9

Nomadic Scholarship

Translocal Approach to Audience Studies

Fabienne Darling-Wolf

In his seminal work on the hybrid nature of contemporary cultures, Argentinian Mexican cultural critic Néstor García-Canclini (1995) describes the anthropologist as entering the city by foot, the sociologist “by car and via the main highway,” and “the communications scholar by plane” (p. 4). Much of the corpus of communication research in the United States seems to justify this characterization. The hefty bodies of work on political economy and transnational media flows, on the transmission and processing of information, or on the politics of media representation are typically concerned with drawing large-scale outlines of media production, content, distribution, and/or reception processes – in other words (and to continue García-Canclini's metaphor), with producing an aerial view rather than a detailed map of the city. In fact, one wonders at times if the communication scholar enters the city at all.

While such investigations have certainly contributed to our understanding of the role of communication in society and culture(s) – and while I do not mean to suggest that we stop producing such research – their macro-level perspective limits their ability to address the realm of reception and, more specifically, the process of interpretation and meaning-making that takes place at the micro-level when audiences consume media texts. In order to better address what Stuart Hall (1980) characterizes as the “decoding” end of the communication process, we need to more specifically attend to audiences' “on-the-ground” negotiation of various cultural texts in different sociocultural contexts.

Using transnational communication research that focuses on the “local” reception of “global” texts as a starting point, this chapter discusses how developing a multi-sited translocal approach to media reception that “focuses on connections between several local social spaces, exploring hitherto neglected local-to-local links” (Kraidy, 2005, p. 155) can help us confront the challenges of fieldwork and contribute to the development of a more sophisticated multidimensional understanding of media audiences. Bearing in mind the theoretical challenge of approaching research with a full awareness of our (and our informants') multiple identities, I further consider what a translocal approach might look like, not only in the context of global media studies but also in the broader realm of qualitative communication research. I close by offering a number of strategies that scholars engaged in audience research might usefully employ to develop a more translocal perspective on audiences' lived experiences and to help them address the politics of conducting such research in a Western academic context. Throughout the chapter, to illustrate my points, I will often draw on my personal experiences as an individual who lives and conducts research in multiple cultural settings. The examples I outline here will demonstrate the usefulness of personal experience as a productive research tool, particularly when we become aware of the translocal aspects of our experiences.

Not an Easy Task

Attending to audiences is not an easy task. While scholars recognize the need to develop a better understanding of audiences' lived experiences in specific contexts, scholarly attempts to address this need have tended to remain “theoretically sophisticated but empirically thin,” producing “quasi-ethnographic” works that lack a “commitment to immersion, building of trust, long-term observation, or participation in the daily lives of research participants” (Murphy & Kraidy, 2003, p. 3). This reluctance, on the part of those who study audiences, to leave the relatively safe realm of theory may be explained in part by the fact that entering the city by foot, alongside the anthropologist, can be an extremely messy business when one is a communications scholar.

At the most practical level, the “political economy” of ethnographic research predicated on costly and time-consuming field experience often has dire consequences (financial and otherwise) for scholars in a discipline lacking a tradition of fieldwork. As communication scholars Patrick Murphy and Marwan Kraidy (2003) explain in the introduction to their edited collection on ethnographic perspectives in global media studies, the ethnographic study of media audiences is, as a result, “constantly under threat of becoming the epistemological privilege of well-funded scholars at elite institutions” (p. 4). This reality becomes evident to me each year when I teach qualitative methods to doctoral students (in a Mass Media and Communication program). Despite my attempts to encourage students to pursue ethnographic methods, the time constraints of the program coupled with the seemingly insurmountable financial challenge posed by fieldwork typically result in most of my students choosing textual analysis as their preferred method, with the occasional addition of qualitative interviewing. The difficult economic conditions under which most academic institutions currently operate make it unlikely that this situation will change for them once they develop their dissertation project or find themselves on tenure track – if they ever are “lucky” enough to get there.

In a similar vein, those of us who managed to spend months or years in the field conducting our dissertation research on audiences or human subjects have often found that we could not reproduce the experience until after we are safely tenured and/or promoted. While I was able, for instance, to return to Japan (the focus of my dissertation work) to conduct fieldwork during summers when I was on tenure track, at other times in the academic year I was discouraged from planning for longer fieldwork periods, which might interfere with my teaching schedule and research productivity.¹ If spending a few weeks with informants each summer can help us develop a better understanding of media audiences, it is not exactly analogous to the total immersion or long-term observation that Murphy and Kraidy (2003) are advocating.

At a more general level, when researchers do choose to conduct fieldwork, the identity politics of a research method critiqued for its historical collusion with colonialism and Western imperialist discourse remain painfully difficult to negotiate. Indeed, if the intense debates initiated by the rise of postmodernism about the politics of representation and the (im)possibility of “speaking for the Other” have usefully complicated our understanding of power issues in ethnographic work, they have also rendered the practice of fieldwork increasingly intimidating. It is consequently not particularly surprising that a growing body of media ethnography should be “shaped more by the critique of ethnography's association with colonialism and Western discourse than by the surprise and productivity of the field encounter” (Murphy & Kraidy, 2003, p. 4). Fully engaging the historical legacy of Western imperialist discourse on ethnographic work requires scholars associated with American or European institutions to come to terms with the fact that they are conducting research from an inescapably privileged vantage point – a fact that does not necessarily render ethnographic audience research hopelessly perfidious or useless, but one that must nevertheless be addressed and carefully negotiated. This is, by all means, not an easy or comfortable task.

Add to this the challenge of accessing the “increasingly intimate, microscopic and virtual reception environments and practices” created by media technologies that, “unlike the less closed-in and more performative–ritualized spaces that have been the customary sites for ethnographic inquiry throughout anthropology's history” (ibid.), render the very notion of “doing fieldwork” increasingly problematic, and the situation gets even messier (for a more detailed analysis of the shifting nature of ethnographic fieldsites, see for example Clua, 2003; Couldry, 2003). Despite the mess, however, scholars interested in investigating how audiences negotiate media messages in various environments do continue to insist on entering the city by foot (or at least on a bicycle). They choose to do so because, if the challenges of fieldwork can be daunting at times, media ethnography also generates unique opportunities to engage media reception in all its complexity.

A View From the Ground

The pioneering audience studies of Janice Radway (1984), Ien Ang (1985), Andrea Press (1991), Elizabeth Bird (1992), and others too numerous to mention here have taught us that we often get a completely different picture when talking to individuals and observing their engagement with popular culture from the one we take when analyzing media texts and/or the politics of their production and distribution. This fact has become painfully obvious to scholars interested in the relationship between the global environment in which popular culture is generated and distributed and the varied local contexts in which it is consumed.

Those who are looking at processes of globalization from the point of view of political economy see a picture of the world where global media production is increasingly concentrated in the hands of powerful corporations from the richest nations (Herman & McChesney, 1997; McPhail, 2002). These scholars argue that this situation produces inauthentic and alienating cultural forms, which thoroughly penetrate and disrupt the local cultures to which they are ultimately distributed (see for example, Giddens, 1999; Tehranian, 1999). Others recognize that transnational flows are increasingly multidimensional and complex but nevertheless argue that global media promote “an American conception of the world” (Hall, 1997, p. 33). As Hall (1997) puts it, globalization speaks English, even if in a “variety of broken forms” – including “Anglo Japanese, Anglo-French, Anglo-German,” or even “Anglo-English” (p. 28).

Those who study transnational flows “primarily conceived in terms of multinational corporations, powerful media, communication technology, or government actors” might, however, “fail to recognize the diversity of paths that can lead to global cultural connections” (Condry, 2006, p. 207). What if, for instance, the use of English is less of a symptom of US hegemony than a tool to question powerful elites' essentializing characterizations of “local” culture – as scholars suggest is the case of much Japanese popular music (see for example Condry, 2006; Stanlow, 2000)? What if the US origins of this global English are ultimately lost, for listeners, in this multidimensional mixing of global cultural production, where our collective memory is “made from the fragments of different nations, making it difficult for that memory to be distilled from any one particular group” (Yúdice, 2001, p. xxvii)? The insertion of “on-the-ground” engagement with local agents into considerations of global processes significantly complicates the picture of transnational cultural influence. As Murphy and Kraidy (2003) remind us: “While globalization may be discursively situated in terms of broad economic, political and cultural trends, media consumption is [. . .] perhaps the most immediate, consistent and pervasive way in which ‘globality’ is experienced” (p. 7).

Indeed, the ethnographic audience research of numerous global media scholars underscore how local agents are often actively engaged in a complex process of transnational reinterpretation through which they translate, mutate, and “indigenize” cultural imports (Tomlinson, 1999, p. 84) – a process that is not, however, devoid of power struggles or negative implications for those involved in it (see for example Parameswaran, 1999; Darling-Wolf, 2003a, 2004; La Pastina, 2007). This research demonstrates that, as local audiences' identities and hybrid cultural forms are being fashioned in relation – or even in opposition – to the global through involvement with increasingly abstract and deterritorialized imagined communities (Anderson & Kingsley, 1999; Niezen, 2004), the global–local nexus becomes a site of simultaneous resistance and domination, enacted on multiple interlocking axes and negotiated in complex and often unpredictable ways (Appadurai, 2001). In other words, “[t]he identification of structures of power by political–economic media research is necessary, but not sufficient, for an understanding of the local–global dynamic. Grasping how power works in concrete local settings is crucial” (Kraidy & Murphy, 2008, p. 351).

In this context, “[p]art of the challenge of understanding cultural globalization involves recognizing that the global and the local are not so much matched pairs as they are symbolic crystallizations of more fluid, ongoing processes unfolding over time” (Condry, 2006, p. 86). In order to fully tease out the implications of this recognition one must, as García-Canclini (2001) suggests, “focus on the concrete conditions in which cultural processes develop in different countries, on the interaction of globalizing projects and the specific multicultural social arrangements obtaining in given regions” (pp. 3–4). Kraidy and Murphy (2008) propose a view of the local that “ventures beyond prevalent conceptualizations of ‘the local’ as something that exists in suspended opposition with ‘the global’” (p. 339). They contend that an ethnographically thick translocal approach “focused on an intricate understanding of the encounter between local life and global forces” (p. 339) is a necessary component of such a project, as it “enables an understanding of the local–global dialectic through the comparative study of multiple locales” (p. 346). As they conclude:

Why Translocalism?

The move toward thinking in terms of “translocal” rather than “global” rests in part on the recognition that, when scholars speak of “the global,” they are often actually describing a series of translocal encounters. I was recently powerfully reminded of the emphasis on the translocal as I was attending an academic conference on the theme of encouraging students to become “global citizens.” The vast majority of the discussions among the scholars present (all engaged in some form of “international” research) centered on the benefits and politics of programs for study abroad (that is, means to provide students with a variety of enlightening translocal experiences) rather than on strategies designed to help students develop an increased awareness of the fact that their daily lives and activities – from the coffee they drink in the morning to the TV they watch at night – are necessarily embedded in worldwide networks of interaction with manifold economic and political implications for individuals around the globe.

Thus, developing a truly global perspective on audiences is not an easy task. As Straubhaar (2007) reminds us, “[o]ne of the main limits on globalization in media and culture is that relatively few people have a primarily global identity” (p. 6). Similarly, processes of transnational influence often operate within relatively limited geocultural and transnational cultural–linguistic regions rather than on a truly worldwide scale. “In short, ‘global’ is not ‘universal,’ and ‘global communication’ does not mean ‘universal communication’” (Mowlana, 1997, p.8).

A translocal approach to audiences can, however, inform our understanding of the global if it is not simply limited to producing translocal encounters (the “study abroad” approach, which often still rests on dualistic comparisons) but is used instead to investigate global–local connections through empirical investigations of multiple local sites, considered in relationship to each other and within a broader global context. A translocal approach can, in other words, enable us “to refocus on the local, which is after all the site where meaning emerges, without disengaging from issues involving global forces,” since “[i]t is through the comparative study of local life in various locations that a living, breathing sense of global communication flows, processes, and outcomes can be comprehensively grasped” (Kraidy & Murphy, 2008, p. 339). Perhaps the most productive aspect of translocalism is that it allows us to address “how one local can help us understand another local” (p. 343). Using the example of global reality television formats adapted to various local environments, Kraidy and Murphy illustrate how this might work. Noting that “[t]he a priori assumption that various format adaptations are linked to the original format (global) but not to each other (locals) is difficult to sustain in the globally connected contemporary world” (p. 347), they explain how, for instance, a Lebanese text may be better understood in terms of its relation to the French incarnation of a format than to its globally licensed form:

In this case, the postcolonial relationship between France and Lebanon offers a more useful framework of analysis than a conceptualization of power relations more broadly characterized in terms of local versus an undefined global.

More generally, translocalism can inform our understanding of the local–global articulation in audience research by providing for a wider range of references to draw on in the process of interpretation. I find, for instance, that I tend to interpret individuals' attitude toward religion in my Japanese fieldsite – where Shinto and Buddhist influences are fluidly negotiated – through the lens of my experiences in predominantly “Catholic” France, where the legality of abortion has remained largely uncontested since 1975, where most people typically go to church only on Christmas night (and, occasionally, at Easter), and where people use birth control but assume they will have children some day and choose to baptize them as infants when they do: where, in other words, the pope's pronouncements are taken with a (rather large) grain of salt and religion is generally approached as an element of culture to be negotiated rather than as a choice profoundly formative of one's identity, as is often the case in the United States. As a consequence of this different positioning, I tend to find US scholars' frequent linking of Japanese religious syncretism to Japan's “exceptional ability to globalize foreign elements (see for example Robertson, 1992) somewhat exaggerated.

Translocal connections can thus usefully run in multiple and complex directions. My personal experience of growing up in France on a heavy dose of both US and Japanese media has informed my understanding of US and Japanese global influence – while at the same time providing insights on French cultural protectionism – just as my work with Japanese media consumers has helped me better understand audiences in French and US contexts (and vice versa). Similarly, when I moved to Japan for the first time, I found life in the countryside highly reminiscent of the small French town where I grew up. The population density, the way people addressed each other in the streets of the village (“Hot isn't it?” “Cold today!”), the multilayered mountains always on the horizon, evoked a “structure of feeling” (Williams, 1961) much more similar to that of the rural France of my youth than to that of the urban United States, which had by then become my “home.” Years later, however, when I decided to reconnect with my local culture “of origin” by buying a “fixer-upper” in a village some 30 kilometers from the town where I was born, I found my experience of the place steeped in translocal comparisons with Japan. An extract from field notes taken in 2008, when I arrived in the village for the summer, illustrates this process:

This shows how translocal encounters can shape our understanding and experience of various “locals” – including, in my case, the place where I am “originally from” – on multiple and multidimensional axes. I suggest that this multilayered process of complicating the local offers productive potential for scholars involved in all areas of audience research, even if their research is not necessarily conducted in a transnational context.

We Are All Translocal, Including Audience Researchers

Taking a historically long view on transnational and intercultural influence, sociologist Jan Nederveen Pieterse (2009) convincingly argues that processes of translocalism and hybridization are the historical norm rather than the exception. Noting that “we are all migrants” (2009, p. 25), he suggests: “The moment we shift lenses from sedentary to mobile categories, the whole environment and the horizon change: hunting, nomadic pastoralism, fishing, trade, transnational enterprise, and hyperspace all have deterritorialization built in” (p. 144). The recognition that “hybridity is deeply rooted in history and quite ordinary” (p. 97) has significant implications for the development of a translocal approach in communication research. Under this premise, as Pieterse contends, “[w]hat is problematic is not hybridity but the fetishism of boundaries that has marked so much of history” (ibid.). In other words, recognizing that we are all, to some extent, translocal (or, as Pieterse would put it, hybrid) encourages us to critically engage the politics of representation permeating academic research. As Pieterse wonders:

If we must be careful not to unquestionably celebrate cultural syncretism and translocalism without taking into account the historical circumstances under which hybridity develops – as Yúdice (2001) reminds us, for many “hybridity results from having to satisfy basic needs by participating in a system of production and consumption not of one's choosing” (p. xv) – Pieterse's questions are important ones to address. Answering them requires us to recognize that (1) all identities are, as he suggests, translocal at least to some extent; (2) some elements of our translocal identity are nevertheless more obvious and/or readily acknowledged than others; and (3) we must critically consider why and how these elements are privileged over others.

For instance, my own translocality is enacted most powerfully on a transnational and/or transcultural axis. Born and raised in France, I have spent most of my adult life in the United States, where I currently teach. I am engaged in an ongoing relationship with Japan, where I moved for the first time as an English teacher some 15 years ago, and which became the main focus of my research (and my ethnographic fieldsite) shortly thereafter. I have lived on the island of Shikoku for several years and have been teaching a summer workshop in Tokyo on a regular basis for the past 10 years or so. I have always returned to France regularly to visit family and have remained close to the francophone community in the United States through my two daughters' French immersion school. I have recently chosen to spend a year-long research leave conducting fieldwork near the town where I grew up (I am looking out onto the French countryside as I am writing these lines). I have homes in France and the United States, and my bicycle is parked in Tokyo (it literally is). In addition to my professional and personal relationships to these three cultural environments, my life partner of 20 years is a Canadian of Ukrainian origin, and, while I have never lived in Canada, we frequently visit his family there. Our daughters are US, French, and Canadian citizens and like to “claim” their “Japaneseness” through expressions of familiarity and affection for a culture in which they have spent extensive periods of time from the moment they were born.

In a strictly academic setting, however, the fact that I speak an accented English, teach at a US institution, and mostly conduct feminist research on Japanese popular culture are the most common axes on which my translocalism is acknowledged and negotiated. Furthermore, not all facets of this identity are treated equally (or, for that matter, are equally significant to my academic research). While I have never found my ability to conduct research on US or French popular culture challenged – despite the (possibly compromising) fact that I am a non-US citizen who left France more than 20 years ago – I frequently find myself having to establish my credentials in order to conduct feminist research in Japan. For instance, despite my much greater academic knowledge (from an anthropological, sociological, or historical point of view) of Japanese culture than of the culture of the other two nations where I have lived, the stamp of approval of a Japanese national was deemed desirable for validating my research on/with Japanese female audiences when I applied for tenure. I was also asked to include several males on my list of outside reviewers, as female scholars' ability to “objectively” judge my feminist research was deemed suspect. In other words, just as we embody different selves in different situations, some elements of our translocal identity necessarily, and at times problematically, take precedence over others in specific settings and at specific points in time.

More specifically, as some aspects of identity are normalized, others are, for lack of a better word and at the risk of sounding repetitive, “othered.” For instance whiteness, maleness, middle-class status, and “Americaness” tend to be naturalized in US academic settings (unless one teaches, perhaps, in a Women's Studies or African American Studies program). As a result, the racial, gendered, class, and national identities of white, male, middle-class US citizens are rarely acknowledged and/or problematized. The complexity of identity politics in academic research has been discussed at length (see for example Narayan, 1989; Bow, 1995; Lakritz, 1995); a full-fledged consideration of its multiple implications is beyond the scope of this chapter and would be repetitive. Suffice is to say here that problematizing all identity boundaries emerges as a useful and necessary exercise. The following section offers some suggestions on how we might proceed to do it by developing a more translocal approach, which might be usefully applied beyond global media studies to various areas of audience research.

On Developing Translocal Strategies for Audience Studies

Questioning Our Own Identities

To develop a truly critical translocalism (Kraidy, 2005), one might productively start by considering the implications of one's own location(s). In a fieldwork setting, this means recognizing and attempting to come to terms with the multiple and complex ways in which our identity (and that of the participants in our research) is constantly performed and negotiated (for more detailed reflections on how this might be accomplished, see for example Akindes, 2003; Buarque de Almeida, 2003; Darling-Wolf, 2003b; La Pastina, 2007). In the French village where I currently live and conduct fieldwork, I have interestingly realized, for instance, that I am constantly “catching” myself claiming my insider status as someone who has grown up in the region. While this is at best an exercise in futility, considering my obvious outsider status as a long-term resident of the United States and, perhaps even more, as a university professor, the fact that I suddenly find myself emphasizing an aspect of my identity I rarely otherwise claim illustrates the politics of my own representational choices.

Defining myself as an Ardéchoise is not necessarily “wrong” – I did grow up nearby, I feel that the strongly asserted cultural specificity of the region remains part of my current cultural makeup, and it offers a convenient link to the lives of the people I interact with on a daily basis. I must be wary, however, not to let this strategic representation serve as a means to downplay other aspects of my identity, which may be more difficult to negotiate (including my status as a researcher), or to justify claims to a problematic form of automatic epistemological authority. At a practical level, I have found that the official consent forms I bring to formal interviews can serve as a useful reminder of my status as a researcher from a foreign institution. They help establish the link between my “local” self – the French-speaking me, who attended the local high school – and my “global” work, visually represented in the university logo at the top of the page and in the English language text surrounding it.

More generally, I must acknowledge that my translocal position is one of privilege that significantly differs from the forced translocality of migrant workers, of immigration that occurs as a result of political strife, intense economic hardship, or forced relocation, or of postcolonial experience. Even though I was raised in a predominantly working-class environment (I first moved to the United States as a live-in babysitter), my national and racial identities afforded me the privilege to choose a (somewhat) global identity. In a similar vein, while the historical encounters between France and Lebanon mean that Lebanese scholar Marwan Kraidy and I share some cultural commonalities that are based on the “conflictual unity bonded by common political and cultural experiences” (Pieterse, 2009, p. 74) that often arises from the experience of postcolonialism, I am constantly reminded in my relationship with him of the crucial qualitative differences between his knowledge of “my” culture – steeped in the legacy of forced cultural influence – and my familiarity with “his,” shaped by an orientalist desire for an exotic Other.

This does not mean, however, that these cultural commonalities cannot be positively harnessed to promote a greater understanding of the nature of transnational and transcultural influence in both of these cultural environments – as happened in our recent respective studies of the adaptation of the same reality TV format in France (Darling-Wolf, 2010) and in the Arab world (Kraidy, 2009). Indeed, if, as Pieterse (2009) suggests, “[p]owerful interests are invested in boundaries and borders” (p. 145), a critical translocalism must ultimately move beyond identity politics, to develop “a new awareness of and new take on dynamics of group formation and social inequality [. . .] furthered by acknowledging rather than by suppressing hybridity” (p. 121). In other words, considering the implications of our own location(s) entails acknowledging the ways in which we are hybrid and harnessing the productive potential of this recognition in specific cultural, historical, and social contexts.

I was recently reminded of this potential when I realized that a Japanese informant – with whom I had long communicated in English or Japanese – actually spoke very good French and had traveled extensively throughout Europe. We both were delighted at this new connection, which took our relationship to a different level and complicated our understanding of each other's identities. We now speak French whenever we see each other. This incident also reminded me, however, of the power of my institutional connection to the United States in defining how I am viewed in my Japanese fieldsite, where interactions with Westerners are typically limited to those with the few English teachers (most often from the United States, Canada, or Australia) who make it to the island. It has encouraged me to acknowledge my French citizenship more honestly in my interactions with Japanese informants.

Denaturalizing Normalized Identities

As noted earlier in this essay, some identities are more easily recognized as translocal or hybrid than others in a US academic setting. One step toward developing a more sophisticated approach to translocalism entails recognizing the hybrid nature of all identities and denaturalizing those aspects of identity that have been hegemonically naturalized as the “objective” norm (for a discussion of this process, see for example Bordo, 1990; Harding, 1990; Narayan, 1989). We might productively start, for instance, by critically addressing the fact that white people have a race, men have a gender, heterosexuals have a sexual orientation (and so on), or that Native Americans are the only US citizens not to have acquired their national identity through a process of immigration (either forced, as in the case of African Americans, or voluntary). As illustrated above, doing so would entail encouraging individuals to consider the implications of their own translocal identities.

Our success in destabilizing the boundaries of race, gender, sexual orientation (and so on) also rests, however, on our willingness to let individuals whose identities have been historically and culturally normalized enter a conversation too often dominated by rigidly defined identity politics. This is not to suggest falling into a form of extreme postmodern pluralism that erases power relations and treats all perspectives as equally valid – we certainly must keep in mind that different identities have different practical and political consequences. But we must work to consider critically all identities, in all of their complexity. I often find, for instance, that within the academic community my status as an immigrant is superseded by my Caucasian racial identity and by my European origin – that is, I may speak with an accent, but I am granted the status of honorary US citizen as long as I more or less follow the rules of US academic behavior. Failure to acknowledge this important side of my identity not only diminishes the potential for recognition and coalition-building across identity boundaries within the immigrant community – to which, incidentally, I do feel strongly connected – but also serves to problematically veil the complex ways in which the politics of race permeates the discourse on immigration, and, more broadly, “diversity.” A more productive route would be to involve everyone in a carefully situated critical examination of the “genealogies of hybridity” (Pieterse, 2009, p. 91) that “does not preclude struggle but yields a multifocus view on struggle and, by showing multiple identity on both sides, transcends the ‘us versus them’ dualism that prevails in cultural and political arenas” (p. 145).

Recognizing the “Local” of Academia

When I first moved to the United States from an environment where attending a four-year university was a relatively rare occurrence (neither of my parents went to high school, my sister attended a two-year community college), I often found the academic culture of vigorous in-class discussions, office hours (this was long before email became a favored form of communication between professors and students), extra-curricular activities, scholarship applications, recommendation letters, and honors programs more daunting than the broader Texas culture that I also found myself having to negotiate. Today I still find that the most difficult translations are often those from the world and speech of academia into the world and speech of individuals (frequently of a rural lower-class background) whom I conduct research with, rather than those “only” involving switching between different national languages – French, Japanese, English.

As a culture that “takes its capital from the scholarly tradition, from the machineries of literacy and education, which are affordable only to a privileged few” (Chow, 1993, p. 114), the academic context in which most scholars are immersed constitutes a “local” environment that significantly shapes the way they see the others and experience the world. Developing a translocal perspective requires us to learn to identify and negotiate this local context's “cultural assumptions.” Because one must be highly educated to enter the ranks of academics, some of the greatest challenges in accomplishing this task are linked to class biases.

Regardless of the nature of the sociocultural background in which they were raised, (future) academics must learn to function in a professional culture that brings with it upper-class biases regarding, for instance, the nature of work (work is more than a way to put food on the table, individuals have some control over their daily schedules), the use of and access to technology (people can be reached at any time and/or wherever they might be, an email message can be expected to yield an answer within days, if not hours, of being sent, a computer must be replaced every few years), or what constitutes a “decent” salary (a lot more than minimum wage, even at the recently raised rate of $7.25 an hour). Such assumptions are challenged on a daily basis in the small village of about 350 inhabitants where I currently reside. While most households count at least one cell phone, frequent and long conversations are rare, and people are definitely not obsessed with their blackberries. If fact, it is not uncommon to have people tell you they could not call you because they were “out of minutes” (my own plan gives me 30 minutes a month, which, blissfully, I never use up). While I found it difficult to function without an Internet connection before a phone line was installed in our house – I missed my favorite newspapers and podcasts, kept on forgetting that I couldn't check things online and got intensely frustrated trying to read my email from my neighbors' computer that just seemed unbearably slow – few people here use email to communicate on a regular basis. I quickly had to learn that I simply couldn't expect people to respond to my email messages, and that if I wanted to set up an interview I had to invite them to my house for dinner.

In other words, we must be aware of the ways in which the biases of academic culture might influence our interactions with individuals in other “locales” and the conclusions we draw about the significance of these individuals' engagements with mediatized texts or cultural practices.

Developing Language Skills

Developing a translocal approach requires us to develop languages skills that help us communicate from one local setting to another. These skills may take the form of “traditional” foreign language competencies – often still a challenge in a US cultural setting that lacks a long tradition of language study from an early age (the national education system requires French schools to start teaching English to children in first grade, two more languages are added in sixth grade) – or they may focus on our abilities to translate the speech of academia into the vernacular languages of the audiences we study.

Granted, this is not always an easy task. While I was lucky enough to be encouraged to study Japanese in my PhD program, I have struggled to fit it into my busy schedule as a professor. But perhaps more time could be dedicated to it were it to take greater priority over the development of other research skills and not to be regarded simply as an extra-curricular activity. Furthermore, regardless of its ultimate success, the process of attempting to develop language skills is a useful exercise in humility, which helps destabilize the lazy naturalization of US English as a global language (“everyone speaks English”) and might ultimately encourage greater tolerance for the multiple versions of English spoken by individuals in different environments in all their peculiarities of accent.

In a similar vein, efforts to translate our work into everyday speech open up productive opportunities for conversations with individuals outside the limited realm of the academic community that most of us find ourselves so immersed in. Indeed, some of the most insightful discussions of our work might come from members of the audience we study, not from respondents to a conference panel. Take the passionate discussions I had with a Japanese key informant over the course of an entire year after I suggested that Pikachu was representative of Japanese culture – this was at the height of the Pokemon craze. Or the pointed questions from a French media consumer regarding my analysis of the nationalistic subtext of reality television. Those were fruitful sources of research inspiration as well as highly enjoyable intellectual debates.

Moving Beyond Dualisms

Because it is predicated on developing a multi-sited approach aimed at undermining the often rigidly defined boundaries of identity and/or place, translocalism in audience research requires us to move “beyond dualism, binary thinking, Aristotelian logic” to emphasize “the in-between the interstices” (Pieterse, 2009, p. 120). This is not an easy task within an academic structure that, while often paying lip-service to the value of interdisciplinary research and collaboration, is generally organized around narrowly defined disciplines and/or area studies that scholars must “fit into” if they are to receive funding, recognition, or promotion (Appadurai, 2001). This division, in turn, exacerbates the identity politics discussed above, as scholars who do not fit neatly in any one category are encouraged to “pick a camp” (for a discussion of this process, see Bow, 1995).

While these structural issues may be difficult to address in the short term, moving beyond dualistic thinking can be a first step toward destabilizing such dualisms. We might productively start by thinking critically about the questions we ask each other. When talking about my work, I am often asked, for instance, whether I am a “bilingual,” which, in this particular context, generally aims at finding out whether I speak Japanese. I am, indeed, a “bilingual,” since French is my native language. I do my best in Japanese (enough to function in the field) and I dabble in Spanish. The fact, however, that the question is put in terms of “bilingualism” illustrates the continuing hold of binarism on academic logic – in a similar vein, I am often asked whether my children have “dual” citizenship. Critically assessing how this mode of thinking influences the way we conceptualize the world might help us recognize that multilingualism is not that uncommon – in fact the monolingualism of most US citizens is the global exception rather than the rule – and it might also help us develop a more complex understanding of identity, one liberated from the either/or, “us versus them” epistemology.

Similarly, we must acknowledge that seemingly simple questions such as “Where are you from?” may require complex answers (my typical response is “How much time do you have?”; my partner's is “All over”), which teach us to respect individuals' acts of self-definition in response to such queries (my oldest daughter likes to describe herself as “French, American, Canadian, and a bit Japanese”) and to accept “unsatisfactory” answers without further interrogation (avoid the still too frequent “No, but I detect an accent. Where are you from originally?”).

Embracing Hybridity – Not Just Theoretically

If, as Pieterse (2009) suggests, “[h]ybridity has become a regular, almost ordinary fixture in popular and mainstream culture” and “is inching up to become the leading paradigm with a steadily growing literature” (p. viii) in the social sciences, the recognition that hybridity “is deeply rooted in history and quite ordinary” (p. 98) must move beyond mere theoretical acknowledgment. But if scholars have powerfully addressed the implications of this recognition to complicate, for instance, our understanding of transnational cultural influence, this recognition is often more difficult to apply – as I hope to have already illustrated to some extent – in the lived experience of our daily academic lives. Those who, for reasons of national/cultural origin or ethnic/class background, do not fit the cultural standards of US academic culture neatly – the Asian teaching assistant (TA) with a strongly accented English, the junior faculty member who spends more time engaging in activism than publishing in academic journals, the non-American job candidate whom we suspect might at some time “decide to go home” – are often marginalized rather than celebrated as valuable sources for productive translocal encounters. While, certainly, a minimal ability to function in a US academic setting can reasonably be expected of individuals employed or studying at US institutions, the fact that translocalism is often construed in terms of the “problems” it creates rather than of the possibilities it offers prevents us from fully harnessing the positive potential of translocal individuals in academic life. We must learn to embrace hybridity in all its implications.

Reclaiming Interpretation

Because it encourages us to identify and draw on different aspects of our identity, a translocal approach is predicated on the recognition of the process of interpretation as a central element in developing a deeper understanding of the audiences we study. As Geertz reminds us:

The politics of academic research have, however, turned interpretation into an intimidating process, particularly when it concerns the lives of individual audience members who can “talk back to us” rather than relatively quieter media texts. Often this results in an apologetic approach to identity, which is focused on the factors that may “bias” our research rather than on those elements that might usefully inform our interpretation of a particular situation at a particular point in time. Certainly, and as I hope to have argued assertively enough, considering critically the impact of our identity on our research is a necessary exercise for all scholars to engage in – since, as Geertz (1973) reminds us, interpretation “raises some serious problems of verification” (p. 16). But I agree with Murphy and Kraidy's (2003) contention that,

Developing a translocal approach to audience studies encourages scholars “overcome their queasiness” by reclaiming their own identities and those of other scholars, with whom they might cooperate, as important tools in developing empirically grounded interpretations, informed both by theory and by a personal engagement with multiple research sites – as “an explorer, not a tourist” (Pauly, 1991, p. 7). Translocalism is, in other words, an important resource if we want to inform, contextualize, and complicate our understanding of other's experiences and of the meaning of our own investment in academic work.

Concluding Remarks

In contrast to García-Canclini's (1995) portrayal of the communication scholar entering the city by plane, Pauly (1991) describes the qualitative researcher as someone who “ambles along the circuitous back roads of public discourse and social practice” (p. 7). This second metaphor, I contend, can usefully guide the work of audience researchers interested in developing a more sophisticated and carefully situated understanding of individuals' engagement with mediatized texts. If taking the back-roads is not always an easy task, the more roads we travel, the greater our ability to draw translocal linkages between them and the greater the pool of experiences available to us for developing comparative and cosmopolitan interpretations of audiences' media practices. In our voyage we must also, however, strive to develop a critical understanding of why and how some roads are better traveled than others, and we must challenge the notion that the more traveled paths are necessarily the more appropriate routes. Finally, we must keep in mind that we are not traveling alone. A translocal approach encourages us not only to develop our own multi-sited observations, but also to compare our travel logs with those of other, differently located scholars, including those whose road maps might significantly differ from ours. Such a comparative approach can help us better understand how our own experiences shape our understanding of the world and how, in turn, those of the individuals we study might influence their understanding and negotiation of the media texts they consume.

NOTE

1 I must note here that my colleagues as well as our department chair have always been very supportive of my work. Even with a supportive department, however, the larger organizational structure of the university often limits scholars' ability to conduct field-work when it is not perceived as a necessary requirement for tenure and/or promotion.

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