Shirley R. Steinberg Critical Cultural Studies Research Bricolage in Action In the contemporary information environment of the twenty-first century-so aptly named hyperreality by Jean Baudrillard, knowledge takes on a different shape and quality. What appears to be commonsense dissipates slowly into the ether, as electronic media refract the world in ways that benefit the purveyors of power. We have never seen anything like this before, a new world—new forms of social regulation, new forms of disinformation, and new modes of hegemony and ideology. In such a cyber/mediated jungle new modes of research are absolutely necessary. This chapter proposes a form of critical cultural studies research that explores what I refer to as cultural pedagogy. Cultural pedagogy is the educational dimension of hyperreality, as learning migrates into new socio-cultural and political spaces. In these pages, I will focus my attention on my research with film, specifically on doing educational research with a bricolage of methods leading to tentative interpretations. Cultural Studies Observing that the study of culture can be fragmented between the disciplines, those who advocate cultural studies look at an interdisciplinary approach, that which transcends any one field. Additionally, a critical cultural studies does not commit a qualitative evaluation of culture by a definition of “high” or “low” culture, and culture may be the most ambiguous and complex term to define in the domain of the social sciences and humanities. Arthur Asa Berger (1995) estimates that anthropologists alone have offered more than one hundred definitions of culture. At the risk of great reductionism, I use the term in this chapter to signify behavior patterns socially acquired and transmitted by the use of social symbols such as language, art, science, morals, values, belief systems, politics, and many more. Educators are directly implicated in the analysis of culture (or should be) in that culture is transmitted by processes of teaching and learning, whether formally (schools) or informally (by wider social processes, e.g., popular culture). This pedagogical dynamic within all culture is a central concern of this chapter. Indeed, culture is inseparable from the human ability to be acculturated, to learn, to employ language and symbols. Culture, in this chapter, involves specifically its deployment in connection with the arts. This is where we move into the social territory traditionally referred to as elite or high culture, and popular culture. Individuals who attend symphonies, read the “great books,” enjoy the ballet, are steeped in elite culture--or as it is often phrased, “are cultured.” Referring to “low” culture, many scholars assert that the artifacts that grew within a local or regional movement are indeed low. Fitting neither into a category of low or high culture is mass culture. Cultural theorists do not agree on any one definition for each type of culture. However, Dwight MacDonald summarizes the difference between the three, and the propensity of all types of culture to become political: Folk art grew from below. It was a spontaneous, autochthonous expression of the people, shaped by themselves, pretty much without the benefit of High Culture, to suit their own needs. Mass Culture is imposed from above. It is fabricated by technicians hired by businessmen; its audiences are passive consumers, their participation limited to the choice between buying and not buying. . . .Folk Art was the people’s own institution, their private little garden walled off from the great formal park of their master’s High Culture. But Mass Culture breaks down the wall, integrating the masses into a debased form of High Culture and thus becoming an instrument of political domination (MacDonald, 1957, p. 60). Within critical cultural studies it is maintained that the boundary between elite/high culture and popular/low culture is blurring. Such occurrence holds important ramifications for those interested in pedagogy (Berger, 1995). The study of culture, for the purpose of this chapter, is not to delineate the “level” or “type” of culture invoked by popular films, but to discuss the pedagogical, sociological and political themes within the films. Consequently, a debate as to the “quality” of popular culture or its place in the light of elite culture will not be undertaken. I will use the term popular culture to define that which is readily available to the American public as a form of enjoyment and consumption. Popular culture defies easy definition. It can be defined as the culture of ordinary people--TV shows, movies, records, radio, foods, fashions, magazines, and other artifacts that figure in our everyday lives (Berger, 1995). Often analysts maintain that such artifacts are mass-mediated and consumed by large numbers of individuals on a continuing basis. Such phenomena are often viewed condescendingly by academicians as unworthy of scholarly analysis. As addressed in this chapter, the aesthetic dynamics of popular culture are not the focus; rather the social, political, and pedagogical messages contained in popular culture and their effects are viewed as some of the most important influences in the contemporary era. In this context the study of popular culture is connected with the sociology of everyday life and the interaction and interconnection of this micro-domain with macro-socio-political and structural forces. Thus, the popular domain--as ambiguous and ever-shifting as it may be--takes on unprecedented importance in the electronically-saturated contemporary era. Cultural Studies and Pedagogy Cultural studies and pedagogy involves education and acculturation that takes place at a variety of cultural locations including but not limited to formal educational institutions. Cultural studies scholars extend our notion of cultural pedagogy, focusing their attention on the complex interactions of power, knowledge, identity, and politics. Issues of cultural pedagogy that arise in this context include: 1) the complex relationship between power and knowledge. 2) the ways knowledge is produced, accepted, and rejected. 3) what individuals claim to know and the process by which they come to know it. 4) the nature of cultural/political authority and its relation to the dialectic of empowerment and domination. 5) the way individuals receive dominant representations and encodings of the world--are they assimilated, internalized, resisted, or transformed? 6) the manner in which individuals negotiate their relationship with the “official story,” the legitimate canon. 7) the means by which the official and legitimated narrative positions students and citizens to make sense of their personal experience. 8) the process by which pleasure is derived from engagement with the dominant culture--an investment that produces meaning and formulates affect. 9) the methods by which cultural differences along lines of race, class, gender, national origin, religion, and geographical place are encoded in consciousness and processed by individuals. 10) the ways scientific rationality shapes consciousness in schools and the culture at large. It is with the above issues in mind that I create my bricolage. The attempt to delineate a universal research method for the study of the cultural curriculum and cultural pedagogy is a futile quest. The critical research of cultural studies and cultural pedagogy can make no guarantee about what questions will be important in different contexts; thus, no one method should be promoted over others--at the same time, none can be eliminated without examination. Ethnography, textual analysis, semiotics, deconstruction, critical hermeneutics, interviews, psychoanalysis, content analysis, survey research, and phenomenology simply initiate a list of research methods an educational scholar might bring to the table. Such an eclectic view of research has been labeled bricolage by several scholars. A term attributed to Claude Levi-Strauss (1966), bricolage (use of a tool box) bricolage involves taking research strategies from a variety of scholarly disciplines and traditions as they are needed in the unfolding context of the research situation. Such an action is pragmatic and strategic, demanding self-consciousness and awareness of context from the researcher. The bricoleur, the researcher who employs bricolage, must be able to orchestrate a plethora of diverse tasks including interviewing and observing, to historiographical analysis, to self-monitoring and intrapersonal understanding. The text produced by this research process of bricolage should be a complex collage, as it weaves together the scholar’s images, insights, and interpretations of the relationship between the popular cultural text, critical questions of justice, the social context that produced it, and its effect on youth and the cultural curriculum (Kincheloe & Berry, 2004). Using theoretical and conceptual frames drawn from critical theory, poststructuralism, postmodern epistemologies, feminism, psychoanalysis, hermeneutics, recovery theory and other traditions, bricolage interprets, critiques, and deconstructs the text in question. Because scientific research has traditionally offered only a partial vision of the reality it seeks to explore, pedagogical bricoleurs attempt to widen their perspectives through methodological diversity. In no way, however, do they claim that as the result of the multiperspective bricolage they have gained “the grand view”--from their poststructuralist perspective they understand that all inquiry is limited and incomplete. Humble in this knowledge, the bricoleur attempts to gain expanded insight via historical contextualization, multiple theoretical groundings, and a diversity of knowledge by collecting and interpreting methodologies (Kincheloe 2005). Theoretical bricolage compensates for the blindness of relying on one model of reading a cultural text. Bricolage does not draw upon diverse theoretical/methodological traditions simply for the sake of diversity. Rather, it uses the different approaches to inform and critique each other. A critical theoretical analysis of popular culture, for example, that is informed by psychoanalysis will be different than one that relies only on the sociological dimension of the text under analysis. Such an interpretive process subverts the tendency of knowledge producers to slip into the position that their interpretation is the “right one” (Kincheloe, 2005). As we study the pedagogy of film, we are able to position it not only in historical, socio-political, and economic context but in relation to other films on a particular topic, with similar themes, or identified with a particular genre--for example, the films of John Hughes concerning middle-class male misbehavior. Expanding our ways of seeing with diverse perspectives we begin to grasp the ideological dimensions of films that often fall through the cracks. A more specific focus on how particular methodologies may be used in this popular cultural/film context may be in order. Critical Ethnography Critical ethnography is an example of a critical research methodology that can be used within the bricolage. Ethnography is often described as the most basic form of social research: the analysis of events as they evolve in their natural setting. While ethnographers disagree about the relative importance of each purpose, ethnography attempts to gain knowledge about a cultural setting, to identify patterns of social interaction, and to develop holistic interpretations of societies and social institutions. Thus, typical educational ethnographies attempt to understand the nature of schools and other educational agencies in these ways, seeking to appreciate the social processes that move educational events. Ethnography attempts to make explicit the social processes one takes for granted as a culture member. The culture could be as broad as the study of an ethnic culture or as narrow as the middle-class white male culture of misbehavior. The critical ethnographer of education seeks to describe the concrete experiences of everyday school/educational life and the social patterns, the deep structures that support it (Hammersley & Atkinson, 1983). In a bricolage, ethnography can be used in a variety of ways to gain insight into film. The most traditional involves audience studies where ethnographers observe and interview film audiences. John Fiske (1993) began his book, Power Works, Power Plays, using such a methodology, as he observed and interviewed a group of homeless men in a shelter as they watched the movie, Die Hard. What was the nature of the interrelationship between the viewers and the text? What did the men’s responses to the film tell us about their self images? What did the men’s responses tell us about film viewing in general and its ideological effects? Fiske’s effort to answer these questions--to interpret his data--constitutes much of the content of the book. In addition to such “audiencing” ethnographies, scholars can use ethnographic methods to explore the characters and cultures portrayed within the film and their relation to social dynamics outside the texts. Gaining knowledge about the “film culture” provides insight into the ideological orientations of film makers and entertainment corporations. Through the identification of patterns of cultural expression and social interaction, researchers can begin to specify the ideological dynamics at work. As socio-political processes are exposed, hidden agendas and tacit assumptions can be highlighted so as to provide new appreciations of the power of film to both reflect and shape culture. Poststructuralist forms of ethnography have focused on the discontinuities, contradictions, and inconsistencies of cultural expression and human action. As opposed to more modernist forms of ethnography, poststructuralist methods refuse to reconcile the asymmetries once and for all. The poststructuralist dimension of ethnography highlights the tendency of classical ethnography to privilege a dominant narrative and a unitary, privileged vantage point. In the effort to connect knower and known, the poststructuralist ethnographer proposes a dialogue between researcher and researched that attempts to smash traditional hierarchical relations between them (Atkinson & Hammersley, 1994). In this critical process the modernist notion of ethnography as an instrument of enlightenment and civilization of the “native” objects of study is overthrown. Poststructuralist ethnographies are texts to be argued over, texts whose meaning is never “natural” but are constructed by circumstance and inscribed by context (Aronowitz, 1993). Thus, a film never stands alone as an object of study in poststructuralist ethnography. Seen as a living part of culture and history, the film takes on new meaning and circumstances and contexts change. How different the movie, The Green Berets (1968) looked to the young audience that viewed it in the late 1960s and early 1970s than it does to young people viewing it in the post-Gulf War 1990s. More young people of the present era may positively resonate with the ideological intentions of the film makers than did young, anti-war viewers of the era in which it was produced. Circumstance and context must always be accounted for in critical poststructuralist ethnography. In this context poststructuralist ethnography informs and is informed by feminist and minority researchers concerned with the status quo of apologetics of film and traditional ethnography itself. Content Analysis Traditionally a content analysis could be considered methodical and quantitative in nature. The important issue about literally analyzing text is to allow the text to open and present themes for the researcher. Following is a method I have used with success in first, analyzing text, and second, in letting the textual analysis speak to me and suggest the themes that can be included. The content analysis then becomes an authentic interpretive analysis that precludes preliminary hypotheses, and instead waits to allow the data to speak for themselves in muli-layered ways. The analysis especially lends itself to research in film, written text, visual text (comics, photography, etc.). It then becomes ready for the critical hermeneutic interpretation which is my tentative research goal. In addition to such ethnographic analysis critical educational scholars use other methods of studying the social dynamics and effects of film. Douglas Kellner (1995) performs content analyses of film reviews and criticisms in the process gaining new vantage points out the ways that film texts become embedded in popular discourses. This “mode of reception” study was promoted by the Frankfurt School critical theorist, Walter Benjamin (Kellner, 1995). Appropriating Benjamin’s methodology, literary critics and theorists developed literary reception research that continues to contribute innovative ways of exploring textual effects. Distributed throughout Aaron Gresson’s analysis of Forrest Gump is the discussion of the film by various critics and the news media. Beginning with the traditional “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” types of articles and moving to more esoteric and scholarly discussion, Gresson is able to trace themes relating back to his original suggestion of the recovery of whiteness and maleness in film (Gresson, 1996). In this context, various research methodologies can be added to the bricolage, in the process providing ever more nuanced forms of insight into popular cultural texts. Semiotics plays an invaluable role in the methodological pantheon with its focus on codes and signs that contribute to individuals’ attempts to derive meaning from their surroundings. Educational researchers can use semiotic methods to gain insights into the social dynamics moving classroom events. Classrooms are full of codes calling out for semiotic analysis. Not only are classrooms saturated with codes and signs but are characterized by rituals and conventions that are rarely questioned. The ways teachers, students, and administrators dress; pupils’ language when speaking to teachers as compared to conversations with classmates; graffiti in a middle school restroom; systems of rules of behavior; the uses of bells and the intercom in schools; memos sent to parents; and the nature of the local community’s conversation about school athletics are only a few of the topics an educational semiotician could study. Observation Methods Contrary to notions that qualitative research dealing with popular culture is vacuous and without rigor, I submit my methodology in the spirit of academic scholarship and indeed, a poststructuralist, feminist, pedagogical research in which I am not seeking answers, but seeking questions, questions and more questions in which to make sense of the world of youth and of education. In their Handbook of Qualitative Research, Norm Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln (2005) discuss their union of poststructural/postmodernist cultural research (Denzin) and constructivist/pedagogical research (Lincoln). They contend that traditional research stops short of boundary crossing within interpretation. Observing that “over the past two decades, a quiet methodological revolution has been taking place in the social sciences” (p. ix, 1994 ) Denzin and Lincoln define this revolution as the “blurring” of the boundaries within disciplinary research. As I discuss my methods and objectives in my research, keep in mind that I want to make “noise” in this so-called “quiet” revolution. In fact, I question whether or not it has ever been quiet. Certainly there have been attempts to silence the noise caused by radical qualitative research-- silence in the denial of the politicization of the research of pedagogy; however, my qualitative predecessors have worked long and hard in the legitimization of the discipline. The word rigor seems to rear its ugly head at methodological junctures. I assert here that my research is indeed rigorous, challenging and constantly changing. Unlike a statistical formula, an organized hypothesis and a proven theorem, I am not beginning with any assumptions other than the one that popular culture must be studied. My thoughts about my subjects and my expectations in my observations changed each time I analyzed and recorded (for lack of a better word) data. It was within this discovery and rediscovery that I found rigor and challenge. It is within this context that I present my literal method of interpretation. I assert that rigorous scripting, recording and viewing/re-viewing (or consuming/re-consuming) is essential for critical hermeneutical research, and it is this process I delineate here. The postmodern condition has also re-determined and re-defined the actual research methods and practices that we use. No longer, as in earlier cultural research, do we view a film at the theater, go to the typewriter and write a response and review. We have the tools of hyperreality, through portability, films are readily available in VHS, DVD, and iMovie, consequently, we are able to view, then script, interpret,re-interpret, then problematize our interpretations as we attempt to make meaning from the text. Unlike viewer/ historians of the past, we are able to re-visit an event, a text, and look for the tacit assumptions that reside within each signifier,floating signifier, code and ideology presented within the film. Materials and Process In order to be able to re-visit and re-view text, I found it essential to have access to videotapes of the films I wished to discuss. Wherever possible, I have avoided even alluding to films still in the theater as I feel they are available for a shallow interpretation at best (unless, of course, one owns his or her own theater). Along with the video tapes, I needed a video recorder, television and a good remote control. Other “equipment” I needed was an unlimited amount of colored pencils, ruled notebooks and a pen. However, on review of these methods, I feel that the use of a laptop computer while viewing could have or would have enhanced and possibly quickened the recording method. In the manner of traditional ethnography, I used scripting as my form of recording. I wrote constantly through each film, usually filling up my notebooks after two films. I wrote quickly, and intuitively. I cannot delineate what to record. I can only describe that I recorded everything that made me think, consequently I relied on my own pedagogical intuition in my records. The use of the remote was essential in being able to rewind and record exact dialogue or to view a scene closely. In some films, I recorded no dialogue, only impressions of the scenery or music or cinematography. In most films I did record dialogue, discerning it as the salient data that would eventually be entered into my hermeneutical interpretations and discussions. Each film took many hours to watch and re-watch. When I felt comfortable that I had scripted enough to begin my transcriptions, I transcribed the notebooks into word processed form. Using phrases, I typed my entries going down each page as I had originally written them. After completing the transcription of all of the films, I read through the entire set of data. As I examined this completed set of scripting, themes and motifs started to emerge. As they began to repeat themselves, I wrote down my impressions of their emergence, named them as separate entities. After my first reading of the data, I used the colored pencils to code each theme/motif that I wanted to pursue. Underlining each item with a different color, macro-themes began to emerge, as the micro-themes seemed coalesced under the auspices of larger themes. Analyzing all the pages of scripting, I discovered additional themes each times. In many instances there would be three or four different colors under a certain situation or dialogue indicating an overlap among the themes. A note: Not appear a “Luddite,” I want to clarify that I chose to use both video and DVD to use in my work. I feel organically connected to the materials in this way, as a audience participant. This is my quirk. However, those with the technical abilities and equipment will find this method quite easy to do digitally using iMovie and competent software. Both visually and intuitively, I began the task of arranging micro-themes and placing them within the macro-themes. Given the thematic crossover, it was important to not essentialize any situation or dialogue and limit it to only one “category.” I kept in mind that through my choice of bricolage, that I was not adhering to one method of interpretation, consequently it was important to record and underline each micro-theme every time it emerged in all macro-categories. Viewing and Naming Films As this is a chapter discussing critical pedagogical research methods, I chose to not use traditional methods of film theory and criticism. I will delineate three terms that I used within my bricolage. As a bricoleur, I cut and pasted what I felt was significant and examined the multiple meanings that emerged. Traditional film criticism, as in any form of sociological research, has categories and philosophies attached to methods of interpretation of audiences and of text. And, as in traditional research, this criticism essentializes and closes itself off to the boundary crossing to which Denzin and Lincoln have chosen to blur. By taking each interpretative method and applying it to a film bricolage, I was able to use film criticism and theory to my advantage in my critical hermeneutical readings. Traditional film criticism “reads” film in many ways. The most compelling methods and classifications involves concepts such as 1) auteurism 2) montage and 3) genre. Each term has value in critical hermeneutics, however, using them in a unilateral deconstruction would limit interpretation to a dogmatic ideological framework established by the original researcher. Auteurism As the name suggests, auteurism refers to the authorship of the text. As in a Derridian deconstruction, the text becomes the only artifact examined, and unlike a Derridian deconstruction, the text in relationship to the author/creator is the essential interpretation. The entire act of meaning making in auteurism is restricted to who the author is, his or her positionality, and tacit and overt agendas in regard to the text. While I would be unable to discount the inclusion of auteurism in interpreting film text, in no way would I be comfortable limiting the interpretation to this narrow theory. In the case of the writer/director, John Hughes--on whose films I rely heavily in my research--I cannot discount the fact that he is a white, middle-class male, and a baby boomer from Chicago. Further discovery of his own background and education can inform me about him and “where he comes from.” However, to allow auteurism to define the purpose of his films, for example: Ferris Bueller is John Hughes or Hughes’s plotlines revolve around his own personal agenda for humiliating adults would direct and possibly limit my interpretation(s). Robin Wood (1995) insists that limiting film theory to auteurism adds to the propensity of inconclusive, inaccurate research that insists “on its own particular polarization” (p. 59). Montage Like auteurism, montage relies on one lens through which to view a text. Unlike auteurism, montage examines the intent of the editor in the analysis of the “essential creative act” of film making (Wood, 1995). While auteur theory exclusively read the act of the author as the textual interpretation, montage theory introduces the notion that the cutting room floor becomes the site for the decisive interpretative act. Once again, one cannot ignore the possible intent of the film editor and/or cinematographer, however, to limit interpretation to montage at the expense of any other aspect of film criticism and theory would once again limit the thickness of the interpretation. Genre In the traditional literary manner, the concept of genre is used to define and classify texts into manageable categories which immediately allow the interpreter to draw conclusions and make expected observations. For instance, when we refer to the Western as a genre, it is easy to imagine horses, Indians, pioneers and a white cowboy on a majestic horse. Within genre theory we are able to find familiar Western themes of patriarchy, white supremacy and colonialism without much effort. If we refer to film noir, we easily picture the frames of shadowy figures, a femme fatale and a Bogartesque antihero engaged in questionable activities. Once again, a prevailing theme of patriarchy emerges without question. Consider the l950s sci-fi genre--a white, middle-upper-class scientist who goes against the odds to defeat an alien invader--back to patriarchy, colonialism, and so forth. Exclusive reliance on genre theory determines in advance which themes will be analyzed and which will not--again the possibility of new interpretations is truncated. Categorizing texts aids us in the ability to place films on the shelf, to place books in the library and to choose different genres in which to research. However, the discussion of genre should be used only to name in a general sense, the macro-category of film that the researcher chooses to interpret. The catch, is that the genre must be determined and defined by each researcher in the context of his or her own research. Consequently, what I view as a western, may indeed be viewed as a political satire to one researcher and a classic to another. With the use of auteurism, montage and genre, I have combined the qualitative method of bricolage using critical ethnography, semiotics, feminist theory and critical hermeneutics to interpret my research Feminist Research Another important aspect of the bricolage involves feminist research with its subversion of the principle of neutral, hierarchical, and estranged interaction between researcher and researched (Clough,1992). It is important that no one body of feminist theory exists. Three forms of feminist analysis have dominated the feminist critique: 1) liberal feminism has focused on gender stereotyping and bias. While such analyses have provided valuable insights, liberal feminism in general has failed to engage issues of power. As a result the position has been hard pressed to make sense of social reality with its subtle interactions of power, ideology, and culture--an interaction that needs to be analyzed in the larger effort to understand both the oppression of women and male privilege (Rosneau, 1992); 2) radical feminism has maintained that the subjugation of women is the most important form of oppression in that it is grounded on specific biological differences between men and women. In radical feminism concerns with race and class are more rejected than ignored, as radical feminists maintain the irrelevance of such categories in the study of women’s oppression; 3) the form of feminist theory privileged in my research is critical poststructuralist feminism. This articulation of feminism asserts that feminism is the quintessential postmodern discourse. As feminists focus on and affirm that which is absent and/or peripheral in modernist ways of seeing, they ground the poststructuralist critique in lived reality, in the material world (Kipnis, 1988). As critical poststructuralist feminists challenge modernist patriarchal exclusions, they analyze the connections between an unjust class structure and the oppression of women (Rosneau, 1992). Often, they contend, male domination of women is concretized on the terrain of class--e.g., the feminization of poverty and the growth in the number of women who are homeless over the last fifteen years (Kincheloe & Steinberg, 1997). In this poststructuralist feminist context research can no longer be seen as a cold, rational process. Feminist research injects feeling, empathy, and the body into the act of inquiry, blurring the distinction between knower and known, viewer and viewed--looking at truth as a process of construction in which knowers and viewers play an active role, and embedding passion into the bricolage. Researchers in this context see themselves as passionate scholars who connect themselves emotionally to what they are seeking to know and understand. Modernist researchers often weeded out the self, denying their intuitions and inner voices, in the process producing restricted and object-like interpretations of socio-educational events. Using the traditional definitions, these object-like interpretations were certain and scientific; feminist self-grounded inquiries were inferior, merely impressionistic, and journalistic (Reinharz, 1992). Rejecting the authority of the certainty of science, feminist researchers charged that the so-called objectivity of modernist science was nothing more than a signifier for the denial of social and ethical responsibility, ideological passivity, and the acceptance of privileged socio-political position of the researcher. Thus, feminist theorists argued that modernist pseudo-objectivity demands the separation of thought and feeling, the devaluation of any perspective maintained with emotional conviction. Feeling is designated as an inferior form of human consciousness--those who rely on thought or logic operating within this framework can justify their repression of those associated with emotion or feeling. Feminist theorists have pointed out that the thought-feeling hierarchy is one of the structures historically used by men to oppress women (Walby, 1990). In intimate heterosexual relationships if a man is able to present his position in an argument as the rational viewpoint and the woman’s position as an emotional perspective, then he has won the argument--his is the voice worth hearing. Drawing from feminist researchers, critical poststructuralists have learned that inquiry should be informed by our “humanness,” that we can use the human as a research instrument. From this perspective inquiry begins with researchers drawing upon their own experience. Such an educational researcher is a human being studying other human beings focusing on their inner world of experience. Utilizing his or her own empathetic understandings, the observer can watch educational phenomena from within--that is, the observer can know directly, he or she can watch and experience. In the process the private is made public. Not only do we get closer to the private experience of students, teachers, and administrators and the effect of these experiences on the public domain, but we also gain access to the private experience of the researcher and the effect of that experience on the public description the researcher presents of the phenomena observed (Reinharz, 1992). Thus not only do we learn about the educational world that surrounds us, but we gain new insights into the private world within us--the world of our constructed subjectivity. By revealing what can be learned from the every-day, the mundane, feminist scholars have opened a whole new area of inquiry and insight. They have uncovered the existence of silences and absences where traditional scholars had seen only “what was there.” When the feminist critique is deployed within the methodological diversity of the bricolage, new forms of insight into educational and social affairs as well as the cultural curriculum emerge. Connecting to Social Theory In examining social dynamics of media/popular culture via the research methodologies of ethnography and semiotics and the political and epistemological concerns of poststructuralist feminism, an effort is made to connect research to the domain of social theory. Indeed, theory is very important in the bricolage of critical poststructuralist research. Theory involves the conceptual matrix analysts use to make sense of the world. Theory, whether it is held consciously or unconsciously, works as a filter through which researchers approach information, designate facts, identify problems, and devise solutions to their problems. Different theoretical frameworks, therefore, privilege different ways of seeing the world in general or the domain of popular culture in particular (Kincheloe, 2001). The theory behind a critical poststructuralist way of seeing recognizes these theoretical dynamics, especially the potential tyranny that accompanies theoretical speculation. The problem that has undermined the traditional critical project of understanding and changing the inequality plaguing modernist societies has involved the production of a theory that was too totalizing (all encompassing) and rigid to grasp the complexity described here. Critical poststructuralist theory is committed to a theoretical stance that guarantees the individual or community the capacity to make meaning and to act independently. Any theory acceptable to critical poststructuralists, thus, must take into account local divergence. This is not to adopt a position that insists researchers allow phenomena to speak for themselves. Theory in this context is a resource that can be used to generate a dialogue with a phenomenon; it is always contingent and it never whispers the answers to the researcher in advance (Grossberg, 1995). Theory does not travel well from one context to another. Indeed theory’s usefulness is always mitigated by context. Such a locally sensitive theoretical position allows bricolage research a space from which to view movies and popular cultural phenomena that maintains an oppositional but not a totalizing and deterministic interpretive strategy (Smith, 1989). Such a strategy searches for manifestations of domination and resistance in popular texts in light of larger questions of democracy (Kellner, 1995). Drawing upon the theoretical work of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, the concept of immanent critique helps us understand this oppositional dynamic. Critical theory, according to Max Horkheimer, attempts to expose and assess the breach between reality and ideas or “what is” and “what could be.” Within capitalist society, Horkheimer maintained, there is an inherent contradiction between the bourgeois order’s words and deeds. The more the power bloc speaks of justice, equality, and freedom, the more it fails under its own standards. Immanent critique, therefore, attempts to evaluate cultural production “from within,” on the basis of the standards of its producers. In this way it hopes to avoid the accusation that its concepts inflict superfluous criteria of evaluation on those it investigates. Employing such a theoretical critique, critical theorists hope to generate a new understanding of the cultural phenomenon in question--an understanding that is able to articulate both the contradictions and possibilities contained with it (Held, 1980). Critical Hermeneutics and the Process of Interpretation I ground my research in the hermeneutical tradition and its concern with both the process of understanding the meaning of various texts and the production of strategies for textual interpretation. Traditionally concerned with the interpretation of religious texts and canonical scriptures within their social and historical context, hermeneutics, after the scientific revolution of the European Enlightenment, emerged as the tradition that challenged the increasingly powerful shibboleths of the empirical scientific tradition. One of the central assertions of hermeneutics is that research and analysis of any variety involves an awareness of one’s own consciousness and the values residing tacitly within it. Such values and the predispositions they support, hermeneuts maintained, unconsciously shape the nature of any project of inquiry. Such profound arguments, unfortunately, exerted little influence on their scientific contemporaries, as they held fast to their science of verification, the notion of objectivity, and the absurdity of the need for self-analysis on the part of the researcher (Kincheloe, 2005). Central to the hermeneutic method is an appreciation of the complexity and ambiguity of human life in general and the pedagogical process in particular. Hermeneutics attempts to return lived experience and meaning making to their original difficulty. In this context, words and images are relegated to the realm of the living with all the possibility for change such a state implies. Words and images to the hermeneutical analyst are not dead and static but alive and dynamic. Such a reality, of course, complicates the process of interpretation but concurrently provides a far more textured picture of human experience. The Greek root of hermeneutics, hermeneuenin, refers to the messenger god Hermes. Such an etymology well fits hermeneutics’ ambiguous inscription, as Hermes was often a trickster in his official role of translator of divine messages to human beings. Interpretation is never simple and straight-forward—humans in the Greek myths learned this lesson frequently at the hands of their deceptive messenger. This lesson is not lost in twentieth century hermeneutics, as analysts focus their attention on the sediments of meaning and the variety of intentions that surround social, political, and educational artifacts. Transcending the scientific empirical need for final proof and certainty, hermeneuts celebrate the irony of interpretation in the ambiguous lived world. Framing the methods of such interpretation as both analytic and intuitive, hermeneutics pushes the boundaries of human understanding in a manner more consonant with the contradictory nature of the world around us. The Nature of Hermeneutic Interpretation Hermeneutics insists that in social/educational science there is only interpretation, no matter how vociferously empirical scientists may argue that the facts speak for themselves. The hermeneutic act of interpretation involves in its most elemental articulation making sense of what has been observed in a way that communicates understanding. Not only is human science merely an act of interpretation, but hermeneutics contends that perception itself is an act of interpretation. Thus, the quest for understanding is a fundamental feature of human existence, as encounter with the unfamiliar always demands the attempt to make meaning, to make sense--but such is also the case with the familiar. Indeed, as in the study of commonly known popular movies, we come to find that sometimes the familiar may be seen as the most strange. Thus, it should not be surprising that even the so-called objective writings of qualitative research are interpretations, not value-free descriptions (Denzin, 1994). Learning from the hermeneutic tradition and the postmodern critique, critical researchers have begun to re-examine textual claims to authority. No pristine interpretation exists--indeed, no methodology, social or educational theory, and discursive form can claim a privileged position that enables the production of authoritative knowledge. Researchers must always speak/write about the world in terms of something else in the world. As creatures of the world, we are oriented to it in a way that prevents us from grounding our theories and perspectives outside of it. Thus, whether we like it or not we are all destined as interpreters to analyze from within its boundaries and blinders. Within these limitations, however, the interpretations emerging from the hermeneutic process can still move us to new levels of understanding, appreciations that allow us to “live our way” into an experience described to us. Despite the impediments of context hermeneutical researchers can transcend the inadequacies of thin descriptions of decontextualized facts and produce thick descriptions of social/pedagogical texts characterized by the context of its production, the intentions of its producers, and the meanings mobilized in the process of its construction. The production of such thick descriptions/interpretations follows no step-by-step blueprint or mechanical formula. As with any art form, hermeneutical analysis can be learned only in the Deweyan sense--by doing it. Researchers in this context practice the art by grappling with the text to be understood, telling its story in relation to its contextual dynamics and other texts first to themselves and then to a public audience (Kincheloe, 2005). Thoughts about Hermeneutical Methods of Interpretation These concerns with the nature of hermeneutical interpretation come under the category of philosophical hermeneutics. Working in this domain scholars attempt to think through and clarify the conditions under which interpretation and understanding take place. The following analysis moves more in the direction of normative hermeneutics in that it raises questions about the purposes and procedures of interpretation. In its critical theory-driven cultural studies context the purpose of hermeneutical analysis employed in this research is to provide understanding of particular cultural and educational phenomena of contemporary American life. Drawing upon the Frankfurt School’s goal of theorizing the driving forces of the present moment, critical hermeneutics is used to develop a form of cultural criticism that sets the stage for a future politics/pedagogy of emancipation. Hermeneutical researchers operating with these objectives build bridges between reader and text, text and its producer, historical context and present, and one particular social circumstance and another. Accomplishing such interpretive tasks is a difficult endeavor, and scholars interested in normative hermeneutics push aspiring hermeneuts to trace the bridge-building process employed by successful interpreters of culture and pedagogy (Kincheloe 2005). Grounded by this hermeneutical bridge-building, critical social analysts in a hermeneutical circle (a process of analysis where interpreters seek the historical and social dynamics that shape textual interpretation) engage in the back and forth of studying parts in relation to the whole and the whole in relation to parts. No final interpretation is sought in this context, as the activity of the circle proceeds with no need for closure (Kincheloe, 2005). This movement of whole to parts is combined with an analytical flow between abstract and concrete. Such dynamics often tie interpretation to the interplay of larger social forces (the general) to the everyday lives of individuals (the particular). A critical hermeneutics brings the concrete, the parts, the particular into focus, but in a manner that grounds it (them) contextually in a larger understanding of the social forces, the whole, the abstract (the general) that grounds it (them). Focus on the parts is the dynamic that brings the particular into focus, sharpening our understanding of the individual in light of the social and psychological forces that shape him or her. The parts and the unique places they occupy ground hermeneutical ways of seeing by providing the contextualization of the particular--a perspective often erased in modernist science’s search for abstract generalizations (Kincheloe, 2005). The give and take of the hermeneutical circle induces analysts to review existing conceptual matrixes in light of new understandings. Here preconceptions are reconsidered and reconceptualized so as to provide a new way of exploring a particular text. Making use of an author’s insights hermeneutically does not mean replicating his or her response to the original question. In the hermeneutical process the author’s answer is valuable only if it catalyzes the production of a new question for our consideration in the effort to make sense of a particular textual phenomenon (Gallagher, 1992). In this context participants in the hermeneutical circle must be wary of critical techniques of textual defamiliarization that have become cliched. For example, feminist criticisms of Barbie’s figure and its construction of the image of ideal woman became such conventions in popular cultural analysis that other readings of Barbie were suppressed (Steinberg, 2004). Critical hermeneutical analysts in this and many other cases have to introduce new forms of analysis to the hermeneutical circle--to defamiliarize conventional defamiliarizations--in order to achieve deeper levels of understanding (Berger, 1995). Within the hermeneutical circle we many develop new metaphors to shape our analysis in ways that break us out of familiar modes. For example, thinking of movies as mass-mediated dreams may help us reconceptualize the interpretive act as a psychoanalytic form of dream study. In this way, educational scholars could examine psychoanalytical work in the analysis of dream symbolization for insights into their studies of the pedagogy of popular culture and the meanings it helps individuals make via its visual images and narratives. As researchers apply these new metaphors in the hermeneutic circle, they must be aware of the implicit metaphors analysts continuously bring to the interpretive process (Berger, 1995). Such metaphors are shaped by the socio-historical era, the culture, and the linguistic context in which the interpreter operates. Such awareness is an important feature that must be introduced into the give and take of the hermeneutical circle. As John Dewey wrote almost a century ago, individuals adopt the values and perspectives of their social groups in a manner that such factors come to shape their views of the world. Indeed, the values and perspectives of the group help determine what is deemed important and what is not, what is granted attention and what is ignored. Hermeneutical analysts are aware of such interpretational dynamics and make sure they are included in the search for understanding (Berger, 1995). Situating Interpretation Researchers who fail to take Dewey’s point into account operate at the mercy of unexamined assumptions. Since all interpretation is historically and culturally situated, it befalls the lot of hermeneutical analysts to study the ways both interpreters (often the analysts themselves) and the object of interpretation are constructed by their time and place. In this context the importance of social theory emerges. In this research critical social theory is injected into the hermeneutic circle to facilitate an understanding of the hidden structures and tacit cultural dynamics that insidiously inscribe social meanings and values (Kellner, 1995). This social and historical situating of interpreter and text is an extremely complex enterprise that demands a nuanced analysis of the impact of hegemonic and ideological forces that connect the micro-dynamics of everyday life with the macro-dynamics of structures of white supremacy, patriarchy, and class elitism. The central hermeneutic aspect of this work will involve the interaction between the cultural curriculum and these situating socio-historical structures. When these aspects of the interpretation process are taken into account, analysts begin to understand Hans-Georg Gadamer’s contention that social frames of reference influence researchers’ questions which, in turn, shape the nature of interpretation itself. In light of this situating process the modernist notion that a social text has one valid interpretation evaporates into thin air. Researchers, whether they admit it or not, always have a point of view, a disciplinary orientation, a social or political group with which they identify (Kincheloe, 2005). Thus, the point, critical hermeneuts argue, is not for researchers to shed all worldly affiliations but to identify them and understand their impact on the ways they approach social and educational phenomena. Gadamer labels these world affiliations of researchers their “horizons” and deems the hermeneutic act of interpretation the “fusion of horizons.” When researchers engage in the fusion of horizons they enter the tradition of the text. Here they study the conditions of its production and the circle of previous interpretations. In this manner they begin to uncover the ways the text has attempted to represent truth (Berger, 1995). In the critical hermeneutical tradition these analyses of the ways interpretation is situated are considered central to the critical project. Researchers like all human beings, critical analysts argue, make history and live their lives within structures of meaning they have not necessarily chosen for themselves. Understanding this, critical hermeneuts realize that a central aspect of their cultural pedagogical analysis involves dissecting the ways people connect their everyday experiences to the cultural representations of such experiences. Such work involves the unraveling of the ideological codings embedded in these cultural representations. This unraveling is complicated by the taken-for-grantedness of the meanings promoted in these representations and the typically undetected ways these meanings are circulated into everyday life (Denzin, 1992). The better the analyst, the better he or she can expose these meanings in the domain of the “what-goes-without-saying”--in this research those features of the media curriculum that are not addressed, that don’t elicit comment. At this historical juncture--the postmodern condition or hyperreality, as it has been labeled--electronic modes of communication become extremely important to the production of meanings and representations that culturally situate human beings in general and textual interpretations in particular. In many ways it can be argued that the postmodern condition produces a second hand culture, filtered and pre-formed in the marketplace and constantly communicated via popular cultural and mass media. Critical analysts understand that the pedagogical effects of such a mediated culture can range from the political/ideological to the cognitive/epistemological. For example, the situating effects of print media tend to promote a form of linearity that encourages rationality, continuity, and uniformity, on the other hand, electronic media promote a non-linear immediacy that may encourage more emotional responses that lead individuals in very different directions. Thus, the situating influence and pedagogical impact of electronic media of the postmodern condition must be assessed by those who study the pedagogical process and, most importantly in this context, the research process itself (Kincheloe, 2005). Critical Hermeneutics Understanding the forces that situate interpretation, critical hermeneutics is suspicious of any model of interpretation that claims to reveal the final truth, the essence of a text or any form of experience. Critical hermeneutics is more comfortable with interpretive approaches that assume that the meaning of human experience can never be fully disclosed—neither to the researcher nor even to the human that experienced it. Since language is always slippery with its meanings ever “in process,” critical hermeneuts understand that interpretations will never be linguistically unproblematic, will never be direct representations, critical hermeneutics seeks to understand how textual practices such as scientific research and classical theory work to maintain existing power relations and to support extant power structures (Denzin, 1992). This research draws, of course, on the latter model of interpretation with its treatment of the personal as political. Critical hermeneutics grounds a critical pedagogy that attempts to connect the everyday troubles individuals face to public issues of power, justice, and democracy. Typically, within the realm of the cultural curriculum critical hermeneutics has deconstructed popular cultural texts that promote demeaning stereotypes of the disempowered (Denzin, 1992). In this research, critical hermeneutics will be deployed differently in relation to popular cultural texts, as it examines popular movies that reinforce an ideology of privilege and entitlement for empowered members of the society—in this case, white, middle/upper-class males. In its ability to render the personal political, critical hermeneutics provides a methodology for arousing a critical consciousness through the analysis of the generative themes of the present era. Such generative themes form the basis of the cultural curriculum of popular culture (Peters & Lankshear, 1994). Within the academy there is still resistance to the idea that movies, TV, and popular music are intricately involved in the most important political, economic, and cultural battles of the contemporary epoch. Critical hermeneutics recognizes this centrality of popular culture in the postmodern condition and seeks to uncover the ways it impedes and advances the struggle for a democratic society (Kincheloe, 2005). Appreciating the material effects of media culture, critical hermeneutics trace the ways movies position audiences politically in ways that not only shape their political beliefs but also formulate their identities. In this context, Paulo Freire’s contribution to the development of a critical hermeneutics is especially valuable. Understanding that the generative themes of a culture are central features in a critical social analysis, Freire assumes that the interpretive process is both an ontological and an epistemological act. It is ontological on the level that our vocation as humans, the foundation of our being, is grounded on the hermeneutical task of interpreting the world so we can become more fully human. It is epistemological in the sense that critical hermeneutics offers us a method for investigating the conditions of our existence and the generative themes that shape it. In this context we gain the prowess to both live with a purpose and operate with the ability to perform evaluative acts in naming the culture around us. In the postmodern condition the pedagogical effects of popular culture have often been left unnamed, allowing our exploration of the shaping of our own humanness to go unexplored in this strange new social context. Critical hermeneutics address this vacuum (Kincheloe, 2005). Critical hermeneutics names the world as a part of a larger effort to evaluate it and make it better. Knowing this, it is easy to understand why critical hermeneutics focuses on domination and its negation, emancipation. Domination limits self-direction and democratic community building while emancipation enables it. Domination, legitimated as it is by ideology, is decoded by critical hermeneuts who help individuals discover the ways they have been entangled in the ideological process. The exposé and critique of ideology is one of critical hermeneutics’ main objectives in its effort to make the world better. As long as the various purveyors of ideology obstruct our vision, our effort to live in democratic communities will be thwarted (Gallagher, 1992). Power wielders with race, class, and gender privilege have access to the resources that allow them to promote ideologies and representations in ways individuals without such privilege cannot. Resources such as entertainment and communication industries are used to shape consciousness and construct subjectivity (Kincheloe, 2005). Critical Hermeneutics, The Production of Subjectivity and Cultural Pedagogy Those who operate outside the critical tradition often fail to understand that the critical hermeneutical concern with popular culture in the postmodern condition is not a matter of aesthetics but an issue of socio-political impact. In light of the focus of this research on the cultural curriculum and cultural pedagogy, a key aspect of this socio-political impact involves the socialization of youth. Those same outsiders sometimes look down their noses at the popular texts chosen for interpretation in the critical context, arguing that cultural productions such as Fast Times at Ridgemont High, for example, doesn’t deserve the attention critical scholarship might devote to it. Critical hermeneuts maintain that all popular culture that is consumed and makes an impact on an audience is worthy of study regardless of the aesthetic judgments elite cultural scholars might offer (Berger, 1995). In the case of a movie like Fast Times at Ridgemont High, it is important to critical analysts because it is both inscribed with profound cultural meanings and so many people have watched it. In its interest in oppression and emancipation, self-direction, personal freedom, and democratic community building, critical hermeneutics knows that popular texts such as movies shape the production of subjectivity; it also understands that such a process can be understood only with an appreciation of the socio-historical and political context that supports it (Ellis & Flaherty, 1992). Norm Denzin (1992) is extremely helpful in developing this articulation of critical hermeneutics, drawing on the sociological genius of C. Wright Mills and his “sociological imagination.” A key interest of this tradition, which Denzin carries into the contemporary era, involves unearthing the connections among material existence, communications processes, cultural patterns, and the formation of human consciousness. This articulation of a critical hermeneutics has much to learn from Denzin and Mills and their concern with subjectivity/consciousness, their understanding that cultural productions of various types hold compelling consequences for humans. Denzin is obsessed with the way individuals make sense of their everyday lives in particular cultural contexts by constructing stories (narratives) that, in turn, help define their identities. Employing a careful reading of Denzin, a critical hermeneut can gain insight into how cultural texts help create a human subject. How, Denzin wants to know, do individuals connect their lived experiences to the cultural representations of these same experiences (Denzin, 1992)? Following this line of thought a critical hermeneutics concerned with the pedagogical issue of identity formation seeks cultural experiences that induce crises of consciousness when an individual’s identity is profoundly challenged. Such moments are extremely important to any pedagogy, for it is in such instants of urgency that dramatic transformations occur (Denzin, 1992). In this research it is argued that such moments are not uncommon in individual interactions with popular texts and that the results of such experiences can be either oppressive or liberatory in nature. Indeed, some pedagogical experiences may be characterized as rational processes but they almost always involve a strong emotional component. Too often in mainstream research this emotional dynamic has been to some degree neglected by logocentric social science (Ellis & Flaherty, 1992). A critical hermeneutics aware of such cultural pedagogical dynamics will empower individuals to make sense of their popular cultural experiences and provide them with specific tools of social interpretation. Such abilities will allow them to avoid the manipulative ideologies of popular cultural texts in an emancipatory manner that helps them consciously construct their own identities. Critical social and educational analysis demands such abilities in its efforts to provide transformative insights into the many meanings produced and deployed in the media-saturated postmodern landscape (Kellner, 1995). Conclusion This chapter describes the way that cultural studies can be used with a bricolaged approach; combining critical research methods in order to critically interpret film, in this case, for a cultural pedagogical reading. 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