Qualitative Studies 1999 Abstracts
Qualitative Studies Division
The American Girl Dolls: Constructing American Girlhood Through Representation And Identity • Carolina Acosta-Alzuru, Georgia • The American Girl dolls, books, and related products created manufactured, and marketed by Pleasant Company of Middleton, Wisconsin-is an enormously successful line of girls’ paraphernalia that, until recently, was sold only by mail-order catalog. Dolls, books and catalogs-seemingly innocent artifacts and texts-can be deeply ideological. They have the power to reinforce a common sense of sorts that, in reality, could be yet another dose of a dominant ideology that devalues and debases women.
Source Diversity After the Telecommunications Act of 1996: Media Oligarchs begin to Colonize Cyberspace • Jeffrey Layne Blevins,Ohio • Through integration of different types of media, corporate conglomerations can produce a preponderance of the information and entertainment that circulates through the media. While the Internet is often seen as being able to counteract this locus of control, this study shows that Cyberspace is the next destination for corporate colonies. By tracking corporate expansion into Cyberspace it seems that the Internet will mainly function as yet another outlet for mainstream media.
Reflecting the American Dream: Walker Evans on 1930’s Advertising • Bonnie Brennen, Virginia Commonwealth University • This paper focuses on the depression-era advertising images created by the quintessential American photographer Walker Evans. Walker’s photographs of printed and hand-made signs, billboards, and posters suggest the ironic presence of advertising in twentieth century industrial society, offering a critique of contemporary society, and illustrating a “structure of feeling” relating to the development of advertising in the United States.
Evaluating the New Marketplace of Ideas: An Examination of Cyberspace, the CDA & the Postmodern Condition • Justin Brown, Pennsylvania State University • The reasoning behind overturning the Communications Decency Act (CDA) recasts marketplace of ideas theory with an euphoric rhetoric of endless possibilities. While a new free trade of ideas may be upon us, the CDA also illustrates the difficulties applying current law to the Internet, a medium which creates its own virtual borders and standards. Despite the potential liberating features of cyberspace, questions remain as to how it will contribute and shape the public sphere.
The Bookstore Reading Group: Members, Support, and Benefits • Kelli Burns, Florida • In an era characterized by the use of television and computer technology, an unlikely cultural phenomenon is occurring. This phenomenon is the reading group, also called a book club or book group, and it has been gaining momentum among today’s readers. A case study of a women’s book club was used to understand how book clubs serve the needs of members and how bookstores support these needs for self-serving reasons.
Ethics and Politics in Qualitative Research • Clifford Christians, Illinois • In John Stuart Mill’s philosophy of social science, methods are amoral. Conceptions of the good life are outside the experimental domain. In Max Weber, the distinction between political judgments and scientific neutrality gains canonical status. The rational validation of utilitarian ethics is compatible with value free inquiry, and aids in generating the social science apparatus of university procedures, IRBs and codes of ethics. The epistemological crisis in this instrumental model can be resolved by feminist communitarian ethics of interpretive sufficiency.
Disabling or Enabling? Reading Bodies, Technologies, and the Borg of Star Trek • Mia Consalvo, Iowa • This paper examines one popular representation of cyborgs-the Borg of Star Trek-using cybertheory and disability theory to better understand current cultural beliefs about bodies and technologies. The paper argues that the Borg challenge many dualisms we have constructed. The Borg both challenge and reinforce the notion of a mind/body split. The Borg reflect many of our own myths about our bodies-that we can easily control them, and rework them to suit ourselves.
Ally McBeal vs. Hollywood’s Male Gaze-Round One • Brenda Cooper, Utah State • Through an explication of the female gazes underlying the narrative structure of the new Fox primetime hit, Ally McBeal, this study offers explanations for the wide appeal of the television series among women. Significantly, the program’s female gazes appropriate the dominant male gazes of mainstream Hollywood by using mockery as a narrative device to illustrate the sexism inherent in the male gaze and its hegemonic patriarchal constructions of female and male sexuality.
Red-baiting, Regulation and the Broadcast Industry: A Revisionist History of the “Blue Book” • Chad Dell, Monmouth University • The FCC’s only attempt to define the “public interest” responsibilities of broadcasters came in the 1940s policy known as the “Blue Book.” This paper refutes historian’s claims that the Blue Book was informally adopted by the industry. In fact, the broadcast industry launched an incendiary campaign to defeat the policy initiative, including a Communist witch hunt targeting its authors. This legacy remains visible in the practices of the broadcast industry that purports to serve us.
American Journalism Vs. The Poor, A Research Review And Analysis • Paula Reynolds, Washington • Critics argue American journalism misrepresents the poor as behaviorally-flawed people and fails to draw a connection between poverty and the political economic system. This has implications for public perception, behavior and policy toward the poor. A review and analysis of the available research shows that the misrepresentation has held true historically and contemporarily, though contradictions are also evident Much is missing from the available research, including appropriate connections to other areas of mass communication scholarship.
Packaging Culture: A Textual Analysis of Travel Journalism Or Television • Elfriede Fursich, Boston College • This paper presents a textual analysis of the Discovery-owned cable outlet Travel Channel and its programs Rough Guide, Lonely Planet, Travelers. I focus on the depictions of travel and tourism between modernity and postmodernity, on strategies of representing Others and on the impact of these shows as global media texts. I especially examine the limited potential of global commercial television to address the problematic issues of cross-cultural contact and mass tourism.
Spatial Concepts of TV as Place: Toward a Critical Phenomenology of Mediated Human Geography • Kim Golombisky, South Florida • Television viewing literature reveals six conceptualizations of TV as place: home theater, family hearth, imagined community, armchair tourism, fantasyland, and social worlds. The author observes space and place are largely missing from communication study, suggests communication technologies like television do alter the ways people organize and experience place and space, and recommends a critical phenomenology of media geographies to locate and displace our communication-dependent and evolving spatial concepts.
Textually Mapping Newspaper Discourse: A Report From The Field • Joseph Harry, Slippery Rock University and James H. Wittebols, Niagara University • A ‘textual mapping’ of two newspaper articles produced by competing newspapers, regarding a high-profile environmental conflict, was conducted to track a variety of comparative linguistic structures. These include rhetorical strategies, argumentative claims, ideological content and narrative schemas. The mapping process, based in critical discourse analysis, involves linking key words and synonyms in a way that reveals content decisions and the discursive, rhetorical logic of the newspaper as text.
Spooks, Spies, and Control Technologies in The X-Files • Kevin Howley, Northeastern University • At times the unprecedented success of and rabid fan loyalty for The X-Files borders on the paranormal. Not surprisingly, then, explanations of the program’s significance are as plentiful as The X-Files’ (in)famous conspiracy theories. Drawing on the work of James Beniger (1986), the author argues that The X-Files expresses fundamental concerns over social, political, and psychological control and articulates deep-seated cultural anxieties toward various forms of control technologies.
Inverted Pyramids Versus Hypertexts: A Qualitative Study of Readers’ Responses to Competing Narrative Forms • Robert Huesca, Brenda Dervin, John Burwell, Denise Drake, Ron Nirenburg, Robin Smith and Nicholas Yeager, Trinity University • The advent of new communication technologies has generated a robust and provocative research literature examining the implications of hypertext on the conventions of reporting and writing. This paper explores the viability of the hypertext form for journalism by asking readers to compare a conventional, online news article with a redesigned, hypertext version of it. The findings reinforce some traditional values and routines of the press, while suggesting reinvention and expansion of the roles, functions, and practices of journalists.
The Forgotten Americans: Issues Of Exclusion In Historic Newspaper Obituaries • Janice Hume, Kansas State University • Aristotle wrote of the constancy of virtues, that they do not follow changes of fortune, but should be accessories of man’s life as a whole. “Among these (virtuous) activities… it is the most honorable which are the most permanent,” he argued. “For that is apparently the reason why such activities are not likely to be forgotten.” A society, then, should tend to remember only the lasting virtues of its individual citizens, and their most honorable activities.
Constructing Childhood in a Corporate World A Cultural Pedagogy-Analysis of the Disney Web Site • Sumani Kasturi, Pennsylvania State University • This paper will present a textual analysis of the Disney web site. The analysis is grounded in a theoretical context provided by cultural pedagogy. Cultural pedagogy refers to the idea that education takes place in a variety of social sites including, but not limited to schooling. By providing a critical analysis of Disney’s latest media ‘text’, this paper extends existing critical scholarship on Disney. Further, it makes the argument that both the content and form of this media text convey specific pedagogical messages: especially pedagogies of representation and consumption.
Framing U.S. Cigarette Exports to Asia: How U.S. Daily Newspapers Covered Cigarette Deal • Kwangmi Ko Kim, Towson University • This study focuses on the U.S. media coverage of U.S. cigarette exports to Taiwan and Korea, and examines whether there was congruence between U.S. foreign policy objectives and the direction of the news coverage. This study revealed that most U.S. daily newspapers followed a U.S. “official” line in reporting the issue of exporting cigarettes to Asia. The issue of exporting U.S. cigarettes to Asia was packaged into a trade issue, not a health issue, by the U.S. press as well as by U.S. policy makers.
News, Myth and Social Order: The Myth of the Flood in The New York Times • Jack Lule, Lehigh University • Tales of great floods have been told in many societies. The purpose of this paper is to study news coverage of the 1998 Central American floods through the framework of myth. The paper first briefly discusses myth and archetypal stories. After touching upon the lone literature on news and myth, the paper takes up the archetypal story of the flood. It explores the ways that myth may provide insights into New York Times coverage of the Central American disaster.
Theorizing NPR: Public Broadcasting And The Public Sphere • Mike McCauley, Maine • The mission statements of America’s public broadcasting organizations lead one to believe that they are vehicles for truly democratic broadcasting. But this industry operates within a wider commercial ethos; hence, it often “behaves” in ways that seem contrary to stated missions. Using NPR as a case study, this paper situates public broadcasting within a three-tiered conception of media performance in the public interest. specifically, it shows public broadcasting’s theoretical affinity with Habermas’s public sphere.
Identity and Consumerism on Television in India • Divya C. McMillin, Washington-Tacoma • ABSTRACT NOT AVAILABLE.
One Man’s Journey: Samuel Day, Jr., As A Test of Shoemaker’s Hierarchy of Influences • James McPherson, Peace College • This paper compares the journalism of Samuel Day, Jr., to Pamela Shoemaker’s Hierarchy of Influences to see if the hierarchy can explain the progressively more liberal work of Day or the content of the publications where he worked. The theory, while inadequate to explain the actions of individual content providers or publications, may be useful in determining whether publications will be successful perhaps an issue for those concerned with a marketplace of ideas.
Mediatized Politics: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the New York Times’ Editorials on the Clinton-Lewinsky Affair • Min Young, Texas-Austin • Analyzing the media discourse of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, the present study illuminates the ideological topography of American society and the ongoing struggles among different ideologies. The semantic, syntactic and pragmatic analysis of the New York Times’ editorials, published in a critical discourse moment, uncovered the sharp contradiction between the diagnostic discourse committed to monogamous moralism and legalism, and the prognostic discourse committed to political pragmatism.
The Virtual “Good Neighborhood”-Tracking The Role Of Communication In Residential Segregation • Eleanor Novek, Monmouth University • Decades after the passage of federal fair housing laws, racial segregation persists today in the U.S., with profound socioeconomic and political consequences for the nation. Communication behaviors, from the restrictive covenants of the past to subtler interpersonal and mediated practices like steering and target marketing, are central to this inequity. This paper explains the theoretical and historical relationship between communication and residential segregation and offers a research agenda for exploring and challenging this pervasive injustice.
Feminist Media Ethnography in the Third World: Exploring Power, Gender, and Culture in Fieldwork • Radhika E. Parameswaran, Indiana • Although feminist media scholars have produced several ethnographies of women’s consumption of popular culture, few have engaged in self-reflexivity about their fieldwork experiences. This paper which is anchored within interdisciplinary postmodern and feminist scholarship on ethnography is a self-reflexive account of one Third World feminist media ethnographer’s research among young middle-class women in urban India who read Western romance fiction. Urging feminist media scholars to pay attention to the politics of representation of audiences, the paper explores power imbalances in the field that arise due to social constructions of gender, ethnic, class, and sexual identities.
Explore Your World: The Strange and Familiar Worlds of Discovery Channel’s Nature Programming • David Pierson, Pennsylvania State University • This paper asserts that the Discovery Channel’s nature programs are structured by dialectical discourses of familiarity and strangeness. On the one hand, these programs invite viewers to evaluate animals through the human template of character and to impose the model of human social organization onto the natural world. On the other hand, because most animals are generally removed from the daily lives of most people, they can be appreciated as exotic, aesthetic object-subjects.
Lionizing Coke’s King: Media, Myth, Capitalism, And The Death Of Roberto Goizueta • Patricia Priest, Georgia • Coca-Cola’s press releases about CEO Roberto Goizeuta’s death are compared to the photographs and text of news articles and obituaries to tease out evidence of reporting that mythologizes not only Goizueta but more significantly what Weber (1958) calls “the spirit of capitalism,” an ethos in which connotations of morality are embedded in business success. We contend the reverential treatment serves to ennoble the increasingly monopolistic financial successes of owners in control of media empires.
A Communication-Based Perspective of the Construction of Social Reality of Women in Non-Tradition Occupations • Michele Rosen, Monmouth University • During the last decade, women have entered traditionally male dominated professions in unprecedented numbers Indeed, today few occupations are off-limits to women capable of undergoing the training and performing the functions of carpenters, electricians, plumbers and other formerly “male-only” trades. Within the professions, more women are choosing careers in engineering, the sciences, and business than in the previous quarter century. This research asks several questions: First, how do the dynamics of work-related communication strategies affect women’s constructs of reality?
Political Economy and Cultural Production: A Discussion of Neo-Colonialist Practices in the Motion Picture Industry, Korea and the U.S. • Elli Lester Roushanzamir, Georgia • Popular film is an influential cultural genre. It has been identified as an industry in which indigenous cultures and national industries have made their mark in breaking from the dominance of the Hollywood U.S. industry. However, this paper, citing as an example the relationships between Korea and the U.S. in this decade (1990s) particularly in the motion picture industry, suggests that colonial-imperialist discourses are rampant between the U.S. and other (particularly “Third World”) countries and that the global motion picture industry provides an exemplar of advanced imperialist practice.
The Zapatistas Online: Shifting the Discourse of a Nation • Adrienne Russell, Indiana University • This paper examines the complex and contradictory dynamic of localization and globalization, revealing technological aspects of the Internet that contribute to a broadening of the discourse regarding the Mexican government as well as dominant conceptions of the Mexican nation. These technological dimensions include the reconfiguration of notions of proximity on the Internet, a condition that influences the scope and nature of user alliances. In addition, the Internet’s lack of an organizational center promotes the dissemination of material that challenges mainstream and “official” accounts, as well as mobilizing information that promotes meetings, rallies and various other types of organized action.
News of Cuba • William Solomon, Rutgers University • This research studies whether business and humanitarian groups’ efforts toward ending the U.S. trade embargo of Cuba have influenced the news media’s coverage of Cuba. It uses a “news frame” model which studies metaphors and euphemisms, combined with selection, emphasis and omission. It examines The New York Times’s coverage of the 1994 exodus of the balseros, or boat people, and the Pope’s 1998 visit. It finds a modest shift in the news frame.
Critical Theories and Cultural Studies in Mass Communication • Les Switzer, John McNamara, Michael Ryan, Houston • This paper examines the role of critical theories and cultural studies in journalism and mass communication by (1) synthesizing two paradigms in contemporary cultural analysis that seek to explain the meaning of phenomena that make a culture, (2) explores some of the issues that are critical for teaching and research in mass communication, and (3) explores ways in which critical literature can be integrated into the teaching and research mission.
Struggle and Consent: African American press coverage of Gone with the Wind • James Tracy, Iowa • This essay uses a theory of hegemony to document change within African American press reception of the film Gone with the Wind. Analysis of five newspapers coverage show that negative reactions by journalists and readers resulted from segregation: blacks could not attend the initial screening in Atlanta. Eventual positive reader response evidenced in the black press complicates the black/white binary opposition approach to media and literary texts. Recognition of Hattie McDaniel’s performance confirmed progress of African Americans, leading to further Optimism.
Understanding the Conditions for Public Discourse: A Critique of Criteria for Letters-to-the-Editor • Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, Stanford University • Using Habermas’ work on discourse ethics, this paper argues that the letters-to-the-editor newspaper section is rhetorically advanced as a forum for public debate, but fails to provide the conditions for such a forum. Its failure stems from the “‘rules” that guide the selection of letters: Simply put, letters should be brief, relevant, entertaining, and well-written. The paper discusses the nuances and implications of these rules, and the ways in which they subtly work against the democratic debate that Habermas envisions.
“More Barney Than Buddhist”: How the Media Framed the Story of the Little Lama • Melissa A. Wall, Washington • This study explores the framing of the story of a young American boy believed to be the reincarnation of a Tibetan lama, finding that coverage depicted this event through four frames: American pop culture ‘R us; There’s no place like home; A mother’s place is with her son; and Buddhism is for Buddhists. The most striking findings suggest that commercial symbols appear to be replacing nationalistic or patriotic ones to represent America.
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