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Summary CRITICAL THINKING IN COMMUNICATION STUDIES (18/20)
Critical Thinking in Communication Studies - Pascal Verhoest Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) Universiteit Gent (UGent)
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CRITICAL THINKING IN COMMUNICATIONSTUDIES
CLASS 1 INTRODUCTION
Why critical thinking in communication studies?
Power is at the level of production. E.g. Netflix: it offers access to a multitude of movies and TV-shows,
but at the same it is a very dominant provider of entertainment. Newspapers, television and social
media are discursive powers: it is one way of many to bring media into circulation.
Critical thinking an empty rhetoric? “It seems to me that critique is one of the most inflationary used
terms in academia” (Fuchs, 2011)
Defining media and communication studies
Mainstream media and communication studies
- Linear thinking that generally ignores broader societal issues and shies away from critique of
power. E.g. the hypodermic needle model, uses and gratification…
- Taking for granted the existing system of mass media ownership, control, and purpose (Todd
Gitlin)
- Assumption that media have to play the function of expressing and reflecting the achieved
consensus in society (Hall)
Critical media and communication studies
- Dialectic thinking: looking at the context and acknowledging the complexity of social and
media relations, and acknowledging the limitations of understanding social reality. Dialectical
thinking is a form of analytic reasoning that pursues knowledge and truth as long as there are
questions and conflicts.
E.g. 13 Reasons Why with its explicit suicide scene arose the question whether scenes as such
may engage a part of the audience to also commit suicide.
E.g. Kodak camera in 1880s was designed to only capture white skin: technology is not neutral
and is influenced by politics and society.
- Focus on power relations: the ways how communication is embedded into relations of
domination, but also about finding alternative conditions of society and communication.
- Engagement: critical theory points to aspects of society and culture that should be challenged
and changed, and thus attempts to inform and inspire political practice.
The social shaping of critical studies
The academic field cannot be seen in isolation from the rest of the world. Some research questions are
more likely to make it into ‘academia’, especially which research will receive funding. Dominant
worldviews, trends and the current belief system determine which research questions are perceived
as relevant or worth studying. A research question such as “Are women less intelligent than men?” is
highly unlikely to be funded and researched in Western Europe.
→ Do Western perspectives dominate the academic field?
Critical thinking focusses on self-criticism: uncompromising criticism of everything; especially of the
existing powers in society, but also of one’s own thinking. Critical thinking is about remaining sceptical
of everything, to not accept immediately, but to question it first, even yourself.
BUT: many critical studies indulge in self-contemplation or even self-prophecy instead of self-criticism.
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,Historical origins of critical communication studies
The origins of the political economy of communication studies can be traced back to 19th century
Marxism. Cultural studies, or critical communication studies, emerged as a critique on the political
economy in the 20th century due to the transformations that capitalism had been undergoing
(structure vs agency). Cultural Studies have its origins in the Frankfurter Schule.
Critical media and communication studies: not a homogeneous field:
- Repression hypothesis: media is seen as a means for enforcing and deepening domination.
E.g. Reinforcing the believe that capitalism is the only way
- Manipulation hypothesis: media as tools that manipulate people. E.g. A pop-icon who has the
power to manipulate politics (Kim Kardashian, Kanye, A$AP Rocky…)
- Emancipation hypothesis: media is seen as a means of criticizing domination. E.g. Challenge
the stigma that a good mother has to stay home with the children.
- Commodity hypothesis: media as sphere of capital accumulation. E.g. Audiences being sold
to advertisers and selling them behind their backs to the capital system.
- Alternative media hypothesis: there are alternative ways of doing and making media
(encoding/decoding). E.g. Pop-icons like Beyoncé who flaunt their beauty can be seen as either
victims who need to flaunt to be popular, or can be seen as confident feminists.
- Reception hypothesis: potential for oppositional interpretations and actions.
→ It is possible for different critical positions to co-exist. We can both be positive and sceptical of
media at the same time.
Critical communication studies as an epistemology and research paradigm
Paradigm: an intellectual lens/thought pattern, organizing principle on a subject matter within a
science. There are three main paradigms in communication studies:
- Positivist paradigm: Investigating the social and cultural world is no different in principle than
investigating the natural world. The social world is patterned and therefore predictable.
- Interpretative paradigm: Social sciences are fundamentally different from the natural
sciences. The focus should be on how people make sense of their social worlds and ho they
express these understandings (how they give meaning to them). ‘Truth’ is constructed in social
interaction, meaning that ‘facts never speak for themselves.
- Critical paradigm: 2 different varieties:
o Critical realism: Things exist apart from our experience and interpretation. The focus
should be on the material world: resources, distribution and social struggles.
o Critical social constructionism: Opposed to absolute truth claims. The focus should be
on ideological critique and deconstruction.
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, Cultural studies: Society as a terrain of domination and resistance and engages in critique of
domination and of the ways that media culture engages in reproducing relationships of domination
and oppression.
Political economy: Central focuses of analysis are media production, media distribution and media
consumption, as well as on their functions for the development of the capitalist economic and societal
system.
→ There are large differences cultural studies research school and political economy research school,
but conflicts between them are responsible for critical studies becoming fragmented and self-centred,
which weakens them in questioning the uncritical mainstream paradigm. Therefore it is important that
their connectedness at the same time as their differences is shown (unity in plurality).
CLASS 2 POLITICAL ECONOMY
Dual meaning of political economy
Political economy contains two concepts in one: the concept of household (oikos) and the city or state
(polis), entailing the knowledge of the householding of the state.
There are two contemporary definitions of political economy:
- Economic policy: the intervention of the government in the economy
- Political aspects of the economy: the interconnectedness of the political and the economical
→ Both definitions are valid, but stem from historically different theoretical traditions. The term
political economy corresponds with a social reality:
In the early modern era (17th-18th century): the boundaries of the economy still largely coincide with
the boundaries of the state, leading to the economy being governed by the state. The economists of
the 19th century and before were consequently all called (and called themselves) ‘political economists’.
Industrialization and the development of capitalism lead to the dissociation of the political and the
economical. Nowadays it is very global.
In the course of the 19th century, two strands develop out of classical economics:
- Classical economists: theory in support of the retreat of the state from the economy
- Marxist (political) economy: reaction against the consequences of the retreat of the state
from the economy
! The term ‘neo-classical economics’ was introduces at the turn of the 19th century by economists who
wanted to distinguish themselves from these ‘old school’ (classical) (political) economists.
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