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Meetings, Conferences, Workshops

1996 Sense-Making Workshop

Workshop Abstracts

COPYRIGHT AND CITATION INFORMATION:
© Huesca, Robert, 1996. Cite as: Huesca, Robert (1996). Respondents as Media Theorists: A Sense-Making Exemplar. Paper presented at International Communication Association annual meeting, Chicago, Illinois, May 23. Available at: http://communication.sbs.ohio-state.edu/sense-making/meet/m96huesca.html

ESSENCE OF PROJECT:
I am centrally concerned with communication theories guiding "alternative" media practices, which I define as having the twin concerns of operating in a procedurally democratic manner while maintaining a commitment to social change agendas. By and large, the various theories guiding this area of research contain the central paradox of being committed to issues of equity and power on the one hand, while limiting, perhaps even reserving, the power to theorize alternative media practice to the domain of the researcher.

This paper suggests that Sense-Making not only allows but mandates researchers to understand their research subjects as social theorists. Adopting this approach in the case of alternative media studies is not only more compatible with the axiological assumptions that guide this area of inquiry, but it most likely will yield valuable theoretical insights from media practitioners, as well.

During 1993 and 1994, I collected ethnographic data at three radio production sites in the Bolivian highlands. The research sites continued a community radio legacy founded by Bolivian tin miners, who had been studied extensively and had been identified for their exemplary practice as alternative communicators (as defined above). Field notes, participation, self-generated videotapes, and collected artifacts were augmented with in-depth interviews informed by the Sense-Making approach. This paper provides a glimpse into the theories of communication and social change from the perspective of the practitioners of this study. The subject-generated theories are shown to contrast in significant ways from the alternative media theories that have been generated by communication researchers.

THE REASON I TOOK THIS ROAD:
My reading of the alternative media literature suggested that scholars had reached their limits in terms of advancing concepts that would inform democratic media practice. Communication theories informing alternative media practice seemed to be in this predicament because they were formulated in static terms and dualistic categories. The alternative was conceptualized as bottom-up, grass-roots, and liberating, while the mainstream was rendered as top-down, authoritarian, and oppressive.

Sense-Making offered a means of theorizing in more dynamic terms, while accounting for differences, rather than polarities. From the beginning of this project, then, I was looking for alternative modes of communicating that were organized in both a top-down and bottom-up fashion, and even liberating and oppressive. These polarities were of secondary importance. Of central concern was understanding the dynamic ways in which these practitioners moved through their daily life worlds, constructing responses to situations in ways that they understood as commensurable with alternative media practice.

THE BEST OF WHAT I HAVE ACHIEVED:
The strength of this study is the empirical evidence that clearly demonstrates the theoretical concern identified at the beginning of the paper. My area of study, as many areas in the humanities and social sciences, is weighted heavily with abstract and ideological arguments. While these have their place, my feeling is that critical theory and cultural studies within communication is in urgent need of more empirical grounding. I do not think that this is my concern alone. This study helps to justify this claim, as the subject-generated theories demonstrate the force of empirical evidence in forcing us to reshape theoretical claims.

WHAT HAS BEEN PARTICULARLY HELPFUL TO ME IN THIS PROJECT HAS BEEN:
My findings would have been impossible to achieve had I not lived and, to some extent, experienced the reality of the media practitioners. I think that having an experiential component to my study helped to extend the conceptual reach of the Sense-Making methods that were used.

WHAT HAS HINDERED ME, WHAT I HAVE STRUGGLED WITH HAS BEEN:
I am thinking more and more about the problems posed by multiple interpretations of reality and how the recognition of multiplicity both broadens and dilutes knowledge claims. Within my findings I have documented contrary interpretations of exactly what constitutes "alternative" media. On the one hand, I find that this makes perfect sense in a world whose great oppressions come from totalitarian impositions of reality. On the other hand, however, I wonder if I can say anything valid about alternative media. I would like to be able to move beyond a sort of intellectual smorgasbord that presents the multiple versions of reality, yet I'd like to do it without imposing a singular view of what that reality is.

WHAT WOULD HELP ME NOW IS:
I would like to see some discussion on the problem of multiplicity and knowledge (see above). While it is a liberating notion that enriches our understanding of just about all social phenomena, I have reached the point of wanting to have more certainty (that's not the right word) about what it is I am studying. I am working through this struggle, by the way, as a fairly entrenched relativist, believe it or not.

PROJECT ABSTRACT:
This paper argues that scholarship focused on developing theories of alternative media -- practices organized by democratic principles and driven by social change agendas -- are marked by a central paradox of disempowering research subjects as social and communication theorists. He posits that media practitioners move through their worlds on the basis of complex notions of how social change occurs and what role communication plays in that process. Ethnographic data collected from Bolivian tin miners' radio serve to illustrate this theoretical assertion and to begin constructing subject-generated theories of alternative media practice.