Crispin Thurlow
What does critical mean? (theoretical, methodological, object of study)
Everyone can have a different perspective on this... Points of departure - rhetorical, discourse, and cultural studies (maybe this is a useful way of mapping the terrain)
Commonalities - spun by one of two turns:
- ethnographic - focuses on the local and idiosyncratic
- discursive - social construction of the world; material life
- or not?
We're all about interdisciplinary work who are attending.Most people here are interested in popular culture, but this isn't the only thing going on. Issues - community, identity, etc., as processional notions.
Crispin handed out some great handouts on critical theory. These talked about the critical literary theory (Richter - The Critical Tradition) and critical *social* theory (Frankfurt School - Marxist, post-Marxist, etc.). The second handout had a super family tree of critical theory (which I just posted at Flickr). Crispin suggests that there's a move beyond the post-modernist to the "neo-Marxist" traditions in feminist, queer, and post-colonial theory.
Gina Neff
Neff is interested in critical approaches to organizations and technology. Her work is not discursive, rhetorical, or even critical. Within organizational communication there's a central focus on the role of power.
Areas of interest:
- Overarching shifts in capitalism in the "new economy" - wants to understand the relationship between local practice and global structure (and how do we connect the shifting nature of power between the "individual" and the "organization" and larger macro-structures
- What voices have access to the creation of technology? Who creates the structures/affordances within technology?
- Power structures within organizations - Neff suggests this is most clearly identified with critical organizational communication.
Very easy to do interdisciplinary work -- very hard to do it well. How do we work within these constraints as critical scholars? How do we frame our work (in intelligable terms) and join the conversations productively.
We should start with the questions and then figure out the tools we need to answer those questions. We do need to provide evidence and argumentation that convinces other academics. (Meta comment: what about others outside the academy?)
Tema Milstein
How do we construct certain ways of "knowing" about the environment? How do these discourses play out? Milstein mentioned a number of ways this is being considered from areas like ecofeminism, science studies, ecopsychology, and environmental justice. Understanding the ways that nature is "constructed" becomes the focus of critical theory in this area. Environmental Communication Yearbook is the place where this is happening.
Milstein's dissertation concerns whale watching. She has conducted fieldwork in the San Juan Islands. She hopes to illuminate the dialogical nature of the communication between humans and whales. Symbolic construction of brochures/web sites around whale watching.
Deb Kaplan
Kaplan is interested in the following:
- Neoliberal discourse of social inequality
- How does the media define global poverty?
- Where is there resistance?
A couple of current studies:
Case study: how homeless camp and local newspaper discuss the changing nature of the homeless within AZ
Tent cities as a beginning of a "grassroots" - uses Maluchi's framework of semiotics, so tent cities would be seen as "signs"
New economy as a discourse - suppresses the new economy's poverty turn of welfare from a universal social provision to a social disease/inner pathology.
Kaplan chooses not to label her work, but hopes to achieve some sense of the contextuality of these serious issues. Tries to take questions from the social world - and how these questions play out in the real world. Kaplan uses a grounded theory approach to understand these issues.
Leah Sprain
"I make critical movees, but a critical approach does not guide my interpreations or research questions." Sprain doesn't go to critical theory to interpret actions within social justice movements. Ethnography of communication - there's a commitment to doing cross-cultural analysis. She's a close reader of texts, drawing on theory secondarily after exploring the texts themselves.
Can enthnographers of communication be critical? There is a lot of debate here - one criticism might be that researchers would look for things there that might not be seen by the participants themselves. Selecting and taking seriously those who are marginalized may be one way ethnographers of communication actually make a critical move. The big issue is do you move to interpreting participant meanings to saying they're "good" or "bad."
Panel 1 Q&A
Can you go into research without theory? Giorgia suggested that we can "read" culture or "read" texts is actually a critical move. Deb suggested that we need to "discipline" the theoretical so we can actually "discover" something. The discovery makes the whole enterprise worthwhile - and Neff added that makes it research.
Ralina argued that often theory and criticism are conflated. She suggested this might be part of the "disabling" effects of high theory ("What Celi knows you should know" - Barbara Cristensan). (Meta: this reminds me of Nakamura's article in Critical Cyberculture Studies.)
(Meta: What about reflexivity? Can we deconstruct our thoughts to the point of ridiculousness?) Reflexivity as "bias"? Researcher's positionality within the research - not biases/limitations. Ralina suggested historicizing and acknowlogizing subject position (she suggested "Racing research - resarching race").
What is considered research? Does it have to be the idea that results are generalizable?
Crispin argued that part of critical theory is its openness to being clear about where we're coming from and how we're engaging theory. We categorize and create themes - we generate the data we're investigating.
