Cultural Studies

16-20 July 2012

Faye Ginsburg, David B. Kriser Professor of Anthropology; Director of Graduate Program in Culture and Media, NYU
Toby Miller, Professor of Media and Cultural Studies, University of California, Riverside

This workshop looks at questions of identity, value and power in diverse social formations from the perspective of culture, understood as a mixture of everyday life, activism, and artistic practice.

Participants will be exposed to a range of methods and their theoretical implications, including strategies such as ethnography, and associated methods such as life narratives, textual analysis, archival projects, political economy, audio and video recording, and approaches to different kinds of "media worlds" as research objects. Additionally, we will consider recent discussions regarding the ethics and politics of field based research as well as publishing, particularly with vulnerable populations such as children, disabled subjects or members of indigenous communities, considering research design in relation to what is often called collaborative or engaged research, and the questions this kind of work raises regarding accessible modes of publishing, and intellectual property questions regarding local forms of knowledge.

We anticipate the seminar being of use to students interested in qualitative, inductive forms of knowledge production in fields such as anthropology, sociology, history, political science, communication studies, public policy, media studies, and cultural studies.

We anticipate that each morning session will address a particular aspect of methods as discussed above, and the afternoon will be devoted to having seminar members present their work to the group to see how the research might be expanded or refined based on the discussions and readings.

Presenters

Faye Ginsburg is the David B. Kriser Professor of Anthropology at New York University (NYU), as well as director of the graduate program in culture and media. She is also founding director of the Center for Media, Culture and History, co-director (with Angela Zito) of the Center for Religion and Media, and founding co-director of the NYU Council for the Study of Disabilities. Her research interests include social anthropology, ethnographic film and indigenous media, social movements in the United States, and gender and reproduction. Ginsburg's publications include Mediating Culture: Indigenous Identity in a Digital Age (forthcoming), Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain (edited with Lila Abu-Lughod and Brian Larkin, 2002), and Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community (1989), as well other other edited volumes on reproduction and gender and numerous articles and essays.

Toby Miller is Professor of Media & Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside. He is a British-Australian-US interdisciplinary social scientist. He is the author and editor of over 30 books, has published essays in more than 100 journals and edited collections, and is a frequent guest commentator on television and radio programs. His teaching and research cover the media, sports, labor, gender, race, citizenship, politics, and cultural policy, as well as the success of Hollywood overseas and the adverse effects of electronic waste. Miller's work has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Swedish, German, Spanish and Portuguese. He is Editor of Television & New Media and Editor and Co-Editor of book series Popular Culture and Everyday Life (Lang) and Sport and Culture (Minnesota). He has recently become the co-editor of Social Identities.