Short Methods Paper

1. Short Methods Paper Discuss the advantages, disadvantages, pitfalls, and/or theoretical issues that arise in taking an audience reception approach to a specific text, topic, or event. OR speak more specifically to your own project. How might you undertake an audience reception study of your topic? What are some of the issues that you would need to resolve in order to complete such a study? In either case, make sure to engage with the readings for the week in some way. Put yourself in dialogue with one or more of the articles and respond to some of the issues and ideas raised by the text.

2. Object of Study and Justification Paper: 4-5 pages (including one page bibliography) Describe and defend your topic for the quarter Your object of study may be a single text, a group of related texts, or a communication event (such as the presidential inauguration). Your object of study must deal with race or difference in some way. Explain the significance of your object of study. Provide a brief review of existent scholarly literature about it or closely related to it.

3. Audience Reception

4. How does each position him/herself within or in the context of the community being studied? • How does each position him/herself within or in the context of the academic community? • How does each imagine the role of their subjects? • Who is the most accessible? Accessible to whom? • How (and how well) do each of the authors integrate political economy into their analysis? Textual or semiotic analysis? • Who is the most “political”? Following Bonus, what do we mean by “political”? Comparative Questions

5. Bobo – • The task of the critic within the interpretive community is to give voice to those who are usually never considered in any analysis of cultural work. (51) • They become a theoretical construction in the process of my analysis of the texts and in the process of linking their statements to a broader framework of assessing black women in the totality of their lives, their history, and their social activism. (24) • Bonus – • “What do you mean by politics hijo [son]?” (67) • Those with whom I’ve talked, perhaps realizing how sharply their own kinds of “politics” differed from mainstream notions of it, have consistently directly my attention to alternate ways of imagining and handling community affairs. (82) • Maira – • To understand the collision of of racialized, gendered, and ethnicized imaginings with material aspirations in this remix culture. I first outline the cultural contradictions facing second-generation youth … and then suggest more layered interpretations that revel gendered tension and underlying racial and material processes. (42) • Trinh T.Minh-ha -- • In this chain and continuum, I am but one link. The story is me, neither me nor mine. It does not really belong to me, and while I feel great responsibility for it, I also enjoy the irresponsibility of the pleasure obtained through the process of transferring. Pleasure in the copy. Pleasure in the reproduction. (122) • What we “look for” is un/fortunately what we shall find. The anthropologist, as we already know, does not find things; s/he makes them. And makes them up. The structure is not therefore something given, entirely external to the person who structures, but a project of the person’s way of handling realities, here narratives. (141) Role of the Research Subject