I was delighted that Georgina Born, an anthropologist from Cambridge University who has written books based on fieldwork undertaken at the French avant-garde music institution IRCAM and the BBC, accepted my invitation to speak to my "entertainment studies" class yesterday. Her "teaching lecture" was entitled "Doing ethnographies of cultural production and cultural institutions" and judging from the feedback coming from graduate students in the Communication program and from students in the Ph.D. program in Cultural Mediations , it was clear that she had struck a chord.
Professor Born's talk confirmed four things I had already been thinking about:
1. Communication studies can be loose when it comes to questions of methodology. This makes it hard to expect the same level of rigour from our students.
2. The use of "ethnography" within cultural studies can be terribly imprecise, since for many the term is a fancy way of saying that the researcher does interviews or as a way to differentiate one's work from the dreaded activities of political economists. In either case, these tendencies are both epistemologically problematic and lacking in ethical reflection.
3. Participant observation would yield some fascinating insights about the way cultural policy decisions made in Ottawa (or across the river in Gatineau, to be precise) actually functions in the day-to-day activities of Canadian cultural institutions, provided certain conditions were met.
4. Interdisciplinarity is a fairly safe position for the scholar to latch on to. However, interdisciplinary research is not a methodology, and it is also difficult to do in such a way that it promotes more conversation across the disciplines. Dr. Born's work is exemplary in that regard, judging from the way her work is picked up by cultural studies scholars, anthropologists, communications researchers, sociologists, and critical theorists. Is this another venue where these kinds of productive conversations taking place?
More media next time....
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