hegemony rules

Ralina Joseph
Talked about her experience as a ethnic studies scholar, and the role of "packaging" herself within communication. UCSD ethnic studies program explored the constructed nature of these categories - questions of power and inequality have to be central. Not essentializing is critical here. Interdisciplinary - multiple modes of inquiry.

She noted the difficulty of using the term "methodologies" when discussing cultural studies work. Communication departments are really into the issue of method in order for work to be valid. Cultural studies was rooted in the Birmingham School - explicitly political, radical, and interested in social reconstruction.

Methods for cultural studies:

• Textual analysis (interpretative or content analysis) - semiotics, ideological analyses, Marxist approach - get beneath the surface the dennotative to explore the connotative. Sees culture as a series of narratives, and texts become cultural artifacts - linking to dominant discourses in society. Texts create identities and subject positions for readers. Joseph suggests she works within the interpretative analysis tradition.
  
• Political economy - cultural studies is deeply rooted in this area. Analyzing the means of production, who's financing the show, the underwriters, etc.
  
• Audience reception - watching people interact with a text to understand their responses.

Madhavi Murty
(Eek! I missed half of this presentation because I was handing off graded papers...thus it's incomplete.)

Murty is interested in subject formation and spaces of resistance - examining the texts (autobiography), films, mainstream media and how the construct and commodify certain subjects within Indian culture.

Theory and method might be intertwined (Foucault, Hall, Gramsci, and work from Black cultural studies) - see texts as constituting the political and the social. Like Giorgia, she mentioned that no one considered her a critical/cultural scholar until coming to the US. Mentioned Leah Fernandez(?) - South Asian studies, political scientist who studied the jute mill workers in India.

Interested in how we categorize and reify certain categories of knowing.

Fahed Al-Sumait
Interested in issues between the Middle East and the West (broadly speaking). Issues in this arena inherently speak to a critical perspective. Al-Sumait's thesis concerned issues of media use/consumption and their influence on stereotypes of the Middle East.

There are not a lot of scholars looking at exactly the same sort of area that he's working within. However, issues of power and representation always come into play into his work. As far as epistemological and methodological approaches, he's most interested in mixing methods to illuminate his research interests. In Kuwait, Al-Sumait is often asked about his background. In the US it's the name that "gives him away" - in both cases, issues of identity are foregrounded.

Rebecca Clark
Clark is a "self-consciously" critical scholar. She's interested in issues of subjectivity and the constructed nature of identity. Her current work focuses on white hip hop (as represented by Fergie and Gwen Stefani). Clark is interested in how white feminist moves might reinscribe whiteness. The issue here is that it is possible for these individuals to be both resistive and hegemonic at the same time. Her thesis was on white masculinity built into hip hop crossover stars.

Clark sees herself as a postcolonial scholar, which she views as crossing boundaries of all sorts (bringing in issues of gender, sexuality, knowledge/power regime, etc.) Her background is in critical rhetoric - the aim here is to unmask discourse of power.

Q&A
Crispin mentioned that the narrative around labels and hierarchy is lame, but we know they're part of the academy right now. But it's a tremendous privilege to be able to even complain about labels.

Tema mentioned that she thinks the exciting place is where tensions happen at once: where people can talk about whales, for example, by saying, "what a great show." This both reinscribes a paradigm where nature "performs" for humans and yet, is also maybe the only way for us to really show our appreciation for the human/non-human boundary.

Exclusionary practices within the scholarship of this area - Gina suggested that there's an affinity for famous scholars right now. How do people get to be the "superstars"? Kate noted that there can be some really positive things about having folks who can reach out beyond the academy.

This brings up issues of politics and writing. Deborah Cameron authored an article where she said we're moving from ethical work to advocacy, but then the critical move is empowerment (doing work with people).