Resource

Explore the text resources provided for each chapter.

Audience studies

The research project Celeb Youth UK ran from 2012 to 2014, exploring the relationship between young people and celebrities. It built on research suggesting that celebrity informs young people’s educational and career aspirations in complex ways, and explored how accounts of success and talent within celebrity shape young people’s imagined futures. Its website describes its research questions as:

  • What discourses (powerful and conflicting social stories) of aspiration circulate in celebrity representations?
  • How do young people take-up these discourses in talking about their own aspirations?
  • How do discourses of aspiration in celebrity and young people’s take-up of these relate to social class and gender?

It has a great website exploring its aims, its methods and its findings.  You can find it here.

Lucy Suchman is an ethnographer and an important figure in the field of Science and Technology Studies. She is particularly interested in the uses of digital technologies, and in 2015 gave an interesting lecture reflecting on the methods needed to explore how digital tech is used. You can find it here

http://www.csisponline.net/2015/07/20/csispsociology-lecture-by-lucy-suchman-on-digital-practices-some-methodological-reflections/

Henry Jenkins has a blog at

http://www.henryjenkins.org/

Art-central is a website for fan-created artwork.

Now try out the exercise for this chapter by clicking on the link on the left.