Introduction
P3: How can one do justice to the lived experience of people, while, at the same time, critically analyse discourses, which form the very stuff out of which our experiences are made?
P4: How can one criticize discourses, which constitute ‘reality’, such as anorexia, while, at the same time, make statements about historical and political reality?
“the British variant of cultural studies interest in ‘resistance'”.
P6: “Resistance underlined the creative potential of popular cultural forms, such as youth cultures and movements, to challenge dominant ideologies and society, even if this potential was not necessarily interpreted to lead to radical, social, change. “
P7: “If one wants to capture and convert the uniqueness of and nuances of a life-story of an anorexic woman, one needs to carefully consult and apply the new ethnographic body of work on ways of studying and writing about different lived worlds. […] Experience is also shaped by social discourses and by the historical and social context in which it is located. In order to capture these other dimensions of the experience, one needs different methodological approaches and methods, such as discourse analysis or historical research.
Combining methodologies in cultural studies
P: 11 The trademark of the cultural studies approach to empirical research has been an interest in the interplay between lived experience, texts or discourses, and the social context. [Bingo? This is essentially what I have been trained to do? ] […] However is our interest in cultures that are different to our own warranted and can we do justice to those cultures? How can we critically analyse culture in a situation where we as scholars, and research as an institution, are an integral part of this culture an its struggles?
Classical Birmingham period works on media audiences (Morley), subcultures (Stuart Hall, Dick Hebdige) and cultures of working class boys and girls. (Angela McRobbie)
Tensions: one cannot bring together a phenomenological/hermeneutic desire to ‘understand’ the creative lived world of another person/group and the distanced, critical structuralist interest in analysing linguistic tropes which guide peoples’ perceptions and understandings. Also realist tendency to find out how the world of reality ‘is’. In the 60s women, black people, postcolonial thinkers and so on have accused researchers and institutions of not depicting their realities but using them to back up their political/scholarly projects.
P.14: “We have awakened to the early 21st century, structured by a new division between exhilarated talk about multiculturalism and possibilities of creating and disseminating alternative, previously silenced knowledges and cultures, and steep inequalities and mistrust and feuding between different groups of people.
P.18: “The positivist criterion of truthfulness or validity is understood to be universal. This means the same rules of truthfulness apply whether the research wants to capture ‘objective reality’ (social facts, economic developments) or people’s subjective or intersubjective experiences (the meanings people give to their lives and actions)”
Validities > validity. Being aware of multiple validities asks us to be more critically aware of what drives our research. Acknowledging that there are many ways of making sense of social phenomena requires one to create multidimensional, nuanced and tentative ways of understanding one’s object of study. Rather than there being one universal rule of of research there are multiple rules and we need to be aware of how they make us relate to reality differently.
Early cultural studies methodological approaches:
Hermeneutic: how well the research ‘captures’ the lived realities of others. ie. a true account of samoan life.
- Dialogic validity, accompanies this approach. It requires: truthfulness (collaborative research with those being studied), self-reflexivity (researchers being aware of their own cultural/contextual baggage), polyvocality (researchers are not studying one reality but many). Doesn’t claim to have an objective vantage point. Main criteria of validity here is how well the researcher fulfils the ethical imperative to be true to other people’s realities.
- Poststructuralist: assessing how well the research unravels problematic social discourses that mediate the way we perceive reality and other people. eg. unmasking of colonialist tropes that describe Samoa. Strands of this approach:
- Postmodern excess: ie Baudrillard. Excess of discourse and infinite ways of approaching reality.
- Genealogical historicity: eg. Foucault. Challenging truths by exposing their historicity.
- Deconstructive: eg. Derrida. Questioning the binaries that organise our thought in order to expose their hidden politics.
Poststructuralist approach says there is no unbiased way of comprehending the world. Good research exposes historicity, political investments, omissions, blind spots and social truths. Good researchers also have an awareness of their own historical, political and social investments and continually reflect on these.
- Realist/ contexualist: how well the research understands the social, economic, political context and connections of the phenomenon it is studying. eg. examining the power structures that shape the lives of Samoans.
Situating the phenomenon of study within wider social, political, global contexts. Committed to a form of realism as it must make statements about how the world ‘really is’. Criteria for this research:
- Sensitivity to social context: carefully analysing the historical events, statistics, developments using different resources and views.
- Awareness of historicity: research needs to understand its own historicity, ie to be aware and critically evaluate its own role in the wider context.
There are newer approaches though.
Combining methodologies
Triangulation
Triangulation when understood as a method for discovering truth is not useful for combining these methodologies because their basic premise in each case is to problematise simple ideas of truth. Dialogism tries to find the true realities for the people studied, and not whether those people spoke the ‘truth’. Genealogy would be sceptical of the ability to find “truth” within institutions such as archives as these reproduce colonial/patriarchal power etc. Contextualists believe that research can never be objective as it is always part of and shapes the social landscapes, such as colonialism, that is studies.
Positivism, whereby there is considered to be a fixed reality that research can attempt to get closer to, has widely been questioned. Research and ideas not only describe phenomena but transform them, ie Marxism. Research is also inherently political, so thinking about methodology (rather than simply methods that get you closer to ‘the truth’) helps us to become aware of the politics and worldviews embedded in our research approaches so that we can do better and more egalitarian research.
Research as a prism (p. 25)
Thinking of research as a prism means viewing reality as fluid (ontology – what exists?) and that research constructs the realities that it studies (epistemology – how can we know about the existence of a thing). Prismatic research argues for multiple realities rather than there being a singular way of looking at reality. Scholars working in this field often work to present alternative realities that contradict accepted scientific truths. They challenge white, male, western scholarship and write for and from different perspectives.
A prismatic approach could see a combination of dialogic validity and deconstructive validity. However, it doesn’t work for constructivist methodology because there is a stubbornly real dimension to the social, economic and political forces experienced by people. Whether or not we experience these differently, they all still effect us so in that sense there can’t be multiple realities there. Prismatic approach can therefore help to enhance understandings of different realities, but it is not well suited to analysing how political contexts for example effect us similarly or differently.
And if the problem with positivism is its belief in there being one truth, prismatic research has the opposite problem of there being endless amounts of truths.
Material-semiotic perspective (p.27)
Derrida V Foucault: D said that enlightenment era “rationality” legitimised itself though a definition of madness or “irrationality”. F said that it wasn’t just a linguistic operation, as it had real life effects on those deemed “mad”.
The material semiotic view sees the nature of reality (ontology) and the way in which we can know it (epistemology) is different from the positivist and prismatic views. It doesn’t see the see reality as fixed entity that can be described (positivist) nor does it see reality as a fluid symbolic clay to be moulded into different views (prismatic) – it understands the relationship between research and reality to be interactive. So research can create worlds, but it reality also exists beyond the research and it can ‘fight back’. Research is always facilitated and constrained by the social and material environment and needs to understand these before it can change them.
Like the prismatic view, the material semiotic view seeks to include a wide variety of perspectives but not simply to allow allow voices/realities to be heard but to enhance more equal, scientific, social and economic structures. Research is always political and so we need to be aware of the realities we are creating, out of whom and for whom. This avoids narrow-minded research, that perpetuates inequality. It requires the researcher to use a rigorous and systematic method that facilitates taking into account and critically evaluating different views of the phenomena being studied. This systematic collecting and assessing of perspectives helps to produce research that is rigorous and more aware of its political and ethical implications.
Material semiotics’s goal is to combine different methodologies and their respective validities to produce better and more inclusive accounts of the world. Dialogic allows us to tune into specific perspectives of different groups. Deconstruction helps to critically analyse discourses. Contextualism allows us to understand how phenomena are intertwined with social, political, and economic structures. Combining these fosters ‘strong objectivity’ and more accurate and egalitarian knowledge.
However Saukko points out that this approach has a commitment to being scientific and adheres to a traditional synthesising research style that translates other perspectives into a scientific view that obeys a logic of detachment and control. In this sense it’s a little at odds with the notion of inclusiveness and is weaker than prismatic research that allows for an appreciation of texture and nuance of different worlds. ‘Strong objectivity’ requires an encompassing view, whereas prismatic research underlines the importance of capturing the particular.
Methodological dialogues (multi perspectival research) (p.29)
Delueze and Guatarri A thousand plateaus p. 530 – 550 writings about rhytmns
A sound (and jazz) based analogy for how the different methodological and political perspectives can be brought into dialogue with each other to create multidimensional research that is capable of attending to the complexity of social phenomena. This research strategy does not try to come up with an enlightened view (positivism) or to acknowledge that there are multiple view (prisms). Rather multi perspectival research aims to hold different perspectives in creative tension with one another. A dialogic or multi perspectival standpoint considers things as not being good or bad but complicated. It helps to avoid research with one-dimensional judgements.
Conclusions
Cultural studies is concerned with the three pronged interest in lived experience, discourses/texts, and the social context. The challenge is that these areas have different methodological approaches: hermeneutic/phenomenological, (post)structuralist, and contextualist. These approach may complement but also undermine each other. Each has an associated validity, and together creates a set of validities. We have seen how triangulation is not an appropriate way of combining these, because it’s rooted in the need to create “the truth” whereas each of these views has a different stance on what that means. Prisms doesn’t entirely work either. Saukko therefore favours a dialogic approach to combine them, as this would be attentive to the lived, cultural as well as social and material aspects of our realities, and acknowledge that there may be disjunctures between them. It would aim to cultivate modes of social and cultural analysis that would be both sensitive to different realities and capable of building bridges between them. It would also encourage a politics that brings different groups, concerns and views together to build a more common, egalitarian and pluralist world.