Cover Page -- Title -- Copyright -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- Introduction -- Part I Groundings -- Introduction -- 1 Cultural studies and the study of culture: disciplines and dialogues -- Asking the cultural question - seven different agendas -- Historical contexts of the culture agenda -- Cultural studies and social movements -- Dominant misrepresentations and popular agency -- Finding a philosophy? Cultural studies, feminist philosophy and hermeneutics -- Relations to other academic disciplines -- Explaining transdisciplinarity: a story in four acts -- Implications of transdisciplinarity for method -- Transdisciplinary strategies -- Conclusion -- 2 Multiplying methods: from pluralism to combination -- Methodological pluralism or a Method? -- Objects and strategies of cultural research -- Cultural circuits: cultural studies meets hermeneutics -- Conclusion: combined and multiple methods? -- 3 Method and the researching self -- 'Inside culture': cultural research as a cultural circuit -- Objectivism, self and other -- From 'standpoint' to 'positionalities' -- Making claims to truth: conventions and truthfulness -- Is truth only a convention then? -- 'Reflexivity' versus the confessional -- Realizing reflexivity: social, spatial, temporal and cultural aspects -- Dialogue and difference -- Accountability and responsibilities -- Conclusion: the logic of combination -- 4 The research process: moments and strategies -- Choosing and Developing a topic -- Starting -- Managing time -- Working with others: supervisors and peers -- Reviewing the literature, mapping the field -- Developing research proposals -- General models of researching -- Starting from a source not data? -- Sources and questions -- Research, analysis and textuality -- Contextualization and creating a distance -- Writing as a moment - functions and forms.

Diversity in the writing process: planning and writing -- Writing and the autobiographical voice -- Writing ethics and politics: authorial power and its deployment -- Conclusion -- Part II Settings -- Introduction -- 5 Theory in the practice of research -- Theory, fear and loathing -- Theory as opposed to practice -- Theory and practice as praxis -- Theory and the empirical -- Reading for theory as a method -- The argument so far -- Theory as abstraction -- Levels of abstraction -- Kinds of abstraction: strengths and limits -- Conclusion: theorizing as a practice -- 6 Make space! Spatial dimensions in cultural research -- Bringing place and space into focus -- Complicated spatialities -- Theoretical tools for researching spatiality -- Spatiality as a metaphor for power -- Virtual spaces, technologized places -- Complex places -- Bringing it all together again: transdisciplinary integrations -- Conclusion: the return of abstraction -- 7 Time please! Historical perspectives -- Thinking about time -- Writing cultural histories part I: radical popular histories -- Writing cultural histories part II: history's cultural turn -- The argument so far: history and cultural studies - convergence and tension -- Public representations of the past and popular memory -- Thinking historically: historicizing theory -- Historicizing the present -- Conclusion -- 8 Culture, power and economy -- Cultural studies 'versus' political economy: failures of dialogue -- Baselines: separating power and culture -- Ideology analysis -- Representation and the limits of ideology critique -- Power and culture: expanding the agenda -- Where does power lie? The popular and the dominant -- Starting elsewhere: economies as culturally embedded -- Economies as representation and discourse -- Cultural and economic circuits: overlap, interdependence, identity? -- The question of consumption.

Cultural conditions of economic systems -- Changing determinations: the economy as culture -- Conclusion -- Part III Readings -- Readings and meetings -- Reading as method, method as reading -- Plan of part III -- 9 Reading popular narratives: from structure to context -- Structural readings: textual strategies -- Structural readings: contextualizing strategies -- Beyond structuralism: poststructuralist approaches -- Combining methods -- Conclusion -- 10 Reading texts of or for dominance -- Reading texts of dominance: a possible reading path -- Why (not) texts? The value of a textual approach to an analysis of anti-terrorism -- How much text? -- Which texts? Dialogue and dominance -- Opening the text, starting the dialogue -- Elaborating a (theoretically informed) reading -- Moral absolutes, the 'other' and unconscious processes -- Making a reading convincing -- Conclusion -- 11 Reading fictions, reading histories -- Fiction and/or history? -- Cultural materialism: rereading literature -- 'New historicism' and historical discourse -- Staging and silencing: explicit and implicit meanings -- Elementary, my dear Foucault -- Beyond a (national) boundary: post-colonial encounters -- Conclusion -- Part IV Meetings -- Introduction -- 12 Researching others: from autobiography to ethnography -- The auto/ethno continuum as a process -- The auto/ethno continuum as a range of methods -- The indispensability of meetings in cultural research -- Pathways in ethnographic and auto/biographical research: two checklists -- Checklist 1: Interviews -- Checklist 2: Memory work -- Conclusion and some limits of the auto/ethno continuum -- 13 Representing the other: interpretation and cultural readings -- Analysis as dialogue -- Multiple readings, multiple theories -- Reading for actors' meanings -- Reading for cultural structures and processes.

Working the other way: individualizing conventional forms -- Making yourself in and against the school -- Reading for structure and context -- The four dialogues of analysis: a checklist -- Representing the other: dialogic implications -- Representing across power: particular strategies -- Conclusion -- 14 Remaking methods: from audience research to studying subjectives -- 'Indiscipline' and combination -- Studying media audiences: promises unfulfilled? -- Researching subjectivities: reflexive selves, discursive subjects -- Conclusion: remaking methods -- In conclusion -- References -- Index.