[Bilimsel Haber] "The Open University, Media Studies and New Times"

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

The Open University, Media Studies and New Times
David Hesmondhalgh

Flow vol 3, issue 9
http://jot.communication.utexas.edu/flow/?jot=view&id=1373


I've spent much of the last three years putting together with colleagues 
a new
undergraduate media course for The Open University. Many US readers of 
Flow will
be familiar with this British institution. Its mission is to provide 
part-time
higher education for anyone who wants to pursue it in the form of supported
distance learning. Yes, anyone. Thought up in the heyday of European social
democracy by Harold Wilson's Labour government, it goes without saying 
that this
mission was enormously unpopular with Britain's famously inegalitarian press
when the university started up in 1970. Yet somehow the OU has survived
newspaper scandal, Thatcherism and even, so far, the galloping onset of
marketisation and audit culture in British universities. And it's a 
non-profit,
state-funded, public institution.

Why's all this relevant to Flow? Well, the OU has had quite a role to 
play in
the development of media studies. Even in the USA, it quite often gets a 
mention
alongside the usual and now-tedious invocations of Birmingham cultural 
studies.
The OU's Mass Communication and Society (1977-1982) and Popular Culture 
(1981-7)
courses were hugely important in Britain. Many well-known media-studies 
names
authored teaching materials: Tony Bennett, James Curran, Stuart Hall, John
Hartley and Janet Woollacott, to name some contrasting examples. Dozens 
more cut
their media studies teeth teaching the courses at the OU's summer 
schools and
local centres in the 1970s and 1980s. Literally thousands of students 
took the
courses as part of social science, humanities and other programmes. And 
hundreds
of thousands watched the OU's television programmes on the BBC. 
Communication,
film and television studies barely existed in Britain before the early 
1980s so
these courses filled a huge hole for many who wanted to engage with the 
media
and popular culture.

The most recent OU contribution to undergraduate media and cultural 
studies was
Culture, Media and Identities, launched in 1997 and chaired by Stuart 
Hall. By
the 1990s, the Open University was producing some of its teaching 
materials with
publishers such as Sage, Routledge and Blackwell. The 'Walkman book' which
introduces Culture, Media and Identities, and Hall's own edited 
collection on
Representation, have become well-known beyond the OU, along with other 
books in
the associated series. The course also introduced the much-cited 'Circuit of
Culture', really a development of Hall's earlier encoding/decoding model.

The Open University system

People often ask how the OU system works. The short answer is: 
painstakingly.
Courses (which usually form one-sixth of an honours degree programme) are
produced by teams of dozens of people, including OU and external academics,
local tutors from around the UK, professional editors, TV producers, website
designers, technicians and others. This course team system of production 
is very
intensive and the fact that it's survived decades of managerialist 
drives for
greater efficiency in the UK public sector is a minor miracle of academic
autonomy.

In order to ensure that the distance learning materials are clear, 
cogent and
academically rigorous, members of course teams read each other's work in a
number of different drafts - at least three – and make comments on 
these
drafts at a series of meetings. And often in writing too. I remember with
particular agony email exchanges of many hundreds of words about one 
sentence.
(In defence of those of us involved, it did happen to be a sentence 
about Adorno
and Horkheimer). To sit listening while a number of very bright people make
detailed criticisms of your work is a process that is probably best 
described as
character-building. If I said that no-one ever fell out and that each 
meeting
began and ended with a group hug you wouldn't believe me, and you'd be 
right.
The process is wonderfully stimulating but unless you have a vast and
impermeable ego, at times it's also pretty terrifying.

Changing politics, changing media pedagogy

For those of us charged with the responsibility of developing a new Open
University media course, its earlier achievements in media and cultural 
studies
were hard acts to follow. One of the most interesting aspects of working 
on the
course (which, typically for the OU, has a less-than-thrilling title:
Understanding Media) has been to observe the ways in which it has ended up
reflecting shifts in the field of media analysis and shifts in the big wide
world beyond it.

The mandate of the Understanding Media course team was to provide a secure
foundation in media analysis for a new generation of OU students – 
and for
others reading our published textbooks. One of the major dilemmas we 
faced was
whether, in an introductory course, to stick with the 
production-texts-audiences
trio which is at the heart of most ways in which the field is pedagogically
carved up - including Hall et al.'s circuit of culture - or whether to 
try to
innovate beyond it, as, say, Simon Frith does in his essay on 
'Entertainment' in
Curran and Gurevitch's Mass Media and Society. With some trepidation 
– we
were worried that it was becoming stale through familiarity - we played 
safe and
opted for the trio as the basis of the structure of the course.

But in other respects, we have departed significantly from what a media 
studies
course in the 1990s would have looked like. For many years, well-rehearsed
tensions between political economy and cultural studies have divided the 
field;
and, for better or for worse, to say that this division is 'boring' will not
make it go away. Equally important in my view have been fissures 
deriving from
the troubled legacy of post-structuralism. All this has led to real 
difficulties
on some undergraduate media courses in bringing these various approaches and
positions into dialogue with each other. In many universities, at least 
in the
UK, the compromise has generally been that particular modules would be 
taught by
critical realist/political economists; others by post-structuralists and
constructionists; and others by popular culture academics. Or, worse, entire
courses or programmes would in effect pursue one approach, with only 
tokenistic
recognition of competing lines of thought.

For many amongst a new generation, whatever their own preferences, an 
adequate
grounding in media critique needs to take serious account of cultural 
studies,
post-structuralism and of the Marxian approaches that were sometimes 
portrayed
as a thing of the past in the 1990s. Rather than advocating a particular
approach, the Understanding Media team encouraged its authors to put 
different
critical perspectives on particular topics into dialogue. In the fourth 
book in
the Understanding Media book series, for example, the constructionist 
approaches
that have tended to dominate textual analysis are rubbed up against critical
realist positions. Across the course, our goal was to avoid caricature and
un-necessary simplification so that students gain a real understanding 
of the
different approaches on offer. This does not, however, mean a bland 
relativism:
the preferences of individual authors shine through in their presentation of
competing perspectives.

The course reflects changed political priorities too. For all kinds of
understandable historical reasons, many cultural and media studies 
teachers in
the 1990s, like much of the left, were overwhelmingly concerned with the
politics of difference and identity. The political role of 'culture' itself,
arguably sidelined for so many decades, became central – and indeed in
some accounts the realm of culture in effect came to be equated with the 
social,
or with politics. This was the aftermath of 1989, the period where political
debate was dominated by conflict in the former Yugoslavia, and by the 
continuing
struggle for gender and ethnic recognition.

To put it another way, though, this was the world before the WTO protests,
before 9-11 and Afghanistan, before the second Gulf War. The politics of
identity and difference remain key in the new course, but I suspect there is
much greater attention to issues of social inequality, class and imperialism
than there would have been if we had been producing the course ten years
earlier. And the issue of market liberalism keeps coming back like a 
chorus in a
pop song – especially in the book on Media Production, but not 
just there.
For many years, consumption was where the action was felt to be in 
cultural and
media studies, and was often understood as the privileged site of cultural
creativity. Understanding Media's book on audiences has a different 
inflection,
and is centrally concerned with the experience of living in nations 
penetrated
by transnational media flows. Here too, neo-liberalism, in its many 
guises, is a
spectre haunting the teaching material.

In trying to create a media studies course for the first decade of the
twenty-first century, we've tried to draw upon the widest possible range of
critical media scholarship. Readings from over 70 authors are integrated 
into
the textbooks, hundreds more are cited. And now that we've finished it 
seems to
me that there is actually a tremendous body of critical media work to 
draw upon
in meeting the challenge of teaching the media to new audiences. As for 
whether
the Understanding Media course team has drawn upon this work successfully
– that's for others to judge.