Doing Global Media Studies

Bremen.
If it’s Monday, this must be (a very chilly) Bremen – I’ve made it to the ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ conference that is itself a pre-conference to the European Communication Conference (ECREA) in Hamburg. We start today with a keynote by Sonia Livingstone, who begins by noting the importance of cross-national research, but also the difficulties in scaling up research in this way. What are the key problems here, then – intellectual, political, and practical, not least also for multicultural and multinational research teams?

There is also a strong push towards the international sharing of research outcomes, of course; there is significant growth in large-scale research projects, and this is driven by the imperative to understand global communications phenomena. But when is it reasonable also to retain some boundaries around projects? Comparative research is at the cutting edge of research in media and communication, but has yet to be fully thought through – organisationally, methodologically, and from many other perspectives. Two key areas can be distinguished here: cross-national research, and open-ended cross-border mapping of transnational media flows. Published projects often tend to turn out to be hybrid, however – theoretical principles are not always translated into methodological approaches.

What is necessary here first is to rethink the idea of the nation – not to remove it altogether, or to retain it unthinkingly. When once, one’s own nation was unproblematically assumed to be ‘normal’, today, cross-national research challenges that view, but national contexts still remain less than fully thought through. Small countries tend to add their results to a kaleidoscope of national studies, while some very large countries still dominate our thinking and are assumed to be the norm.

Only comparative research can overcome such issues – indeed, all social science research and all analysis should be regarded as comparative. This does not mean that the nation state is necessarily the obvious basis for comparison, however; transnational flows, the rise of new institutions, and other transnational contexts move some of our analysis beyond a focus on ‘the nation’. At the very least, the specific context and reach of the research must be clearly stated, in order to contextualise its peculiarities. Additionally, of course, the academy itself is globalising (with a concurrent push towards English as the lingua franca of academic publication); this also introduces new risks, and subtle difficulties in international cooperation.

One definition of comparative research is as comparing two or more nations with respect to the specific area of research, often involving one or more researchers from each nation. While the growth in such research is legitimised by the forces of scholarly globalisation, paradoxically it also maintains the nation state as the pricipal unit of comparison. There are a number of models here: ideographic (seeing one’s own country through the eyes of others, treating countries as objects of analysis in their own right and producing individual research outcomes for each); hypothesis-testing (treating each country as a specific space in which to test a given overarching hypothesis, thus providing a basis for comparison – but here, too, little contextualisation is usually required, or given); system-sensitive research (treating countries as units in a multi-variable analysis, and exploring how specific national contexts may have shaped differences in the resulting patterns).

Rationales for such comparative research projects need to be provided, however – and may include a comparison of largely similar countries in order to explore how smaller differences influence results patterns, or a comparison of vastly different countries in order to test a supposedly globally applicable hypothesis.

But the idea of the nation state must be further critiqued; it is often accepted all too uncritically. In the age of globalisation, it is no longer the automatic starting-point; a focus on the nation tends to minimise the internal differences which also exist, and maximise the external differences which may be overstated in the process. Some studies even position one nation as the norm against which all other nations are then compared (and often found wanting).

Beyond all this, the problems of scale (managing cross-national studies) and standards (addressing but also managing local specificities) also emerge. Such projects are difficult to manage, and many cross-national projects end up universalising their outcomes; local cultural contexts tend to be ignored, and shared global attributes highlighted. Cross-national theories are vulnerable to the idea that they neglect local features, while national studies overstate their internal homogeneity.

The transnational alternative to the previous three models moves beyond the assumption of global fundamentals as well as avoiding national isolationalism in research. This positions the national merely as the locus for transnational trends, and is best applied to phenomena that precisely cross national borders. Alternative objects of study and units of analysis must be operationalised – Arjun Appadurai suggests the ethnoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes, and ideoscapes as five vectors for such research approaches, for example. There are now many examples for studies which operate on this basis, following their object of research wherever it travels.

The nation state approach renders many media phenomena marginal; an alternative to this is to employ the idea of a transnational imagination through shared media and communication. Such phenomena do not map onto national borders, but embrace the faultlines and fissures between nation states: networks between cosmopolitan cities which have transcended the national frame, for example.

Reality is even more complicated, though – neither purely national or transnational, neither simply etic or emic. And most research projects tend to oscillate between the two, though usually not deliberately. This highlights the problematic status of the nation state as a unit of analysis for such research – it is difficult to transcend. Research still work (and draw funds) from their specific national contexts; shifting this (as in Europe) to a regional context hardly helps. Many media forms are shaped strongly by their national contexts, and national contexts are far from obsolete.

Indeed, the observation of which processes do transcend national boundaries can provide important new insights. Beck argues for a methodological cosmopolitanism in this context, which could be described as combining insider and outsider knowledge.

Can we reframe ‘the nation’, then? It is neither a simplistic nor fundamental category, but a conflicted one; it must be part of a repertoire along with the sub- and transnational level. This may be mapped onto the levels of ethnos, demos, and kosmos: three different and intertwined categories which undermine the primacy of the national. The conception of the cosmopolitan nation as a community of communities assumes a heterogeneous nation with internal differences and strong connections to external communities. This is effective as a critique of the universalism of ethnocultural approaches, at the other extreme. In between, there is the notion of the civic nation, the nation as demos, with a cool, non-visceral definition of citizenship. This approach focusses on issues of social inclusion and exclusion, of access to media institutions, and applies particularly well in EU Europe.

Each of these approaches suggests specific research approaches, too – the ethnocultural, a comparison between nations; the cosmopolitan, tracing the connections; the civic-democratic, a more complex approach which also holds great potential for informing a wide range of media and communication stakeholders, including policymakers. This approach selects countries to research on the basis of their common national and supranational structures of power, highlighting common ground and factors of differentiation.