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Abstract

Carey's call for a uniquely American form of cultural studies challenged the dominant paradigm of media effects research in the late 1970s. Even today, his work cannot be easily categorized. How then can we replicate his method in order to teach his way of doing scholarship? The discipline of communication has the potential to reveal how the structures of cities, of print, of voice, of digital media, as well as the structure of our ideas all privilege certain experiences over others. His configured style was a methodological choice that indicated by implication what had been relatively invisible within our discipline. What we can know through the progression of a linear argument and what one can discern through an emergent configural pattern will differ. These two approaches illustrate different ways of knowing. The challenge is to learn to recognize this crucial difference, as it relates to our choice of methodologies.

Keywords

communications methods cultural studies

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References

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