Internationalizing Media Studies

Daya Kishan Thussu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781134050222
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The explosion of transnational information flows, made possible by new technologies and institutional changes (economic, political and legal) has profoundly affected the study of global media. At the same time, the globalization of media combined with the globalization of higher education means that the research and teaching of the subject faces immediate and profound challenges, not only as the subject of enquiry but also as the means by which researchers and students undertake their studies.

Edited by a leading scholar of global communication, this collection of essays by internationally-acclaimed scholars from around the world aims to stimulate a debate about the imperatives for internationalizing media studies by broadening its remit, including innovative research methodologies, taking account of regional and national specificities and pedagogic necessities warranted by the changing profile of students and researchers and the unprecedented growth of media in the non-Western world.

Transnational in its perspectives, Internationalizing Media Studies is a much-needed guide to the internationalization of media and its study in a global context.

Part I
Internationalizing media research

Chapter 1
Why internationalize media studies and how?

Daya Kishan Thussu

International media and their study are in the process of transformation, spurred on by increasingly mobile and globally networked communication infrastructures. The multi-vocal, multi-directional and multi-layered media flows have also made redundant many traditional ways of thinking about the media (Thussu, 2007; Arsenault and Castells, 2008). The globalization of media industries and audiences, combined with the internationalization of higher education, mean that the research and teaching of the media face pressing challenges.¹ In particular, the transformation of media and communication in Asia – the world’s most populous region with some of its fastest growing economies – has profound implications for what constitutes the ‘global’ in media and their study. As a relatively new field that is by its nature inter- and trans-disciplinary, media studies is well placed to draw in and deploy a range of paradigms and approaches, from the social sciences as well as arts and humanities, to look across borders and boundaries, between nations, cultures and academic disciplines (Downing, 1996; Curran and Park, 2000; Appadurai, 2001; Murphy and Kraidy, 2003; Abbas and Erni, 2005; Miike, 2006; Shome, 2006; Thussu, 2007; Connell, 2007; Sreberny, 2008; Tomaselli, 2008).

This chapter aims to delineate the changes in media and their study at a juncture when notions of place, space and time have been reconfigured, making it imperative to suggest new research angles and approaches, as well as methodologies, going beyond explicit or implicit assumptions for studying international social reality. After providing a brief historical context to the evolution of media studies as an academic field, the chapter critiques the epistemological limitations of the study of the media, necessitated in part by the increasing importance of China and India in global communication and media discourses. Finally, the chapter suggests some markers which could contribute to the internationalization of media studies.

Historical limitations and legacies

Like other new fields, the study of media emerged on the fringes of academic activities, initially in the United States, where communication became the subject of university research after the end of the First World War, when interest in the psychological potential of the media to shape people’s views became apparent, reflected in such works as Walter Lippmann on public opinion (published in 1922) and Harold Lasswell on propaganda (published in 1927). The growing institutionalization of media and communication studies within the disciplines of sociology, politics and psychology led to the establishment of ‘mass communication’ as a new area of academic inquiry. Early work in the field demonstrated a positivist and empiricist orientation, with an emphasis on behavioural ‘effects’ research, and more applied aspects of communication, often influenced by political and economic interests. Such studies tended to have a national focus and largely ignored the transnational and historical contexts of communication and media.

In Europe, media and communication as a field of academic study took time to develop, though in Finland a college of journalism was established in 1925, in Czechoslovakia in 1928, and the Institut Français de Presse in Paris in 1937. After the Second World War, Europe’s first international journal for media, Gazette, was founded in 1955 – four years after the launch of the US-based Journal of Communication. Academic study of media began in Italy in 1958 and in Spain in 1960, while such French scholars as Jacques Ellul, with his seminal work on propaganda, and Fernand Terrou, who founded the science of the press at the Sorbonne University, made notable contributions to the field (Vroons, 2005).

In Britain’s class-dominated academe, where higher education was until the 1980s the preserve of a relatively small elite, media studies developed at the margins of traditional academic activities. Initially media studies was taught in the former polytechnics and was characterized as having a Marxist orientation – reclaiming and validating the experience of the working classes, with intellectual inspiration from such figures as Richard Hoggart, founder of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, and Welsh scholar Raymond Williams at Cambridge University. The dominant ‘culturalist’ paradigm took a qualitative and critical approach and evolved in the 1970s to delineate the ideological role of the mass media (Scannell, 2007). Thus, in Britain, the study of media, culture and communication had a different trajectory from that of the US model of communication studies with its health, development, interpersonal and organizational variants. Despite its popularity among students, the media were not considered a ‘proper’ subject for academic study, and that rather condescending attitude towards the subject still persists in some quarters.

In parts of the world where the British educational model had a defining influence, such as in India, a similar attitude to studying the media can be detected. Generally in the global South, where the European colonial imprint was deeply ingrained in intellectual institutions, media and communication research was profoundly influenced by the Western or, more specifically, the American tradition of mass communication research, given its prominence during the Cold War. This was reflected also in a dependency relationship in the field of research, evident in the import of textbooks, journals, citations, employment of experts, and the funding, planning and execution of research. This situation was characterized, as Halloran has noted, ‘by a one-way flow of values, ideas, models, methods and resources from North to South. It may even be more specifically a flow from the Anglo-Saxon language fraternity to the rest of the world’ (Halloran, 1997:39).

It is not surprising then that US approaches were enthusiastically adopted in media and communication courses around the developing world. The so-called modernization paradigm shaped the theoretical framework in relation to media and communication studies in much of the global South (Sparks, 2007). A dependency syndrome developed that privileged a type of data-driven research on the behaviour, attitudes and values of the people in the developing countries but largely failed to analyse the political, social and cultural contexts of communication. Continuities can be detected in a revised version of modernization theory which demonstrates an almost blind faith in the potential of the new information and communication technologies as agencies for development. This ‘neo-developmentalist’ view, under the banner of the globalization of the information society, legitimized an advanced telecommunication and computer infrastructure, through ‘efficient’ private corporations (Mosco, 1996). A valuable antidote to the modernization thesis, represented by critical research, analysed patterns of ownership and production in the media and communication industries, and located these within the context of national and transnational power relations. However, this tradition often took a deterministic line in which much of the South was seen as an undifferentiated ‘other’.

To be sure, such limitations of scholarship were not specific to the study of media and communication but afflicted the social sciences more generally, being deeply rooted within European academic traditions. As Said has argued, in the European intellectual imagination the ‘other’ was created as part of an ideological Orientalist discourse, promoting and privileging European imperialist epistemology (Said, 1978). Such specialized journals as the Journal asiatique (established in 1823), the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1834), and the Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen Gesellschaft (1845), as well as ‘learned societies’, helped legitimize an intellectual discourse which was based principally on racialized and imperialistic categorizations of the non-European. As a recent study of higher education in colonial India argues, European epistemology was projected not just as one of many ways of knowing but as knowledge itself, undermining indigenous knowledge systems and traditions (Seth, 2007).

As British colonialism became entrenched in most of the globe during the nineteenth century, the hegemony of the English language was established, supplemented in the twentieth century by the growing relationship between American-led global capitalism – with its formidable media, cultural, corporate, military and communication networks – and the English language (Phillipson,1992). This severely disadvantaged scholars writing in other languages (even European ones). Translations, where they existed, were more often than not from English into other languages rather than the other way around (Ahmad, 1992).

As historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued in his provocative book Provincializing Europe, this led to what he termed ‘asymmetric ignorance’, indicating that the Western academy did not need to read specialists of non-Western histories. Long ‘dead and gone’ European intellectuals are routinely invoked as ‘though they were our own contemporaries’, Chakrabarty notes. Illustrating his point with an example from his native India, Chakrabarty wryly observes: ‘Faced with the task of analyzing developments or social practices in modern India, few if any Indian social scientists or social scientists of India would argue seriously with, say, the thirteenth-century logician Gangesa or with the grammarian and linguistic philosopher Bartrihari (fifth to sixth centuries), or with the tenth- or eleventh-century aesthetician Abhinavagupta. Sad though it is, one result of European colonial rule in South Asia is that the intellectual traditions once unbroken and alive in Sanskrit or Persian or Arabic are now only matters of historical research for most – perhaps all – modern social scientists in the region’ (Chakrabarty, 2007:5–6).

That there exists in Western historical writing a pervasive Eurocentric or Occiden...

Table of contents

• Internationalizing Media Studies
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Internationalizing media research
• Part II Broadening the field of media studies
• Part III Regional perspectives on internationalization
• Part IV Pedagogic parameters
• Index