “replicator” from Star Trek. In these scenarios, a localized omnipotent production—a post-scarcity scenario (see Panayotakis 2011)—overcomes by itself capitalism: But symptomatically enough, questions of work, environment, and planetary computation are (mostly) absent from these scenarios. Who owns the templates for producing goods with 3D printers? What about the energy supply? In a critical and symptomatic reading, this imaginary economy, very present in a plethora of discourses nowadays, is deconstructed and possible implications for a post-capitalist construction are discussed.


Author(s):  
Madhavi Murty

Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s intellectual projects have consistently foregrounded a deep and rigorous critique of power—the power of capitalism, colonialism, and racialization, ethnic nationalism and heteropatriarchy—and have established the significance of feminist perspectives for struggles for economic and social justice. Her work is generative and provocative for critical cultural communication scholarship in providing methodological tools with which to think about the nexus between power and knowledge, discourse, the appropriation of the local and the particular for the formation of the global and vice versa, the formation of universals abstracted from their histories and social formations such as the “Third World Woman,” identity, and historical materialism. Hers is an intellectual project, grounded in feminism, that takes on the thorny task of carving out solidarities through critique. Her project delineates its own ideological standpoint and formulates a feminist historical materialism that strives methodologically to hold local particularities and their global implications in a tight grip. Mohanty’s work is, in fact, a provocation to formulate modes of analysis that are founded on a careful epistemological critique, such that it has often been used most productively to unravel the formulation of ethnocentric universalism. As such, Mohanty’s work has been particularly relevant for the fields of black cultural studies, feminist media studies, postcolonial communication studies, transnational media studies, race, and communication within critical cultural communication studies.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document