The Speculative in Communication Research: Data, Identity, and the Pursuit of Professionalism, 1940-1960
2020-05
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The Speculative in Communication Research: Data, Identity, and the Pursuit of Professionalism, 1940-1960
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2020-05
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From the 1940s, the Bureau of Applied Social Research (BASR) at Columbia University was an important location for the development of foundational ideas about, theories of, and methods to study communication and media. This dissertation employs archival materials and is a women’s labor history of these ideas, theories, and methods. Exceptional women working at the BASR had numerous opportunities to develop their careers while facing significant institutional barriers such as nepotism rules, foundational support for research, and gendered expectations of academic and domestic labor. Women formed “special relationships” with male superiors which provided them with cultural capital and support for Rockefeller Foundation fellowship applications. Institutional barriers meant that academic prestige through publication was denied to women, and they were instead tracked into conducting commercial studies. Proportionally, women conducted half of the academic research men did and double the commercial studies. These commercial studies kept the BASR financially afloat and subsidized male academic research. Female interviewers for the Mr. Biggott project staked a claim to professionalism in the interview transcripts they submitted for coding. Their daily duties and experience became valuable in the study’s development. Using gendered behavior in interview situations, they induced answers from respondents and developed interview techniques that exhibited gendered and raced understandings of professionalism, objectivity, and identity. The mechanics of interview coding that transformed qualitative into quantitative data erased their labor and the subjective decisions made within the interviewing process. Female interviewers produced an understanding of white working-class male identity through the interviewing process, with the men lacking any control over their own representation in the transcripts. In the context of the post-war crisis of masculinity, interviewers constructed the white working-class body and mind through their observations. Importantly, these social scientific constructs contradicted the ways in which their research subjects understood themselves in relation to their country and their citizenship rights. The dissertation points to the larger implications of understanding the social scientific method as a set of human behaviors and relations that produces powerful and lasting ideas about subjects of research and researchers themselves.
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University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. May 2020. Major: Communication Studies. Advisor: Catherine Squires. 1 computer file (PDF); xiv, 370 pages.
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Hristova, Elena. (2020). The Speculative in Communication Research: Data, Identity, and the Pursuit of Professionalism, 1940-1960. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/264313.
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