research papers - Sari Piittinen

Category: research papers

Reading papers: Professional wrestling

Posted on March 4, 2020 by Sari Piittinen

Asuka at WWE Live in Glasgow in 2017, photo by Russell Stewart

I recently came across an issue of The Popular Culture Studies Journal in 2018 that had a special section dedicated to professional wrestling studies. It has 16 whopping texts about the topic and I’ve only scratched the surface so far, but I already want to get started writing down some of my thoughts.

Pro wrestling is something that I’ve been watching on and off for over ten years now. (“On and off” means that there were some years in between when I barely watched anything, and periods when I watched wrestling shows every week.) I’ve been well aware of how it’s perceived as a culturally “inferior” form of entertainment, lowbrow, something that an academic person like myself ought to never be caught watching and enjoying. (I’m of course joking here.) But as I’ve watched it, I’ve found it a fascinating phenomenon in many ways, and even if right now it seems unlikely I’ll ever study it, well, in an alternative timeline I already would have. Back in the day when I was deciding the topic for my MA thesis, one of my options was to study how pro wrestling commentary on WWE’s shows is translated into Finnish, since (heavily edited) RAW and SmackDown had been aired on Finnish tv for a while at that point. And yes, some of the translations were ..interesting. My interest in Japanese culture ended up beating WWE for my MA thesis topic, but things could have easily turned out differently.

It is also a little hilarious that I’m continuously interested in research topics that are or have been considered lowbrow – digital games, the gothic, let’s play videos, carnival, and here pro wrestling… Not sure it’s a blessing or a curse to identify interesting phenomena in topics that appear to need to be justified over and over again for others who struggle to see their value. This challenge is certainly recognized and addressed by the pro wrestling scholars in the issue. In the introduction, Castleberry, Reinhard, Foy & Olson summarise so well why pro wrestling is right now an interesting resource for observing sociocultural issues that I’ll make an exception and quote it:

“Fake news is kayfabe, online performativity is a work, and social media campaigns can be top-down manipulated or bottom-up inspirational. The genre of pro wrestling is more than a physical story form. It articulates class struggle and personifies the negotiation of power—sometimes fair but oftentimes stacked against the just, the virtuous, the universal underdog.” (pages 65-66)

In other words… The fictional storyworld ‘bubbles’ of pro wrestling don’t seem too different from groups that establish their own concepts of truth, or the questioning of truth in today’s society. Online performativity is everywhere in different forms, including gameplay streaming, vlogging and blogging, review videos, or self-help advice… And in these different types of content, people do things or take on roles that are specifically intended for the performance and not something they would otherwise do. Some popular phenomena are backed by powerful institutions, while others begin their success on a grassroot level (see, for example, environmentalist movements). Certain social groups are either perceived as, or hope to be perceived as, underdogs, and gain supporters who wish to combat the perceived unjust division of power. Basically, despite its fictional setting, the concepts and phenomena that take place in pro wrestling are not at all divorced from reality, especially now when anyone can become an online performer and create their own narrative that is simultaneously fictional and realistic.

One particularly fascinating concept is kayfabe, as discussed by Eero Laine in the paper “Professional Wrestling Scholarship: Legitimacy and Kayfabe”. Kayfabe is based on the assumption that everyday events are somehow directed by those in power in the backstage, resulting in a simultaneously cynical and optimistically speculative view of the world. In wrestling, it has to do with how writers and powerful figures like Vince McMahon make decisions of how wrestlers are portrayed and what kinds of stories they’re allowed to tell. But even outside the world of pro wrestling, it seems a very fruitful approach for analysing the performances and theatricality in politics, business, the media, and so on. It might be combined, for example, with critical discourse analysis, which is especially focused on relations of power, dominance and inequality. I’ve witnessed a kind of deeply cynical kayfabe element even in the way gamers talk about games, their development, and any kind of failure at addressing player concerns (for example, when games have glitches that aren’t immediately fixed by the game developer) – there is a kind of big bad making decisions behind the scenes. There’s something here worth exploring, I think.

Reading papers: Cognitive linguistic and multimodal methods

Posted on February 21, 2020 by Sari Piittinen

The article I’ve read this time is “The visual basis of linguistic meaning and its implications for critical discourse studies: Integrating cognitive linguistic and multimodal methods” by Christopher Hart, published in Discourse & Society in 2016 (find it here). This is the first non-media studies article during this little article reading experiment of mine!

The disclaimer:
I don’t aim to write ‘academic reviews’ of these papers, but very informal and subjective thoughts about how these papers or chapters could influence my own work. I even avoid direct quotes of the text to also make it visually more apparent that this is not an academic text.

I was drawn to this paper because of my continued interest in multimodality and, well, the intriguing wording of ‘visual basis of linguistic meaning’. However, the ‘cognitive linguistic’ aspect of it intimidated me a little; the term ‘cognitive’ tends to make me think of all things psychological and things that happen inside a person’s mind, which is not really what I’ve been studying so far. Sure, I’ve analysed meanings produced in discourse, but I’ve tried to be careful not to step over the line to make suggestions about what people think when they are experiencing this or that. These are two different things.

I think partially because of the fear that I was stepping over into (to me) unexplored area of research it took me a lot longer to finish reading this paper than the previous ones. There’s nothing wrong with the paper or how it was written (on the contrary, it demonstrates its arguments and examples well). I’m just experiencing that good ol’ impostor syndrome and sometimes encountering something that isn’t immediately and easily understandable to me makes me question my intelligence, and that is destructive for my motivation to keep reading. Especially if I feel like it’s something that I should easily understand, which is the case here considering my educational background… Anyway. Just trying to be open about my challenges because how else to improve?

The paper discusses what cognitive linguistic critical discourse studies (CL-CDS) has to offer in combination with multimodal discourse analysis (MDA), how to explore connections between language, image and ideology, and how multimodal information is encoded by mental representations that are invoked by language use. Some of it is familiar to anyone who’s dealt with discourse studies before, but with suggested new uses and perspectives.

The paper gives a short introduction to MDA and how there’s been a need to develop a toolkit, like ones used in linguistics/grammatics, to describe the communication of ideas, attitudes and identities in non-linguistic forms. This is actually something I’ve had some methodological anxiety about, since I’m supposed to be analysing gestures, expressions, etc. in video material in the near future. It seems very difficult to find tools for describing what different non-linguistic means of expressing meaning might actually mean. If someone has a sarcastic smile on their face, am I allowed to suggest it’s a sarcastic smile, and if so, based on what reasoning? In linguistics, there are specific grammatical means and contextual information that we can use to support our arguments. I’m still struggling to understand how to do that credibly with non-linguistic communication. This paper, at least, helps orientate my thinking somewhat, for example, through the conceptualizations of image as co-text and context: how linked language usage and images match, and how previously encountered semiotic experiences reflect in simulated experiences.

One especially interesting part for me was the argument concerning how the encoding of orientational values, at the level of simulation, encourages us to experience an event as if we were in the shoes of the agent or patient (in a text). So for example, a person or group involved in an event (like being threatened by a shooter) can be positioned as the patient – as the one on the receiving end of an action – so that the viewer interprets the action as a personal threat rather than something neutrally reported. Basically, by deciding whom to portray as the agent or patient we’re also making decisions of who are to be perceived as ‘one of us’ or as ‘other’, and something like danger can be perceived as personal or impersonal. (At least that’s how I understand it.) Doing this kind of analysis in language is familiar to me, but in images, not so much. I see the benefits of using this kind of approach to the analysis of news media, in particular, but not necessarily the kind of data that I have currently collected, aside from acknowledging the positioning of participants as performers or audience and what that suggests about their perceived importance for the content. However, since we’re already speaking of simulation, I wonder if someone would one day do a close analysis of, for example, how different types of game characters are visually positioned during scenes and still images (when the player does not control the camera) and what this suggests about their ideological connotations.

I probably failed to discuss the main points that the article strove to make, but like I said, I’ve been going through some challenges and am still taking it all in. At least I managed to blog about it!

Reading papers: Processual approach to media, communication and social change theorization

Posted on February 3, 2020February 3, 2020 by Sari Piittinen

The article I read this time is “Theorizing media, communication and social change: towards a processual approach” by Sabina Mihelj and James Stanyer, published in Media, Culture & Society in 2019 (find it here). It seems the papers are numbered in such a way that I’ll be doing papers from one journal at a time, so I guess we’ll be continuing with media studies until an article from a different journal pops up!

This time I was interested in this paper, first, because I didn’t know what a ‘processual approach’ concretely means, and second, because ‘social change’ or change in general is a kind of a hot topic I’ve heard researchers mention a lot in the past five years or so, but I don’t really have any knowledge about how it’s studied and has been studied in the past. The paper by Mihelj and Stanyer both discusses how the topic has been approached in five research journals between 1951 and 2015, and suggests an approach for future use, so in a way it’s a rather nifty study to come across for someone with my gap in knowledge. We can say that this article gave me more information about research on media, communication and social change, but unlike the two papers I blogged about previously, it’s not something I could see myself applying to my work in the near future (just because I’m not working on a topic like this). So, it benefitted my general knowledge instead.

In the longitudinal look at research journals, Mihelj and Stanyer discovered two main approaches to theorizing social change (which could both also appear in the same study): media/communication as an agent of social change, and media/communication as an environment for social change. These approaches also had several subcategories; examples for the latter approach are transnationalization, commercialization and democratization. The paper identifies key differences between the two approaches – for example, the focus on micro-changes that affect individuals for the former, and changes on the macrolevel that may take decades or even centuries to complete for the latter.

What the two approaches have in common is that they privilege outcomes instead of processes – hence the authors’ interest in introducing a processual approach and typology. Basically, this approach perceives society as a process and change as natural, and suggests that any order or structures that exist are temporary and by-products of change. So, instead of highlighting the outcomes of structural changes, for example, the process of how this happens has received less attention. Mihelj and Stanyer point out that research that focuses on outcomes can’t help but become outdated quickly; in contrast, focus on processes especially in the contemporary unpredictable, complex changes, as I understand it, would produce information and discussions that can be continued and applied for a long time to come. The paper also suggests a focus on examining gradual shifts over a long period.

To someone reading about these approaches for the first time, even just the longitudinal (decades or even centuries long) research sounds very ambitious and overwhelming, although I’m aware that such tasks have been undertaken by many throughout history. Most of my studies have sought to examine closely rather specific and in-the-moment phenomena, although of course they connect to a larger picture, culture, society and a history of developments. I just haven’t explored those developments too much because I haven’t approached those topics from the viewpoint of social change. The shift to focusing on processes sounds intriguing to me. I can’t straight away imagine what the concrete steps and tools would be for doing this kind of research; how to identify the ways in which causes of change interact and combine to create change over time. This isn’t something that I need to figure out right now, either, but is certainly food for thought, and who knows, might influence the way in which I perceive phenomena – as something constantly in-process, which also goes along with the perception of how, for example, aspects of identity are continuously negotiated and (re)constructed in discourse. It’s interesting how papers that don’t seem to immediately benefit my own work still manage to poke my brain.

Reading papers: Reception studies and discourse theory

Posted on January 6, 2020 by Sari Piittinen

I’ve decided to give a try to reading all the random research articles and chapters I’ve collected from the past few years and writing down some thoughts on each one. (Good luck with that, huh??) This leads us to the disclaimer that I should probably post on each update:

I don’t aim to write ‘academic reviews’ of these papers, but very informal and subjective thoughts about how these papers or chapters could influence my own work. I even avoid direct quotes of the text to also make it visually more apparent that this is not an academic text.

The first paper I’ve read is “The right to die: a Belgian case study combining reception studies and discourse theory” by Leen Van Brussel, published in Media, Culture & Society in 2018 (find it here).

What drew me to this paper were reception studies and discourse theory mentioned in the title. The paper is about the field of media studies which isn’t exactly my field – I’m certainly interested in studying media, but I’m not familiar with the specific tools and theory of the field of media studies, to clarify! However, I believe I could find use for some of the approaches and concepts of media studies, which is why broadening my views seems like a good idea.

Also, with my background in linguistics, I’m very familiar with the concept of discourse, but as a methodological approach it’s usually referred to as discourse studies or discourse analysis. The use of discourse theory, specifically, made me curious to see whether this media studies approach is much different from the approaches I’m used to. (While it underlines discourse that goes beyond the linguistic, there are certainly discourse analytic approaches that also take context and multimodality into consideration, so in that sense it’s similar. With that being said, some of the tools presented in this paper were new to me, so clearly there is some homework to be done.) Reception studies is also something I’ve wanted to learn more about, since I’m interested in studying player experiences of video games. Therefore, understanding better how to study the ways in which people make sense of and experience different types of media texts sounds pretty important. Finally, I was also interested in the combination of two approaches (reception studies and discourse theory) that Van Brussel says has not been used much before; I’m all for finding new ways to combine approaches, I’m often tempted to do such things myself, and am inspired by the innovativeness of others!

The study examines what people say in response to media texts about euthanasia, but instead of euthanasia, I’m more interested in the approaches and concepts that the author is working with and how they conducted the study. This can be a kind of a difference between an academic reader and a non-academic publication: the latter is usually only interested in the results, but for the sake of improving my professional toolkit, I’m intested in how those results were achieved. (With that being said, euthanasia was a very interesting topic for this paper and I happily read all of the analysis!)

To summarise my FEELS about the approaches: what Van Brussel is selling, I’m buying. First of all, the tools presented in this article are explained clearly and make sense. Everything was easy to read and understand. Secondly, I can see how the proposed combination of discourse theory and reception studies could have many uses, including the context of video games which is my current playfield. Very good, solid stuff.

Possibly the biggest concrete takeaway to me from this paper is the differentiation between the logic of recognition and the logic of identification when we interpret media texts. Of these, logic of recognition has to do with recognizing the socially dominant order, the hegemonic message in the text. But recognizing it doesn’t say anything about how we invest in it (or whether we agree/disagree with it, how position ourselves in relation to it). That’s where the logic of identification comes in: how we identify or dis-identify with discourses that become activated in media texts. The differentiation between the two makes it possible to examine how people produce interpretations like “these are the values, ideologies etc. that I recognize the text is constructing, and/but this is what I say about it”. Seems rather useful to me, and applicable to many different types of data.

The study shows how people can negotiate and reject discourses that are activated in the media, or how they can bring in alternative discourses. To me the interesting next step is to examine how this is done in different contexts and what types of alternative discourses people offer in them. At the same time, we’re also dependent on existing or available discourses that allow us to speak; if the discourse doesn’t exist in the society, or in the media, how can anyone say anything about it? This leads to how important it is to consider what discourses are made available to us, especially because it can be so difficult for us to see the invisible. In the linguistic sense, we can see new words and terms developed or borrowed when discourses emerge – an old example of this is perhaps the loanword sekuhara for sexual harrassment in Japanese, from 1989. However, arguably it took until the global Me Too movement (and the simple, unifying label #MeToo) of the late 2010s for the discourse to be made available again in the Japanese culture.

In any case, although I’m not technically a media scholar, I’m very interested in using the tools suggested by Van Brussel at some point, and I’m pretty psyched that I could be so inspired by the very first article that I ended up reading for this little ‘project’. Now even if I next end up reading several articles that don’t have much I could apply in my own work (although I have no doubt that they are good papers), I can always fondly remember this one.