Discourses about Audiences: International Comparisons,
Call for Proposals, from Richard Butsch and Sonia Livingstone
Please forward and post on listservs, especially those likely to
reach scholars of non-Western media cultures
We seek proposals from media scholars to study the representations
of audiences in non-western societies and pre-modern Europe. We use
"western" to indicate culture rather than geography. In that sense,
the term contrasts to all societies not based upon Western
traditions, including not only "eastern" societies but also
societies south of the equator.
We plan to publish the studies in special issues of journals and as
an edited book, in multiple languages. We also plan to organize an
international conference where the authors will present and discuss their work.
In our books, The Citizen Audience and Audiences and Publics, we
have explored representations of audiences and the categories used
to characterize them. These explorations have been within the
context of modern democracies in Western Europe and North America.
In Western discourse, audiences have been variously considered
crowds, publics, mass and consumers, active or passive, additive or
selective, vulnerable and suggestible or critical and creative,
educated or ignorant, high or low brow, and characterized
differently on the basis of their presumed race, class, sex and age.
These debates and these categories sometimes have been adopted and
applied to audiences in non-Western cultures. The conjoined terms
"audiences and publics," for example, have begun to be used by
scholars across the globe. But there is no reason to assume that
such Western categories and associations apply, or apply in the same
way, in non-western societies. At a time when global and regional
media (satellite, television/radio, recording, mobile phone,
internet) saturate even remote populations and cultures, we have no
comparative empirical studies to reveal what categories are
indigenous to individual non-western cultures, and to record how
they differ and change.
Consequently our goal is to bring together research from across the
globe, toinvestigate whether the terms associated with audiences in
western Europe and North America actually fit the indigenous
discourses on audiences in non-Western cultures. Each culture likely
has a different and interesting history. We think that such a
comparative study of discourse on media and audiences could bring
new insights into global media as well as Western discourse and
scholarship on media and audiences, and be of immense value to
government policymakers and media practitioners as well.
The project will explore specifically non-Western languages and
cultures, and as a whole, will compare their discourses on
audiences. In this globalized world this will sometimes be a
marginal distinction, given the bleeding of Western ideas through
borders and cultural boundaries. We would like applicants to go
beyond non-Western incorporations of Western terms about audiences
that accompanied their adoption of media technology and texts, to
explore their discourses on indigenous practices and their
audiences. With this foundation, then applicants would investigate
how indigenous discourses represent media audiences as these media
spread through these societies.
From all applicants, we will select 10-15 scholars to research
discourses in their proposed culture and language, looking at these
both before and since their contact with Western culture and the
spread of twentieth and twenty-first century media. We expect to include:
1. Studies on discourses in major languages of the world, e.g.
Chinese, Hindi, Bengali, Arabic, Urdu, etc.,
2. Studies on cultures and languages less integrated into
globalization and more remote from Western influence, and
3. A study of a major medieval European culture and language before
democracy and publics became associated with audiences.
Applicants should be fluent in the language and
generally familiar with the media/audience history of the culture
they propose to study. For their research, we wish contributors to
study representations in that culture and language, examining its
historical development, in whole or part, of discourses as media
are introduced into that culture through the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries, with special consideration to the lexicon
used to characterize media audiences. Junior as well as senior
scholars are welcome, as long as each demonstrates his/her
capabilities for this research.
Proposals should be in English and include a
preliminary research plan of no more than 3 single-spaced pages,
specifying the cultural/linguistic context and describing the plan
of research. as well as current vitae of the applicant(s). Send
proposals as email attachments to both
<mailto:(Butsch /at/ rider.edu)>(Butsch /at/ rider.edu) and
<mailto:(S.Livingstone /at/ lse.ac.uk)>(S.Livingstone /at/ lse.ac.uk).
We look forward to reading your proposals.
Richard Butsch, Professor of Sociology, American Studies, and Film
and Media Studies
Rider University, USA
Sonia Livingstone, Professor of Social Psychology,
Department of Media and Communications,
London School of Economics, UK
