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Get a Grip: Studying Spectatorship of Auviovisual Media. Cinema Studies , Stockholm University 22 January – 29 March 2010 Katariina Kyrölä k atariina.kyrola@mail.film.su.se. 1) Introduction to the theme and emphasis of the course
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Get a Grip:Studying Spectatorship of Auviovisual Media Cinema Studies, Stockholm University 22 January – 29 March 2010 Katariina Kyrölä katariina.kyrola@mail.film.su.se
1) Introduction to the theme and emphasis of the course 2) Questions and choices (methodology, material, concepts, frameworks) to consider when you begin to plan and write your thesis 3) A narrative of how I made these choices during the process of writing my doctoral dissertation
Gripping Media Images • ”getting a grip” – looking from a distance, but presuming proximity • ”what grips us” – what images or viewing experiences stay with us, what we may refuse and why: factors in the media image, the viewer, the viewing situation • Questions of spectatorship & corporeality
Media images have power to: • Introduce things otherwise unknown and even unimaginable to us • Make some of those things even mundane • Give names and forms to fears and desires • Make mundane issues strange • Participate in producing our very sense of what is unusual/unimaginable and usual/mundane
Choices to make in preparing for thesis • Method: ”tools” of analysis, e.g. audienceethnography, psychoanalyticalclosereading –> doesnottellmuch of what is doneyet • Methodology: the widerpackage of tools and theoretical, conceptual and politicalcommitmentsthatcomewithmethods (Saukko 2003) • Methodnotsomething to beinsertedbetween the researcher and the material –> the toolscanchangeyourway of looking, changeyourmaterial and changethemselves
Concepts • Mieke Bal (2002) Travelling Concepts in the Humanities. A Rough Guide (incl. image, misc-en-scène, framing, intention, critical intimacy) • Allowing space for redefinitions or specifications of concepts • On this course: fantasy, gender, ”real”, affect, memory, the body, sensoriality, audience, intertextuality, discourse
Research material or ”object” • Important but NOT determining in choosing, using and adapting concepts and methodologies • A specific media product? A genre? A recurring figure, structure or tendency in the media? Representations of a social group? • A question? A suggestion? A claim? • A group/person(s) whose ways of looking interest you?
Situating and locating • Why the issueorquestionthatinterestsyoumayinterestothers, too (relevance of the topic) • Yourresearchmaterialor ”object” (whatothershavesaidaboutit) • Yourconcepts and methodology (conceptscanfunction as methodologies) • Yourways of looking (whatmakesyou look the wayyoudo)
Critical visual methodology (Rose 2007) • Look at the media images’ ownvisualeffects • Thinkaboutways of seeingmobilizedbyimages • How the effect and ways of seeingproduceorunravel social differences and hierarchies • Whatare the social and intertextualcontexts of viewing • Whatexpectations, meanings and historiesspectatorsbring to theirviewing
EXAMPLE OF CONCEPT CHOICES:Doctoral dissertation Katariina KyröläThe Weight of ImagesAffective Engagements with Fat Corporeality in the Media
The firstextensivestudy on howfatgenderedbodiesarerepresented in the contemporary media • An exploration on the methodology of how to study the relationsbetween media images and viewingbodies as corporeal, affectiveengagements • Background: feministtheory on embodiment, feminist media studies, culturalstudies
Affect • ”affective engagements” Media images of fat bodies may engage viewers affectively, cannot be rationalized or criticized ”away” ”affect” as both intensities and flows and hierarchical forms and structures
Body image • A way to grasp ”invisible” but still gendered and corporeal relations and effects between viewing bodies and media images • Used not in the sense of negativity/positivity or congruence/distortion between body and self-image instead, refers to corporeal ability to open to change and multiplicity
Research material • Media image material: fatness in newspaper and magazine articles, television series, documentaries, feature films, websites • Accounts of viewing experiences: the strategic "I", culturally & personally located, combining the ontological and the epistemological