Statement of Research
My philosophical approach to critical media analysis and cultural studies research reflects my belief that all communication is political, in the sense that one cannot separate concerns of communication from concerns of power, which is further reflected in my approach to the intersection of culture and new media technologies. As an overarching principle, my work explores the larger issues of how cultural forms, texts, and practices are constructed and used as a tool along the broad continuum between various articulations and negotiations of power.
There is certainly much that goes with this under this era of globalization and global capitalism, for the articulation of cultural meaning occurs through many forms, mediated and otherwise. But through culture (and equally through new media technologies) this process works in such a way as to contribute to the contested grounds of nation, state, identity, race, ethnicity, and so many other areas of social life. Yet just as with all cultural forms, this contestation is fundamentally rooted in flows of power, flows that are often left unexamined or unexposed as they are so engrained in cultural forms as to be inseparable from the forms themselves without the close analysis of how this dynamic came to be.
My research is rooted in the literature of critical cultural studies and poses an overarching question when examining the role of culture and communications: what are the possibilities and consequences – cultural, social, political, economic, (and increasingly environmental) – that occur through the rise of new media technologies and the way in which these media are used?
Most recently, my work problematizes past understandings and present tendencies of the notion of cultural production as a governance strategy, especially in terms of global cultures. This notion is the focus of my dissertation, entitled ‘Empire’ Records: The Mediated Musical Politics of Culture in Twenty-First Century Warfare. I argue a re-thinking of culture as a site of conflict by examining new global flows of power that have contributed to a generalized shift in conceptualizations of sovereignty and labor, race and identity, nationality and ethnicity. Especially in terms of varying negotiations of these ideas, the role of communication technology and the rise of new, mediated networks, there arises a complicated and often contradictory relationship emerging from questions of agency, subjectivity, and the possibility of resistance once the actions of everyday life, themselves, have become technologies of power. I use popular music as a window into the development of these subjectivities, examining three case studies as an exploration of these processes: Emmanuel Jal, a former Sudanese child soldier and hip hop artist; M.I.A., a Sri-Lankan revolutionary and transnational pastiche musician; and U2/Bono, the internationally renowned musical group and activist.
My other current projects take a similar theoretically informed critical cultural approach to the field, looking at the cultural, political, and economic uses of media. My paper The New Technology of the Mediated Security State: Crowdsourcing Home(land) Security and the Texas Border Watch explores the use of Crowdsourcing, a new, networked technology of distributive labor, through the creation of the Texas Border Watch, a network of governmental web-based security cameras mounted at the U.S.-Mexico Border and patrolled by anyone with an internet connection. I argue that the crowdsourcing of border security represents the down side of the emergence of new media technologies, used as a tool of governance to shift the responsibilities of security from the state to the populace at little to no cost, to create participatory “citizen-soldiers” in the War on Terror; and to bring the threat of terrorism into the private sphere of the home through the creation of a mediated security state.
Furthermore, my paper ‘We’ve got the Best President Money Can Buy’: The Comic Politics of the Billionaires for Bush, examines the media and protest tactics of The Billionaires for Bush, a protest organization appropriating stereotypical traits of the ultra-wealthy and attending Republican events in ironic support of their causes. Drawing on theory from both media studies and rhetorical theory, I explore the tactics and effectiveness of their strategies, suggesting that in the largely ironical conditions of new media entertainment of this age, ironical tactics may serve the social and media activist better than traditional actions. Other recent papers have explored the way in which citizenship was previously articulated primarily as a statement of the rights of the individual and the rearticulating of this idea under Neoliberalism to one of responsibilities to the state, and that under this arrangement the goals of the latter negate the free exercise of the former through three distinguished roles – subject, consumer, soldier – and still with space for resistance as critical subject.
And this, in essence, highlights the way in which I approach critical cultural studies: as a method to highlight the functioning of power relationships in culture in order to create a more equitable world. For without first understanding both the existence of these relationships and the way in which they operate, the goal of transforming culture to a more just basis cannot be fulfilled. As such, my involvement this field has been quite an exciting personal development over the years as I’ve become a researcher of the cultural effects of media forms and technologies. My background, and indeed my present work, has always had a critical bent to it in its variety of paradigms of exploring the different processes of power existent in media forms; becoming a scholar has given me new avenues to explore through new research strategies such as these.