Center Projects
- Media, Meaning and Work
- Symbolism, Meaning and the New Media@Home Project
- Symbolism, Meaning and the Lifecourse Project
Media, Meaning, and Work: Men, Vocation, and Civic Engagement
This study commenced in 2006 under the direction of Dr. Stewart Hoover. It is part of a larger project, supported by the Lilly Endowment, in which he and Professor Lynn Schofield Clark of the University of Denver are co-investigators.
The lead researcher in the Center's efforts is Dr. Curtis Coats, a Center Post-Doctoral fellow. Other members of the research team have included : Robert Peaslee, Doug Crigler, Kimberly Casteline, Magdalena Ayala, Rolando Perez, Gia Medeiros, Colin Lingle, and Annemarie Galeucia, all graduate students at the University of Colorado, and Dr. Monica Emerich, a Center Post-Doctoral Fellow..
Research Questions:
The project on Men, Vocation, Spirituality, and the Media is focused on gendered differences in the role of various sources of social meaning in informing ideas bout work, vocation, parenting, and citizenship. The sources of meaning of particular interest are media and public culture on the one hand and more traditional sources and locations such as religion/spirituality, family, and cultural and social tradition. First, we intend to explore how ideas of work are imbued with meaning in the stories of the media and how people make sense of those stories in their own “plausible narratives of the self “ (Hoover, 2006). Second, we consider how senses of meaningful work are reflected in and reinforced by the social and class values reflected in the media.
Third, we want to explore how they relate these stories of the workplace with other values that have shaped their life choices. Fourth, we are also interested in how people learn about community needs, both from the media and from other sources. Through interviews, observations of key locations in which such discussions occur, and analysis of media materials mentioned by interviewees, we intend to explore how people make sense of the various cultural resources available to them as they consider their own sense of vocation as it relates to the workplace, their family, and the community around them.
Location for the Study:
Because of our expertise in the contextualized study of media, religion, and meaning making, the University of Colorado’s Center for Media, Religion and Culture is an ideal site to host such an ambitious and wide-ranging study. The proposed research into the relationship of media, meaning, and vocation is an extension of previous work in a number of ways, while it remains consistent with the overall direction of projects that have been pursued through the Center for Media, Religion and Culture.
Men, Vocation, and Civic Engagement:
In exploratory work already underway, fascinating material has emerged that links men, media, and religion/spirituality in the imagining of vocation and civic engagement, particularly in relation to the role of father. Cultivation of ideas of career, work, work satisfaction and larger ideas of vocation is seen in many contexts as an important role for men and fathers (though, of course, not exclusively theirs) (May, 1998). At the same time, men from a range of religious traditions and backgrounds seem to find within certain media and other cultural commodities resources meaningful to their own quests for identity and selfhood. They further seem to encounter these symbols and ideas in ways that also refer to, or draw on, their experiences of religion and spirituality, and to see their role in conveying these ideas to the next generation to itself be a religious or spiritual task (Hoover, 2006; Hoover and Emerich, 2005).
Men do face some significant challenges in these tasks. Primary among these is the notion that men lack the kind of discursive and symbolic resources and networks of support related to religion, spirituality, and identity that are more taken-for-granted in the experience of women (Boyd, Longwood, and Muesse, 1996; Mowry, 1996; Delamont, 2001). At the same time, extensive symbolic and conceptual resources are available to both men and women in the broader culture through the media sphere (Craig, 1992; Hanke, 1992).
Consistent with our previous work, we conceive of these resources as both a kind of inventory of ideas, values, and symbols out of which people may configure senses of themselves, their roles, and their potential for expressive action, and as a context of action where people use and re-use media experiences and symbols to position themselves in their personal, family, social, and civic lives. This places us directly in what has been called a “third generation” of media reception scholarship (Alasuutari, 1999) that is oriented toward the understanding of how people make and remake culture through their interactions with cultural resources. Our informants can be said to very much live “in a media world” (Bird, 2003) where central ideas about what is and what is possible are formed, shaped, and experienced in media culture.
A question at the center of this project, then, is to consider both how men and fathers in particular (but also women, mothers, teachers, pastors and others) interact with the broader media culture and the kinds of resources and images of self, identity, vocation, and engagement that are found there. The deeper normative question concerns the capacity of these practices and symbols to support positive and upbuilding outcomes. It is clear from our studies that there is a wide range of such claims, values, and symbols available in an increasingly complex and wide-ranging media marketplace (Zolo, 1992). One of the potential concerns, then, is whether it is possible any longer to think of there being commonly-held normative symbols and ideas about these issues, and if there are, where they are and for whom are they are meaningful and relevant (Couldry, 2005).
Our research here will also address a question that has been at the heart of our work on parenting and family life, but that is relevant to questions of vocation and civic engagement as well: the relative roles of “informal” and “formal” models and roles for education and action. We are well familiar with the more formal contexts relevant to ideas of vocation. These include schooling, social clubs and such organizations, even churches, mosques and synagogues. Yet it has been suggested by some scholars that informal ideas, contexts and networks are important, possibly more important to the task (Janoski and Glas, 2002). This brings the private sphere and its integration into the radically informal media sphere, to the center (Cf. Eliasoph, 1998). And, as we have said, men and fathers have been traditionally been positioned (and in our interviews have sought to position themselves) at the center of these interacting spheres.
Focusing in our preliminary studies on issues and ideas around vocation and social/civic/religious/spiritual engagement has already resulted in some fascinating and provocative learnings about how individuals draw on religious, spiritual, and cultural resources in the necessarily expressive practices of parenthood and parental involvement in the development of senses of engagement and vocation in children. Beyond their role as fathers, there is also much to be learned about how these resources and practices address ideas of vocation and engagement for our informants themselves and in their own vocational lives. We are finding that these questions are also relevant to critical debates around religious politics and the so-called “culture wars” (Hoover and Emerich, 2005).
Along the way, these studies will deepen and extend our analysis of the relationship between the media and religion, spirituality, and meaning. We have already learned much about the capacities of media to influence and engage individuals as they make senses of themselves in spiritual and religious terms. This new approach will allow us to focus those studies on a normative object: the way in which belief, spirituality, religious institutions and practices, and the claims and values of the media culture come together and interact in the development and maintenance of ideas of an expressive and socially engaged self
Symbolism, Meaning, and the New Media @ Home
The Symbolism, Meaning, and the New Media @ Home project took place between 2001-2006 at the University of Colorado's School of Journalism and Mass Communication. The project, under the direction of Co-Principal investigators, Stewart Hoover and Lynn Schofield Clark, examined how media are used as a resource in family and individual meaning-making practices. Hoover’s work focused on the ways in which adults in the U.S. have participated in practices of religious “seeking” and how these practices intersect with and are informed by the emergent media environment. Clark’s work focused on the role media play in the negotiations and struggles over claims to interpersonal, cultural, and religious authority in intergenerational and familial relationships. More than 100 people were interviewed about media and religion in their daily lives, and a variety of religious cultural artifacts were analyzed.
This project built upon an earlier project called "Symbolism, Meaning, and the Lifecourse," in which a team of doctoral students interviewed more than 250 persons regarding how various kinds of families approach the media in their homes.
Some of the key works to come out of this project are Hoover's Religion in the Media Age (Routledge, 2006, www.routledge.com), Clark’s From Angels to Aliens; and the book by Hoover, Clark and Alters titled Media Home and Family (Routledge, 2004, www.routledge-ny.com). This site introduces you to some of this project's findings and also introduces related work developed by and with doctoral students and faculty colleagues who worked on this project.
Symbolism, Media and the Lifecourse Project
The Symbolism, Media and the Lifecourse project was an interdisciplinary, academic study housed at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication of the University of Colorado from 1996-2001. The work begun with this project continued in the Symbolism, Meaning, and the New Media @ Home Project and the Teens & the New Media @ Home Project, both of which took place from 2001-2006. The main publication resulting from the Symbolism, Media, and the Lifecourse project was the book, Media, Home, and Family, by Stewart M. Hoover, Lynn Schofield Clark, and Diane Alters, with Joseph Champ and Lee Hood (Routledge, 2004). Research conducted during this project also contributed to the book, From Angels to Aliens: Teenagers, the Media, and the Supernatural, by Lynn Schofield Clark (Oxford University Press, 2003), and to the book, Religion in the Media Age, by Stewart M. Hoover (Routledge, 2006).
The principal investigator of the Symbolism, Media and the Lifecourse project was Stewart M. Hoover, Ph.D., an internationally recognized authority on religion and the media. Lynn Schofield Clark, Ph.D., served as associate investigator, and associate researchers on the project included Diane Alters, Joseph G. Champ, and Lee Hood, all of whom were doctoral students who have since earned their degrees. All of the project staff members are former professionals in journalism and electronic media. Alf Linderman, Ph.D., a Swedish scholar in the sociology of religion with expertise on television reception research, and Henrik Boes, who specializes in religion and multimedia, served as consultants to the project.
In this project, we were interested in how religion is changing as a result of two sociological trends:
- the decline in the authority of religious institutions throughout western culture, a trend usually associated with secularization or neo-secularization, and
- the emergence, since the Reformation, of a media culture that has more authority to define the frameworks and use of symbols than the formerly-regnant religious institutions.
The questions that emerge for us as researchers, then, were (and continue to be):
- How do these changes work themselves out in the everyday lives and practices of the U.S. population - the country with the highest proportion of self-reporting religious people who also generally report a high level of interaction with mediated sources? and
- Can we then say that what we are seeing is not a religion *in* the media age, but a religion *of* the media age?
While we were interested in exploring media texts for themes of religion, our primary focus was on talking with people from all walks of life and with varying interests in or commitments to religion to learn how "they" were interpreting media, and how "they" were defining what is religious or meaningful in what they see.
The project was supported by a generous grant from the Lilly Endowment, a foundation interested in the trends in contemporary American religion.