CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland

Achievements, Obstacles, and Exemplars in Audience Research

Organiser: Melissa Click

Balter-Reitz, Susan (DePauw University, USA) CHILDREN'S MUSEUMS, THE CONSTRUCTION OF AUDIENCE, AND CULTURAL CONSUMPTION: A CASE STUDY OF THE INDIANAPOLIS CHILDREN'S MUSEUM
Children's museums are particularly influential sites; they serve as both cultural and educational institutions. Visitors are required to position themselves as both students and consumers in these museums. Thus, the study of these types of museums provides insight into how individuals are acculturated at a young age to become audience. This paper will examine how the Indianapolis Children's Museum, recently ranked by Child as the top Children's Museum in the United States, invites its audience to participate in the construction of cultural knowledge. I will examine how the museum constructs a preferred audience for its vision of culture through its structural elements, its interactive displays, and its selection of artifacts. In particular, I will examine the museum's exhibitions of other cultures, with a focus on how visitors are asked to view these cultures.

Click, Melissa (University of Massachusetts-Amherst, USA) PERFECTING FANATICISM?: US AUDIENCES' LOVE/HATE RELATIONSHIPS WITH MARTHA STEWART
Nineteen years after Connecticut caterer Martha Stewart published her first book, Entertaining, she heads a media empire that includes, in addition to over two dozen best-selling books, a syndicated television show, a magazine, a newspaper column, a web site, a radio show, a mail order company, a product line at K Mart, and a collection of licensing agreements. In US popular culture, Stewart's name is synonymous with obsessive perfectionism, and commonly connotes a return to more traditional gender roles, a reverence for expensive and unusual materials, and a regard for traditions and customs typically rooted in European heritage. Through analyses of Stewart's texts and of responses from her audience members and the popular press, both set in a social history of the 1990s, I aim to investigate the meanings constructed around the Martha Stewart phenomenon. Particularly relevant to this panel, Stewart's fans both adore and reject her-and her media texts are often more complex than initially presumed. What does it mean to be a Martha Stewart fan? My presentation seeks to answer this question.

Gray, Jonathan (Goldsmiths College, United Kingdom) EXPLORING NEW AUDIENCES: ANTI-FANS, NON-FANS, AND NEWS FANS
This paper argues for the need for reception research to address three largely under-researched groups: 'anti-fans', those who positively dislike a text, or are otherwise displeased by its existence; 'non-fans', those who occasionally consume a text, but casually or even distractedly so; and news fans, those who watch or read the news with fan-like devotion and affect. Whether wittingly or unwittingly, much qualitative research has focused on fans, and on engrossed viewing, but it is the contention of this paper that we still have much to learn of texts, audiences, viewing practices, and of the role of affect (or lack thereof) in meaning construction by studying anti-fans, non-fans, and news fans. This paper examines the blind spots of much audience reception work to date, and then discusses what new studies may offer us, and suggests ways in which such work might proceed.

Longhurst, Brian (University of Salford, United Kingdom) AUDIENCES, CONSUMERS AND ENTHUSIASTS
This paper will consider the significance of the Spectacle/Performance paradigm developed by Abercrombie and Longhurst (1998) for the study of contemporary audiences. Audiences argues that contemporary western societies are increasingly characterised by the interaction between simple (e.g. theatre), mass (e.g. television) and diffused audiences (of everyday life) and that extant paradigms for the study of audiences are unable to cope with the empirical and conceptual demands of the understanding of these relations. On the basis of an emphasis on the dynamics of the interaction between processes of spectacle, narcissism, performance, and imagination fuelled by media resources, they offer a new paradigm for the understanding of the audience nature of contemporary social and cultural life. This paper will consider this paradigm through the examination of interview data on the media lives of various groups researched in recent collaborative projects carried out by Longhurst on the middle classes, young people and political activists. The paper will engage with contemporary theories of increased omnivorousness (e.g. Peterson) and social capital (e.g Putnam, Lin).