PhD course, 7-9 June 2011:
Media Ethnography: Theory and Practice

The course will take place at Roskilde University, Denmark. Application deadline: 30 April 2011.

Speakers:

• Dr. Jo Helle Valle, Senior Researcher, Nat’l Institute for Consumer Research, Oslo, Norway
• Dr. John Postill, C3RI, Sheffield Hallam University, UK
• Dr. Debra Spitulnik Vidali, Associate Professor, Emory University, USA
• Dr. Thomas Tufte, Professor, Roskilde University, Denmark

This short course is designed to introduce Ph.D. students to the theory and practice of media ethnography. We explore how media ethnography applies to both media production and media reception, and how it is fundamentally both a theory and a method for investigating everyday practices and lived experiences as they are shaped by culturally-specific ways of being-in-the world.Media to be considered include: television, film, radio, newspapers, and new media. The course will begin with a brief overview of the history of ethnographic approaches within media studies and cultural studies, which dates back to the mid 1980s.We then engage more recent scholarship within media anthropology, focusing specifically on three dimensions of ethnography: (a) as fieldwork method; (b) as anthropological lens, and (c) as a method of writing and re-presentation.

Course co-directors are Debra Spitulnik Vidali and Thomas Tufte. For more information, see course description here.