Table Of ContentRESEARCH METHODS FOR THE ARTS AND HUMANITIES
GENERAL EDITOR: GABRIELE GRIFFIN
Designed to serve postgraduate students and academics teaching research R Research Methods
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Research Methods for Cultural Studies
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This new textbook addresses the neglect of practical research methods in cultural r
studies.It provides students with clearly written overviews of research methods in C
cultural studies,along with guidelines on how to put these methods into operation.It u
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advocates a multi-method approach,with students drawing from a pool of techniques t
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and approaches suitable for their own topics of investigation.The book covers the
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• Drawing on experience,and studying how narratives make sense of experience
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• Investigating production processes in the cultural industries,and the consumption and d
assimilation of cultural products by audiences and fans i
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• Taking both quantitative and qualitative approaches to the study of cultural life
• Analysing visual images and both spoken and written forms of discourse
• Exploring cultural memory and historical representation. E
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The contributors,along with Michael Pickering,are Martin Barker,Aeron Davis,David t
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Deacon,Emily Keightley,Steph Lawler,Anneke Meyer,Virginia Nightingale,and Sarah Pink. d
The book is designed for use by students on upper-level undergraduate and taught b
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Masters-level courses as well as postgraduate research students and cultural studies
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researchers more generally.It will be of enormous value across all fields of study
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involved in cultural enquiry and analysis. c
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Michael Pickering is Professor of Media and Cultural Analysis in the Department of Social e
Sciences at Loughborough University.He has published in the areas of cultural history l
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and the sociology of culture as well as media analysis and theory. i
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Cover design:River Design,Edinburgh
Edinburgh University Press E
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22 George Square,Edinburgh EH8 9LF i
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www.eup.ed.ac.uk b
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ISBN 978 0 7486 2578 9 r
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Research Methods for Cultural Studies
RESEARCH METHODS FOR THE ARTS AND HUMANITIES
Published Titles
Research Methods for English Studies
Edited by Gabrielle Griffin
Research Methods for Law
Edited by Mike McConville and Wing Hong Chui
Forthcoming Titles
Textual Editing in English Studies
Research Methods for History
Research Methods for Practice-based Research
Research Methods for Film Studies
Research Methods for Linguistics
Research Methods in Theatre Studies
Research Methods for Geography
Resarch Methods for Education
Advisory Board
Professor Geoffrey Crossick, Chief Executive, AHRB
Professor Warwick Gould, Director, Institute of English Studies, London
Professor David Bradby, Theatre Studies, Royal Holloway, London
Professor Angela McRobbie, Media and Communication Studies,
Goldsmith’s College, London
Professor Robert Morris, History, Edinburgh University
Professor Harold Short, Director of the Centre for Computing in the
Humanities (CCH) at King’s College London
Research Methods for Cultural
Studies
Edited by Michael Pickering
Edinburgh University Press
©in this edition, Edinburgh University Press,
©in the individual contributions is retained by the authors
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
George Square, Edinburgh
Typeset in /Ehrhardt by
Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Manchester, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
Cromwell Press, Trowbridge, Wilts
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN (hardback)
ISBN (paperback)
The right of the contributors
to be identified as authors of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act .
Contents
List of Figures vii
Introduction
Michael Pickering
Section One: Lives and Lived Experience
. Experience and the Social World
Michael Pickering
. Stories and the Social World
Steph Lawler
Section Two: Production and Consumption
. Investigating Cultural Producers
Aeron Davis
. Investigating Cultural Consumers
Anneke Meyer
Section Three: Quantity and Quality
. Why Counting Counts
David Deacon
. Why Observing Matters
Virginia Nightingale
Section Four: Texts and Pictures
. Analysing Visual Experience
Sarah Pink
. Analysing Discourse
Martin Barker
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Section Five: Linking with the Past
. Engaging with Memory
Emily Keightley
. Engaging with History
Michael Pickering
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index
List of Figures
Figure . Courtney and Taisha’s favourite advertisements
Figure . David and Anne Gibson at home
Figure . Up the garden path
Figure . David at work in the garden
Figure . Three web captures from the ‘recomendaciones’
section of the www.telemadre.com website, showing the
shopping trolley, Thermos flask and Tupperware
Figure . Representing Slow Living
Figure . PowerPoint slide
Figure . A screen capture from Rod Coover’s Cultures in Webs
Introduction
Michael Pickering
There has long been a reluctance to bring any explicit discussion of methods
and methodology into cultural studies. This can be explained in various
ways. We can see it first of all as connected with the field’s renegade charac-
ter, and its conscious dissociation from established academic disciplines.
Developing and adhering to a particular set of methods was considered to be
characteristic of those disciplines and somehow compromised by an unexam-
ined notion of empirical enquiry. Cultural studies has preferred to borrow
techniques and methods from established disciplines without subscribing to
any disciplinary credentials itself. Empirical enquiry has been treated with sus-
picion or regarded as woefully insufficient in itself, primarily because of the
emphasis in cultural studies on fully conceptualising a topic of enquiry and
locating it within a more general theoretical problematic. Along with a heavy
reliance on textual analysis of one kind or another, applying techniques of close
reading to a broad range of cultural phenomena, cultural studies has been dis-
tinguished as a field of study by the ways it has engaged with theory and sought
to apply it, rather than by its adoption or development of practical methods.
The influence of theoretical issues and preoccupations has gone hand in
hand with an inclination to ask critical questions about the rules of asking ques-
tions, with codified procedures and the prescription of set methods seeming to
inhibit the free play of critique. By defining its practice as operating in oppos -
ition to disciplinary boundaries and controls, such procedures and methods
have been regarded as imposing constraints on intellectual enquiry, particularly
where this is dealing with the politics of culture or with the reproduction of
relations of power in particular cultural texts or practices. Academic bound-
aries and prescribed methods have at times been associated with such repro-
duction, perhaps especially in relation to male control of intellectual agendas
Description:This new textbook addresses the neglect of practical research methods in cultural studies. It provides students with clearly written overviews of research methods in cultural studies, along with guidelines on how to put these methods into operation. It advocates a multi-method approach, with student
