Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies

In this article, we explore through a series of productions our analytic relationships with an interview with Iris—a fourth-grade student who participated in a post-intentional phenomenological study focusing on how social class–sensitive photo storying took shape in a high-poverty elementary school. Following Deleuze and Guattari’s configuration of assemblage as a constant process of making and unmaking, we have plugged into our assemblage (Jackson and Mazzei) some poetry and a dramatization, as well as some of the expected productions of academic writing such as theory, citations, and methodology. In this way, we reconceive the phenomenon as an assemblage that produces, rather than means.

Anxieties associated with global conflict surround youth and ideological narratives mediating these conflicts can be seen in the popular media youth consume. This investigation uses contemporary cultural-theoretical conceptualizations of ideology to analyze several important popular screen-based cultural artifacts created for youth consumption to determine how young audiences are invited into the ideoscapes and discourses of global politics in the age of the “war on terror.” The analysis shows that these youth-oriented media artifacts script fundamental understandings of conflict and provide schema in which young viewers can orient themselves in relation to global Others, while also setting the matrix of intelligibility within which global politics itself becomes coherent. In addition, these popular cultural texts undertake an innovation of familiar Orientalisms, inviting young people to identify with an aggressive defense of the West and serving as an ideological support for the United States in the context of ongoing global conflicts.

How Is Home,¹ a Performance Autoethnography in Four Parts,² is a contemplative, interpretive, account on the nature of home. It is a multiple-voiced work. The nature of the empiricism used in this piece works to connect ethnographic detail in a meaningful way, toward the end of a telling of the production of emotions, symbol, and affect combined to display a sense of the way a life is built and undertaken through subjectivity. This work enables a glance at how notions of identity are formed and encountered, then rewoven through understanding, toward a libratory end. This story is my own, extended through imagination, a story of understanding my own identity as an Iraqi–Iranian–Jewish–American woman in post 9/11 United States. Ideas of Gaston Bachelard, Gloria Anzaldua, and Homi Bhabha are used to enrich and prop up my notion of home in this piece, which is always shifting, and momentary. Disciplinary oppression occurs in many ways in the present day United States, infused by the wily discourses produced through neoliberal global corporate machinations, tinged by its large events’ (wars, economic depressions, bank bailouts, austerity measures, etc.) impact on our systems of affect. In certain ways, the languages and actions in this new/old world can leave people with very little. This work works, through meaningful interventions in autoethnography, to correct that, as the meanings of our everyday lives, whether in the present moment or of memory is where much can be mended. I welcome you, dear reader, to join me, in my place, at home.

This piece sails in time and space, collecting memories in an effort to show instead of tell how masculinity is inculcated in children by parents. I use autoethnography to present scenes collected from three different moments of my life. I reflect on gender norms reproduced as complementary/opposite meanings, in which hierarchy remains, placing men above women.

The relationship between the online and offline self is one of the most interesting questions faced by new media researchers. This article argues that James Carey’s ritual view of communication can be of immense value in analyzing this complex phenomenon. The article revisits Carey’s famous “ritual view”—that saw mass communication and mass media as the primary ground for modern society—to elucidate how the notion of ritual can function as a theoretical category that is very useful for social and cultural analysis in the contemporary epoch. By discussing the nature of contemporary information processing, the article demonstrates how digital protocols and practices function in a highly ritualistic manner, thereby functioning as tools for the construction of individual and social reality. By applying Carey’s seminal insights to the “world” constructed by computer-mediated communication and social media, the article demonstrates how everyday digital rituals enable the modern subject to emerge in a paradoxical form—extensively networked and connected, yet deeply self-directed and solitary.

We are getting faster, or so we have been led to believe. Planes, trains, and automobiles—alongside the substrates of online modernity—have seemed to suggest to us that the world is a place we are constantly in need of catching up with. In turn, partially in response to institutional demands on productivity, some academics have suggested slow methods in research.¹ Yet, what if we were never fast in the first place? What if the things and atmospheres of Western industrial modernity actually produce slow ontologies of feeling as we traverse space and place? Straddling history, literature, and (auto)ethnographic attunements to emotions and society, this article attempts to suggest there is a modernity which is slow—an “endless mastication”—in which we, as both subject and subjects, are chewed-up and spat out amid the endlessly deferring signs of the presence and absence of meaning in social space.

In this article, the street is both a place of travel and a space for critical discourse. As tensions between public and private spaces play out in the streets, street artists claim visible space through multiple forms of art. Through a critical performance geography and a qualitative inquiry of the street, I photograph the movement of art across walls, doorways, windows, sidewalks, lampposts, alleyways, gutters, and dumpsters over a 7-month period in the Eastern Market neighborhood of Detroit (N = 806). After describing street art as a fluid genre that has developed into a diverse spectrum of post-graffiti, I explore how street art contributes to a changing visual terrain through discussions of racism, decolonization, gentrification, and the role of art in spatial justice. Photographic cartography is introduced as (a) a visual method of performance geography that illustrates material-discursive “fault lines” and (b) a critical means of analyzing conversations in contested public space. Significantly, street artists simultaneously work within and against urban renewal policies in “creative cities” such as Detroit. Given that the arts are at the center of sophisticated visual discourse regarding neoliberalism, democracy, and the battle over public space, researchers might continue to examine how street artists inscribe social justice in, on, and around the streets.