Film Practices and Audience Studies: Methods in Media Anthropology (Ethnographic Methods in a Selected Research Field)

Instructor: Dr. Markus Schleiter

The empirical focus of media anthropology is on what people – as both consumers and producers – do with media. In studying audiovisual media, this enables us to address questions such as how film media are part of sociality and everyday lifeworlds. Rather than focusing exclusively on film content, media anthropologists investigate how media become meaningful to people and in which ways film watchers as well as film makers reflect and articulate ideas of culture with reference to media.

During this course, students – individually or in groups – will design and carry out their own practical research in Münster or beyond. Research settings could be TV or series watching sessions, film sets, web worlds, cinema outings, K-pop fan culture, Bollywood consumption, lunch talks on YouTube or Netflix, or .... Media anthropological methods embrace the whole range of anthropological research methods, including, most importantly, participant observation, multi-sited ethnographies, and interviews. Films can be a research focus, but may also be used as research tools, for example in elicitation interviews or research-oriented ethnographic film production. Furthermore, media anthropologists use qualitative methods to analyse the narratives, content, or stylistic features of films.

During the course, students will develop their own empirical research projects from the very first steps of articulating a research question, to using methods in the ‘field’, to ultimately producing an ethnography that will be peer-evaluated in class. The practical projects will be accompanied by intensive reading and discussion of exemplary ethnographies by media anthropologists, and of key texts on anthropological methods more generally as well as those in media anthropology. Students will also have the chance to produce audiovisual media as part of their projects.

Work required:

- Original empirical research project (individually or in groups)

- Oral presentation of a research question (10 min.); and the results of the research conducted (25 min.)

- Ethnographic essay presenting the research results (5 pages) or audiovisual production and self-reflective essay (2 pages)

- Submission of short texts (for example, research notes) as part of four assignments (1-2 pages each)

- Two critical essays on the readings (1-2 pages each) to be submitted before the respective sessions

- Close reading of the key text each week

Recommended Literature:

Agar, Michael H. 2008. The Professional Stranger: An Informal Introduction to Ethnography: Second Edition. Bingley, UK: Emerald.

Altheide, David L., Schneider, Christopher J. 2013. Qualitative Media Analysis. Delhi: Sage.

Askew, Kelly and Richard R. Wilk (ed.) 2002. The Anthropology of Media: A Reader. Malden: Blackwell Publishing.

Bender, Cora and Martin Zillinger (ed.) 2015. Handbuch der Medienethnographie. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer.

de Maaker, Erik 2000. Integrating Ethnographic Research and Filmmaking: Video Elicitation for a Performance Oriented Analysis of the Teyyam Ritual. Visual Anthropology 13 (2): 185-197.

Ginsburg, Faye D.; Lila Abu-Lughod and Brian Larkin (ed.) 2002. Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Marcus, George E. 1995. Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 95-117.

Pink, Sarah 2007. Doing Visual Ethnography: Images, Media and Representation in Research. London: Sage Publication.

Schleiter; Markus 2014. VideoCD Crossovers: Cultural Practice, Ideas of Belonging and Santali Popular Films. Asian Ethnology 73 (1-2): 181-200.

Kurs im HIS-LSF