Suchergebnisse

Culture on Display invites the reader to visit culture. Reflecting on the contemporary proliferation of sites displaying culture in visitable form, it offers fresh ways of thinking about tourism, leisure and heritage. Bella Dicks locates diverse exhibitionary locations within wider social, economic and cultural transformations, including contemporary practices of tourism and travel, strategies of economic development, the staging of identities, globalization, interactivity and relations of consumerism. In particular, she critically examines how culture becomes transformed when it is put on dis

This paper seeks to uncover what the marketization of heritage means in practice. Ironically, both the sponsors and the critics of heritage may over-estimate how amenable it is to the 'spirit of enterprise' (whether loved or loathed). This is particularly the case with heritage visitor-sites which have been set up with regeneration-targeted funding. Their planners and sponsors like to think of them as seed-beds for growing the green shoots of enterprise and economic development in the local sphere. This is in accordance with latter-day political doctrines of entrepreneurial governance and the selling of place (for both place-promotion and tourism). On the other side of the fence, their critics accuse them of selling out to the market, shoe-horning history into a standardized industry and turning local culture into a commodity. I shall argue that this picture is caricatured on both sides.

This article discusses three qualitative research traditions concerned with 'multimodal' and 'multisensory' methods, namely: i) ethnomethodology, ii) multisensory ethnography and iii) social semiotics. These have been selected not because they are the only research domains in which qualitative multimodal methodology is currently developing, but because a comparison between them allows for discussion of methodological and theoretical issues of key importance for advancing the field. Each is argued to rely on a distinctive underlying epistemological commitment – to the study of action, experience and communication, respectively. Each combines linguistic and non-linguistic data to try and get closer to the object of research, but involve different ontologies of closeness. The differences include how the object of research is defined, the role of context, the nature and locus of meaning, the nature of evidence and the relationship between researcher and the object/subject of research. These in turn have implications for how time and space are conceived. The discussion ends by indicating how the respective insights and advantages of each might be synthesised to suggest a new, integrated perspective for this kind of qualitative research.

This paper discusses the contradictions of citizen participation in regeneration. Focusing on the south Wales Valleys, it observes that the creation of the Welsh Assembly in 1999 created a window of opportunity for a radical, bottom–up programme of 'non-prescriptive' regeneration, Communities First, which invoked active citizenship to address democratic deficit and economic crisis. Drawing on interview and policy evidence, the analysis shows how the programme became captured by a New Labour policy agenda shifting the priorities from citizen representation to 'community activation'. This trajectory is interpreted in the light of Jones' and Ward's analysis of the 'crisis of crisis management', in which the state attempts to offset repeated failures to address economic crisis by a series of political-level 'fixes' that in turn create new problems. In the case discussed, these fixes take the form of risk management measures, which the paper discusses using the concepts of the risk society (Beck) and reflexive government (Dean).

Industrial heritage deals directly with working-class experience in a very public forum, but has not really been analysed in relation to class issues. This article discusses the case of ex-workers re-employed as heritage guides to tell the story of their own lives at a living history coalmining-museum, exploring the nature of the performances/representations of class that are produced. Heritage performance is caught up in a double bind that is familiar to other kinds of working-class representation: a continual equivocation between foregrounding dignity and autonomy on the one hand, and acknowledging subjugation and defeat on the other.This tension is played out, though differently, both in the guides' past occupations and their present ones.The article examines the public narratives they produce for visitors in the here and now as well as locating these in an understanding of their current positions as tour guide employees and their living through of their memories and identities as mineworkers.

This article notes the `vernacular aesthetic' at work in the new breed of experience-centred heritage museums, which foreground and celebrate the ordinary lives of `the people'. It seeks to understand how constructs of `the people' are produced at such museums. Many existing treatments of heritage museums have analysed them as symptoms of totalizing trends, rather than coming to terms with how they work as sites of cultural communication. By drawing on Stuart Hall's theory of encoding/decoding, the article presents a linked analysis of the encoding and decoding of `the people' at a heritage museum in South Wales. It discusses how this museum was set up, through particular relations of production and frameworks of knowledge, and shows how the heritage texts are the negotiated and hybrid outcome of the conflicts that shaped encoding. It then traces the circuit of communication through to a visitor study, which asked visitors what impressions of `the people then' they had formed during their visit. A particular concern was to explore how visitors positioned their present lives in relation to the past, and how popular mythologies of `community' are deployed in this process.

Der Beitrag verzeichnet das Aufkommen einer "heimatlichen Ästhetik" bei den neu entstehenden erfahrungsorientierten Heimatmuseen, die sich vordergründig mit dem Alltagsleben "der Leute" beschäftigen und dessen Darstellung zelebrieren. Es wird der Versuch unternommmen, zu verstehen, wie das Konstrukt von "den Leuten" in solchen Museen hergestellt wird. Viele Arbeiten, die sich mit Heimatmuseen beschäftigen, analysieren diese als Symptome ganzheitlicher Trends und untersuchen nicht, wie sie als Einrichtungen kultureller Kommunikation funktionieren. Unter bezug auf Stuart Halls Theorie des Codierens/ Decodierens wird eine Analyse vorgestellt, die zeigt, wie in einem Heimatmuseum in Südwales "die Leute" codiert und decodiert werden. Die Entstehungsgeschichte des Museums mit seinen besonderen Produktionsbeziehungen und dem dahinterstehenden Wissensgerüst wird geschildert. Am Ende eines langen und konfliktreichen Codierungsprozesses stehen zwitterhafte heimatbezogene Texte. Eine Besucherstudie, die die Besucher nach ihren Eindrücken, die sie während ihres Rundgangs von "den Leuten damals" gewonnen hatten, fragte, geht den Kommunikationsabläufen nach. Ein wichtiges Anliegen war es, herauszubekommen, wie die Besucher ihr heutiges Leben im Verhältnis zur Vergangenheit sehen und wie sich in diesem Prozess populäre Mythen von "Gemeinschaft" entfalten. (UNübers.)

This article discusses how emergent sensory and multimodal methodologies can work in interaction to produce innovative social enquiry. A juxtaposition of two research projects — an ethnography of corridors and a mixed methods study of multimodal authoring and 'reading' practices — opened up this encounter. Sensory ethnography within social research methods aims to create empathetic, experiential ways of knowing participants' and researchers' worlds. The linguistic field of multimodality offers a rather different framework for research attending to the visual, material and acoustic textures of participants' interactions. While both these approaches address the multidimensional character of social worlds, the 'sensory turn' centres the sensuous, bodied person — participant, researcher and audience/reader — as the 'place' for intimate, affective forms of knowing. In contrast, multimodal knowledge production is premised on multiple analytic gaps — between modes and media, participants and materials, recording and representation. Eliciting the tensions between sensorial closeness and modal distances offers a new space for reflexive research practice and multiple ways of knowing social worlds.

Current interest in ethnography within social research has focused on its potential to offer insights into the complexity of the social world. There have increasingly been calls for ethnography to reflect this complexity more adequately. Two aspects of ethnographic enquiry have been particularly singled out as areas in need of redefinition: the delineation of ethnography's object of study and its mode of presentation. Both of these areas are implicated in the recent attention to the possibilities of hypermedia authoring for ethnography. The paper offers a discussion of this potential in the light of an ongoing research project with which the authors are engaged. The project is designed to enable this potential to be assessed, and to provide for the construction of what the authors call an ethnographic hypermedia environment (EHE). We believe that the promise of hypermedia lies not only in its facility for non-sequential data organisation, but also in its ability to integrate data in different media. The synthesis of the visual, aural, verbal and pictorial planes of meaning holds considerable promise for the expansion and deepening of ethnographic knowledge. Consequently, we suggest that hypermedia has implications for all stages of the research process, and argue against the current tendency to see it as merely a tool either for analysis or for presentation. These arguments are illustrated by means of a commentary on some work in progress.

Ethnographers, like other researchers, currently have a broad range of media at their disposal for conducting fieldwork, for aiding analysis and, most challengingly, for representing their completed work. These include digital media such as photographs, video film, audio-recordings, graphics and others besides. Through the computer 'writing space', these media can be integrated together, alongside more conventional written interpretation, into hypermedia environments. However, integration poses a number of potential problems, which this article addresses through a discussion of the semiotics of multimedia. In particular, it argues that different media can be seen to 'afford' different kinds of meaning. The integration of different media, therefore, has potentially significant implications for ethnography. Rather than seeing these media forms as discrete, we suggest an approach to ethnographic work which sees meaning as emerging from the fusion of differently mediated forms into new, 'multi-semiotic' modes. We therefore recognize the need to go beyond the current interest in visual methods, and instead to develop ways of understanding what kinds of meanings are produced in multimodal ethnographic work.