Michael Pickering – författare

This elegantly written and illuminating book explores the attenuated relationship between history and cultural studies, reappraising some of the issues and positions which have led to the impasse between them and highlighting the contribution to be made by a new engagement between cultural and historical theory. Focusing on the contested concept of 'experience' as a central part of his argument, Pickering advances new ways of attending to the myriad voices of everyday cultures, past and present.

Stereotyping stands in need of serious re-appraisal. This book provides a critical assessment of the concept and its use in the social sciences, considering its theoretical basis and historical development and linking these closely to the concept of the Other. As the first sustained book-length treatment of stereotyping in either sociology or media and cultural studies, the text embraces such key topics as nationalism and national identity, gender, racism and imperialism, normality and social order, and the figure of the stranger in the modern city. It is genuinely interdisciplinary, moving between sociology, social psychology, cultural history, psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory, and offers an indispensable examination of the roots of prejudice and bigotry in modern societies.

Researching Communications, Second Edition provides a practical, authoritative, step-by-step guide to media and communications studies students taking courses in communications research. The authors also examine the complementary nature of qualitative and quantitative research methods, and aim to show how these techniques hold up in practice. The new edition also incorporates new information on using archives and computers as well as the use of the internet as a resource for research. 'This is an enormously useful text for anyone interested in an up-to-date guide to cultural analysis; it will be indispensible for teaching research methods in communication studies.' - Hanno Hardt, University of Iowa

This new textbook addresses the neglect of practical research methods in cultural studies. It provides students with clearly written overviews of research methods in cultural studies, along with guidelines on how to put these methods into operation. It advocates a multi-method approach, with students drawing from a pool of techniques and approaches suitable for their own topics of investigation. The book covers the following main areas:* Drawing on experience, and studying how narratives make sense of experience.* Investigating production processes in the cultural industries, and the consumption and assimilation of cultural products by audiences and fans.* Taking both quantitative and qualitative approaches to the study of cultural life.* Analysing visual images and both spoken and written forms of discourse.* Exploring cultural memory and historical representation.The contributors, along with Michael Pickering, are Martin Barker, Aeron Davis, David Deacon, Emily Keightley, Steph Lawler, Anneke Meyer, Virginia Nightingale, and Sarah Pink. The book is designed for use by students on upper-level undergraduate and taught Masters-level courses as well as postgraduate research students and cultural studies researchers more generally. It will be of enormous value across all fields of study involved in cultural enquiry and analysis.

The first textbook on research methods and methodological questions in the fieldThis guide provides students and researchers with a clear set of outlines and discussions of particular methods of research in memory studies. It offers not only expert appraisals of a range of techniques, approaches and perspectives, but also focuses on key questions of methodology in order to help bring unity and coherence to this new field of study. Key Features:Investigating community remembering and memory in personal narrativesExploring the localisation of official national memory, and the contribution of different memoryscapes and different regimes of memory to cultural heritageAttending to painful pasts and disrupted memory Examining how memory is achieved and communicated in everyday interaction, and how it is manifested in emergent ethnicitiesFocusing on the production of social memory in the media and the use of media as self-produced vehicles of memoryAnalysing the dynamics of remembering in public confessions and apologias, and in testimonies offered by Holocaust survivors

Blackface minstrelsy is associated particularly with popular culture in the United States and Britain, yet despite the continual two-way flow of performers, troupes and companies across the Atlantic, there is little in Britain to match the scholarship of blackface studies in the States. This book concentrates on the distinctively British trajectory of minstrelsy. The historical study and cultural analysis of minstrelsy is important because of the significant role it played in Britain as a form of song, music and theatrical entertainment. Minstrelsy had a marked impact on popular music, dance and other aspects of popular culture, both in Britain and the United States. Its impact in the United States fed into significant song and music genres that were assimilated in Britain, from ragtime and jazz onwards, but prior to these influences, minstrelsy in Britain developed many distinct features and was adapted to operate within various conventions, themes and traditions in British popular culture. Pickering provides a convincing counter-argument to the assumption among writers in the United States that blackface was exclusively American and its British counterpart purely imitative. Minstrelsy was not confined to its value as song, music and dance. Jokes at the expense of black people along with demeaning racial stereotypes were integral to minstrel shows. As a form of popular entertainment, British minstrelsy created a cultural low-Other that offered confirmation of white racial ascendancy and imperial dominion around the world. The book attends closely to how this influence on colonialism and imperialism operated and proved ideologically so effective. At the same time British minstrelsy cannot be reduced to its racist and imperialist connections. Enormously important as those connections are, Pickering demonstrates the complexity of the subject by insisting that the minstrel show and minstrel performers are understood also in terms of their own theatrical dynamics, talent and appeal.

'There have been few critical engagements with the concept of creativity in recent years, so the authors provide an important contribution in drawing attention to what is arguably at the heart of much of what we most value in culture'

- Douglas Kellner, University of California, Los Angeles

'In this important book, Keith Negus and Michael Pickering challenge commonplace assumptions about creativity and casual invocations of genius. They give comfort neither to popular wisdom nor to academic convention. Drawing on the work of philosophers, sociologists, political theorists and economists, as well as artists, musicians and novelists, they raise profound questions about the very ideas which sustain our understanding of art and culture'

- Professor John Street, University of East Anglia

'It's all too rare to read a cultural studies book that offers any real originality. This one achieves this, not only by addressing debates and sources neglected in the field, but also by traversing high and low culture, and all points between'

- Dave Hesmondhalgh, The Open University

Creativity has become a buzzword and key issue in debates about cultural policy, human growth and the media and cultural industries. It has also become a very misused term used to describe anything from musical and artistic genius, to shady financial accounting, to the teaching of children and the management of employees.

But what does it mean?

Negus and Pickering provide a clear and logical way of understanding what we describe as creative, and how this term has become central to attaching cultural value. Their book:

· Develops an approach which enables us to think of creativity as both ordinary and exceptional

· Focuses on creativity as a way of rethinking key concepts in the study of culture such as:

Convention; innovation; tradition and experience.

This book is useful to those studying Media and Cultural Studies who need to understand Cultural Production, Communication, Popular Culture and Cultural Theory.

'There have been few critical engagements with the concept of creativity in recent years, so the authors provide an important contribution in drawing attention to what is arguably at the heart of much of what we most value in culture'

- Douglas Kellner, University of California, Los Angeles

'In this important book, Keith Negus and Michael Pickering challenge commonplace assumptions about creativity and casual invocations of genius. They give comfort neither to popular wisdom nor to academic convention. Drawing on the work of philosophers, sociologists, political theorists and economists, as well as artists, musicians and novelists, they raise profound questions about the very ideas which sustain our understanding of art and culture'

- Professor John Street, University of East Anglia

'It's all too rare to read a cultural studies book that offers any real originality. This one achieves this, not only by addressing debates and sources neglected in the field, but also by traversing high and low culture, and all points between'

- Dave Hesmondhalgh, The Open University

Creativity has become a buzzword and key issue in debates about cultural policy, human growth and the media and cultural industries. It has also become a very misused term used to describe anything from musical and artistic genius, to shady financial accounting, to the teaching of children and the management of employees.

But what does it mean?

Negus and Pickering provide a clear and logical way of understanding what we describe as creative, and how this term has become central to attaching cultural value. Their book:

· Develops an approach which enables us to think of creativity as both ordinary and exceptional

· Focuses on creativity as a way of rethinking key concepts in the study of culture such as:

Convention; innovation; tradition and experience.

This book is useful to those studying Media and Cultural Studies who need to understand Cultural Production, Communication, Popular Culture and Cultural Theory.

Whether for weavers at the handloom, labourers at the plough or factory workers on the assembly line, music has often been a key texture in people's working lives. This book is the first to explore the rich history of music at work in Britain and charts the journey from the singing cultures of pre-industrial occupations, to the impact and uses of the factory radio, via the silencing effect of industrialisation. The first part of the book discusses how widespread cultures of singing at work were in pre-industrial manual occupations. The second and third parts of the book show how musical silence reigned with industrialisation, until the carefully controlled introduction of Music while You Work in the 1940s. Continuing the analysis to the present day, Rhythms of Labour explains how workers have clung to and reclaimed popular music on the radio in desperate and creative ways.

This book explores how photography and recorded music act as vehicles or catalysts in processes of remembering, and how they are regarded, treated, valued and drawn upon as resources connecting past and present in everyday life. It does so via two key concepts: vernacular memory and the mnemonic imagination.

Originally published in 1982. The songs on which this study is based were once vibrant in the throats and ears and minds of living people. This book examines the songs and their meanings in relation to the lives of those people, and relates them to the cultural tradition and practice of which they were an integral part. The art of village song represents a sense of cohesiveness and mutual identity around local patterns of kinship, social groupings, territorial orientations and cultural relationships. The actual ways in which songs were part of village life is of course highly problematic, but this book endeavours, most of all, to present an understanding of the place of song in the social life of villagers.

Blackface minstrelsy is associated particularly with popular culture in the United States and Britain, yet despite the continual two-way flow of performers, troupes and companies across the Atlantic, there is little in Britain to match the scholarship of blackface studies in the States. This book concentrates on the distinctively British trajectory of minstrelsy. The historical study and cultural analysis of minstrelsy is important because of the significant role it played in Britain as a form of song, music and theatrical entertainment. Minstrelsy had a marked impact on popular music, dance and other aspects of popular culture, both in Britain and the United States. Its impact in the United States fed into significant song and music genres that were assimilated in Britain, from ragtime and jazz onwards, but prior to these influences, minstrelsy in Britain developed many distinct features and was adapted to operate within various conventions, themes and traditions in British popular culture. Pickering provides a convincing counter-argument to the assumption among writers in the United States that blackface was exclusively American and its British counterpart purely imitative. Minstrelsy was not confined to its value as song, music and dance. Jokes at the expense of black people along with demeaning racial stereotypes were integral to minstrel shows. As a form of popular entertainment, British minstrelsy created a cultural low-Other that offered confirmation of white racial ascendancy and imperial dominion around the world. The book attends closely to how this influence on colonialism and imperialism operated and proved ideologically so effective. At the same time British minstrelsy cannot be reduced to its racist and imperialist connections. Enormously important as those connections are, Pickering demonstrates the complexity of the subject by insisting that the minstrel show and minstrel performers are understood also in terms of their own theatrical dynamics, talent and appeal.

Originally published in 1982. The songs on which this study is based were once vibrant in the throats and ears and minds of living people. This book examines the songs and their meanings in relation to the lives of those people, and relates them to the cultural tradition and practice of which they were an integral part. The art of village song represents a sense of cohesiveness and mutual identity around local patterns of kinship, social groupings, territorial orientations and cultural relationships. The actual ways in which songs were part of village life is of course highly problematic, but this book endeavours, most of all, to present an understanding of the place of song in the social life of villagers.

This book addresses the nature and role of fear in the German world from the early modern period through to the 20th century. Offering the first collection that centres fear in the historical analysis of central Europe since 1600, these essays demonstrate the importance of emotional experience to the study of the past. Fear has been at the centre of many of the most important historical events in this region; witch hunts, religious conflicts, invasions and ultra-nationalism in the form of the Nazi regime. This book explores ways in which fear was understood, developed and negotiated throughout these historical contexts, and how people of the German world coped with it. From the fear of vampires to the loss of national sovereignty, pestilence, gypsies and criminals, Fear in the German Speaking World 1600-2000 draws connections between cases over a period of 400 years and considers fear alongside the history of emotions more generally. In doing so, the chapters reveal a complex, evolving construction of fear that is universally human, but also dependent upon its cultural and historical context.

This book addresses the nature and role of fear in the German world from the early modern period through to the 20th century. Offering the first collection that centres fear in the historical analysis of central Europe since 1600, these essays demonstrate the importance of emotional experience to the study of the past. Fear has been at the centre of many of the most important historical events in this region; witch hunts, religious conflicts, invasions and ultra-nationalism in the form of the Nazi regime. This book explores ways in which fear was understood, developed and negotiated throughout these historical contexts, and how people of the German world coped with it. From the fear of vampires to the loss of national sovereignty, pestilence, gypsies and criminals, Fear in the German Speaking World 1600-2000 draws connections between cases over a period of 400 years and considers fear alongside the history of emotions more generally. In doing so, the chapters reveal a complex, evolving construction of fear that is universally human, but also dependent upon its cultural and historical context.

The new edition of the highly respected Researching Communications is a comprehensive and authoritative guide to researching media and communication. Researching Communications, Third Edition is an invaluable guide to performing and analysing research tasks, introducing the major research methods, giving detailed examples of research analysis and practical step-by-step guidance in clear language.Written by highly regarded experts in the field, the third edition includes new sections on social media analysis, digital research methods and comparative research, as well as updated case studies, international examples and details of recent developments in media and communication studies.Undergraduate and postgraduate media and communication students will find Researching Communications an invaluable resource at all stages of their course.

The new edition of the highly respected Researching Communications is a comprehensive and authoritative guide to researching media and communication. Researching Communications, Third Edition is an invaluable guide to performing and analysing research tasks, introducing the major research methods, giving detailed examples of research analysis and practical step-by-step guidance in clear language.Written by highly regarded experts in the field, the third edition includes new sections on social media analysis, digital research methods and comparative research, as well as updated case studies, international examples and details of recent developments in media and communication studies.Undergraduate and postgraduate media and communication students will find Researching Communications an invaluable resource at all stages of their course.

The Compass Dances is a collection of poems written from 1955 to 2015; the work of almost a lifetime. Influenced by the author’s long absence from England, this strikingly original collection provides unique reflection on simultaneously writing in two languages, far away from the familiarity of home. With a nod to postmodernism, the process of authorial construction is left deliberately exposed. Asides and footnotes are used to signpost the reader and provide insight into the inspiration behind Pickering’s writing. There are also many poems whose compelling inner force needs no explanation, appearing to have sprung fully formed from the mind of their creator. Included in the collection is 'Cosmos', a long poem for dramatic performance, which has been described by a producer as 'a remarkable juxtaposition of the mythologies of various traditional cultures with the scientific story of the Cosmos, which is powerfully emotive'. Michael’s familiarity with more complex languages than English (notably Finnish) and, paradoxically, simpler (notably Italian) makes The Compass Dances a unique collection that will appeal to all poetry lovers.

Indigenous peoples have long sought the return of ancestral human remains and associated artefacts from western museums and scientific institutions. Since the late 1970s their efforts have led museum curators and researchers to re-evaluate their practices and policies in respect to the scientific uses of human remains. New partnerships have been established between cultural and scientific institutions and indigenous communities. Human remains and culturally significant objects have been returned to the care of indigenous communities, although the fate of bones and burial artefacts in numerous collections remains unresolved and, in some instances, the subject of controversy. In this book, leading researchers from a wide range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences reflect critically on the historical, cultural, ethical and scientific dimensions of repatriation. Through various case studies they consider the impact of repatriation: what have been the benefits, and in what ways has repatriation given rise to new problems for indigenous people, scientists and museum personnel.It features chapters by indigenous knowledge custodians, who reflect upon recent debates and interaction between indigenous people and researchers in disciplines with direct interests in the continued scientific preservation of human remains. In this book, leading researchers from a wide range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences reflect critically on the historical, cultural, ethical and scientific dimensions of repatriation. Through various case studies they consider the impact of repatriation: what have been the benefits, and in what ways has repatriation given rise to new problems for indigenous people, scientists and museum personnel. It features chapters by indigenous knowledge custodians, who reflect upon recent debates and interaction between indigenous people and researchers in disciplines with direct interests in the continued scientific preservation of human remains. Paul Turnbul lis a Professor of history in the School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics at the University of Queensland. He has written extensively on nineteenth-century racial thought, and the theft and repatriation of Indigenous bodily remains.His recent publications include (with Cressida Fforde and Jane Hubert) the co-edited volume The Dead and their Possessions (Routledge). Michael Pickering is the Head of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Program at the National Museum of Australia and has directed the Museum's repatriation program for the past nine years. His research interests and publications include studies on material culture, cannibalism, hunter-gatherer archaeology and anthropology, heritage management, and repatriation.

Popular culture is as debated as it is pervasive. It is pervasive in that the symbolic worlds in which we live and out of which we construct sense are, in many different ways, understood as and within popular culture. It is debated in that it has often been polarized as a negative or positive counterpart to other dimensions of cultural activity. Volume One establishes the historical dimension necessary for the study of popular culture, showing how popular culture has developed over the past two centuries in the West, and how it has operated as a site of aesthetic debate and contestation as well as of communal pleasure and social interaction. The second and third volumes are devoted to the different theoretical perspectives and analytical approaches to popular culture. These have mainly developed since the late-nineteenth century, though pioneering discussion from this time has recently become sidelined. Along with some examples of such early discussion, the volumes feature contributions from the ′culture and civilization′ tradition, the Frankfurt school, Chicago sociology, western Marxism, early cultural studies (rejecting the term ′culturalism′), structuralist and poststructuralist approaches, folkloristics, feminism and men′s studies, postmodernism and postcolonial studies.The final volume concentrates on the questions and issues involved in the aesthetics and ethics of popular culture and their relation to the quality of public life. Volume Four specifically includes articles that deal with issues in popular culture studies that remain ongoing and in dynamic movement, or are in various ways contentious and unresolved. Volume One: Historical Perspectives on Popular CultureVolume Two: Theoretical Approaches Volume Three: Theoretical ParadigmsVolume Four: Aesthetics, Ethics and Cultural Politics

The book explores the connections of memory and remembering with transformations in intimate relationships, migration and spatial mobilities, loss and bereavement involving loved ones or those with whom close affinities are felt, resulting in a volume that helps fill the gap in memory studies caused by lack of sustained ethnographic work.