Mediating self-representations: tensions surrounding 'ordinary' participation in public sector projects

Within a contemporary context of self-revelation, which Jon Dovey has called the 'selfspeaking society' and Ken Plummer has described as the 'auto/biographical society', public funds are being directed towards inviting members of the public to represent themselves on public platforms. This thesis asks how processes of mediation shape these self-representations in public sector projects in the cultural sphere. The notion of mediation as a process delineates a specific form of enquiry which stresses both the multiple factors that shape meaning, and the open-ended nature of meaning-making. Within this broad concern, this study focuses on the processes of mediation implicated when public service institutions invite members of the public to represent themselves, assist them in constructing their self-representations and then frame and disseminate the finished texts. Three overlapping but distinct processes of mediation are examined: institutional, textual (including technological) and cultural. The empirical analysis explores the production processes in two cases: BBC Wales' Capture Wales and The Museum of London's London's Voices. The case studies are multi-method, including in-depth interviews and observations with participants and producers, and the textual analysis of selected self-representations. The empirical research suggests that processes of mediation in London's Voices and Capture Wales are constituted through a series of tensions that are both challenging and productive. The public museum and public service broadcaster constitute markedly different contexts and consequently the particular ways in which tensions emerge in each case study are distinctive. Nevertheless self-representations in both Capture Wales and London's Voices are mediated by tensions in four areas: Purposes, Quality, Ordinary people, and Community. Institutional personnel hold varied conceptions of purpose and participants take part for a range of reasons, from imagining audiences for what they produce, to training in specific skills. Some stakeholders emphasise quality of process while others emphasise quality of outcome. The category of the 'ordinary person' is both strategically avoided, and invoked and, in the texts produced, the 'ordinary person' is both brought into being and simultaneously undermined. 'Community' is something which these projects aim to engender and, at the same time, is seen as always already there. In analyzing the empirical data, I draw on Nikolas Rose's Foucauldian analysis of structures of governance to argue that the categories of 'ordinary people' and 'community', as revealed in the case studies, work to constrain how members of the public represent themselves. At the same time the empirical analyses reveal cracks in these structures of governance, which are potentially challenging to their very operation. However, I argue that it is also possible to imagine these cracks as valves, which allow the structures of governance to continue to function all the more effectively. Finally, the thesis considers the normative and critical arguments for the continuation of publicly funded projects of this kind. In particular, I suggest that projects of this kind present a challenge to the increasingly formatted representation of members of the public in media and cultural spaces that is evidenced, for example, in the expansion of reality television formats across the television channels

'Oh goodness, I am watching reality TV': How methods make class in audience research

One of the most striking challenges encountered during the empirical stages of our audience research project, `Making Class and the Self through Televised Ethical Scenarios' (funded as part of the ESRC's Identities and Social Action programme), stemmed from how the different discursive resources held by our research participants impacted upon the kind of data collected. We argue that social class is reconfigured in each research encounter, not only through the adoption of moral positions in relation to `reality' television as we might expect, but also through the forms of authority available for participants. Different methods enabled the display of dissimilar relationships to television: reflexive telling, immanent positioning and affective responses all gave distinct variations of moral authority. Therefore, understanding the form as well as the content of our participants' responses is crucial to interpreting our data. These methodological observations underpin our earlier theoretical critique of the `turn' to subjectivity in social theory (Wood and Skeggs, 2004), where we suggest that the performance of the self is an activity that reproduces the social distinctions that theorists claim are in demise

What is Fred telling us?: a commentary on youtube.com/fred

In a world that struggles to get children to read books, in which the youth television audience is increasingly hard to reach, and in which shared attention becomes fragmented as everyone follows their own niche interests, an ordinary fourteen year old boy is reaching millions with his own channel on YouTube. This article was published in the Commentary section of the September 8, 2008 Teachers College Recor

Self-representation in museums: therapy or democracy?

This article explores the discourses of citizenship through which the museum institution is currently framing its public: museum-goers as participants. Drawing on qualitative research on the London's Voices project at the Museum of London, and 1934: A New Deal For Artists at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC, this paper examines the ways in which the contemporary museum, and cultural policy internationally, has converged around the activity of inviting members of the public to 'speak for themselves' through a variety of media technologies. Discursive analysis of such mediated activities as activities of self-representation suggests that this strategy of participation is simultaneously both productive and uneasy, as questions of institutional legitimacy and citizen empowerment co-exist within the broader social context of the self-speaking or auto/biographical societ

It’s just sad: affect, judgement and emotional labour in reality TV viewing

The relationship between feminism and domesticity has recently come in for renewed interest in popular culture. This collection makes an intervention into the debates surrounding feminism's contentious relationship with domesticity and domestic femininities in popular culture. It offers an understanding of the place of domesticity in contemporary popular culture whilst considering how these domesticities might be understood from a feminist perspective. All the essays contribute to a more complex understanding of the relationships between feminism, femininity and domesticity, developing new ways of theorizing these relationships that have marked much of feminist histor

It’s good for them to know my story: cultural mediation as tension

Recent years have seen amateur personal stories, focusing on «me», flourish on social networking sites and in digital storytelling workshops. The resulting digital stories could be called «mediatized stories». This book deals with these self-representational stories, aiming to understand the transformations in the age-old practice of storytelling that have become possible with the new, digital media. Its approach is interdisciplinary, exploring how the mediation or mediatization processes of digital storytelling can be grasped and offering a sociological perspective of media studies and a socio-cultural take of the educational sciences