Fielding the Study of Reception: Notes on "Negotiation" for Global Media Studies

As an emerging area of inquiry, "global media reception studies" has quietly amassed into a minor industry of scholarship. Of this body of work, ethnographic studies stand out in terms of their rigor and depth and their potential to engage theoretically our understanding of audiences' negotiation of meaning-a construct rooted in Hall's (1996) encoding/decoding model-which is important because the negotiation of meaning occupied a central place in the reception literature of the 1980s and 1990s, where it was articulated in terms of agency, intentionality, and subject-formation. Through this emphasis, however, the authority of media discourses often moved out of focus whereas media consumers' tactics, resistance, and pleasure emerged as primary points of analysis. In a call to rethink the notion of negotiation ethnographically, this article offers a critical assessment of the gaps and links between past reception studies and current media ethnographies and suggests ways that fieldwork could lead to a deeper and more complex understanding of audience meaning making.