Cultural Studies, Common Sense and Communications

Introduction: At home in Asia? Place-making, belonging and citizenship in the Asian Century

“…They come from different disciplinary perspectives, namely empirically oriented social sciences (Budianta, Castillo, and Moreh), urban studies (Ang and Chu), and the cultural studies of law (Erni). Taken together, they reiterate Morley's (2014) reminder of cultural studies' commitment, epitomized in the subtitle of his article, to 'the infra-ordinary, the interdisciplinary and the particular'. They also respond to Pink et al's (2013) call, in a recent publication in this very journal, to continue shifting the study of 'home' towards spatial theory and non-or beyond-representation accounts 'that direct our attention to the affective, unspoken, sensory and political elements of the everyday'.…”

“…A turn towards Asia may help not only serve to counter the Eurocentrism that haunts theorizations of home, place, belonging and citizenship, but also to rethink these notions, to: refigure our 'common sense' … to better correspond to conditions outside the Metropolitan West, if we wish to have things to say which are relevant outside the unusually privileged conditions which still apply in (at least some parts) those specific socio-geographical area. (Morley, 2014) What does home mean to Asians, and those who aspire to be Asian? How do Asian migrants make themselves at home in Singapore or Sydney?…”

Understanding the popularity and affordances of TikTok through user experiences

“…Ang, 1985; Morley, 1986; Radway, 1984; Seiter et al, 1989). Ethnographic audience studies is marked by a strong opposition to the ‘tendency to presume that the media can be understood independently of the cultural contexts in which they operate’ (Morley, 2015: 28). As such, it is a qualitative approach that is not ‘satisfied with the sporadic inclusion of disembodied, decontextualised observations of behaviour’ but seeks to ‘engage with audiences meaningfully in and across contexts of their lives’.…”