Finally... My Approved PhD Topic

I think I've met my match in Mirca Madianou. Mirca is my brilliant and beautiful PhD supervisor of course, and she has been delightfully diligent in reading and critiquing my work. I've always thought I was a good reader myself--like, I lovelovelove editing other people's work, giving many, many comments, suggestions, words of encouragement. But then Mirca is the same thing! Unlike my other readers (cough! Jason! cough!), who sum up their comments with one or two points, Mirca notices everything. Big picture, little picture, big screen, small screen... er, oops carried away by Roger-isms. Anyway, yes, Mirca notices everything. The media anthropologist par excellence talaga.

Last term, she assigned a writing exercise that turned out to be what I consider my best work ever. But instead of a cheery reaction, I got a "it's very good, you obviously love writing... I have a few questions..." Then I ended up defending the article for over an hour while we went through it. It was a good discussion though.

And now with the PhD topic. I started with four proposals in the Abstract Idol competition: Suffering Strangers, The World in Third World Eyes, Coming Home to Media, and Children of Diaspora. Mirca picked Children of Diaspora before Christmas. Then over the new year, I changed my mind and did a fifth one: We Are the World. But then we decided to drop children altogether because Mirca foresees theoretical and methodological pitfalls. So now I'm doing Through the Eyes of Others. And after FIVE revisions--more than any I've had in any one piece of written work (excluding communications plans I've done in my past life as corporate whore)--it's finally approved. And I'm overjoyed. I can now enjoy the inexplicably early springtime in Cambridge.

So here, my friends, is the topic I'm married to for the next three-plus years of my life. It took so long for me to commit to it--dropping the children angle was painful--and be convinced by it. And when I finally did, I had to go through four rough patches. But now I have you. And I'm proud of you.

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Through the Eyes of Others: Cosmopolitanism, Media and Morality

This study seeks to examine how individuals relate with distant others in the context of media consumption. As such, it is situated within the field of media and morality, which in recent years has fanned the debate as to how the work of the media--in reflecting and refracting the world through the screens, pages, and interfaces that likewise constitute the world--is central to understanding distant peoples, distant cultures, distant events. The cosmopolitan orientation of recognizing the Other as paradoxically different from us and same as us (Silverstone 2006) has been sought by scholars in spectacles of suffering (Chouliaraki 2006), disaster marathons (Tester 2001), and mediated conflict (Cottle 2006), among others. But while this moral-ethical 'turn' in media studies has given us a critical new vocabulary by which to critique the media and its routinized, stereotypical, and exoticized representations of otherness, little scholarship has dwelt on how exactly audiences make use of these representations in their everyday life. So while scholars analyze texts in arguing whether the media provide audiences with an enlarged, cosmopolitan mentality or leave them helpless with compassion fatigue, dialogue with audiences--in their creativity, diversity, and unpredictability--has been minimal. Roger Silverstone's forceful question 'The media may have extended reach, but have they extended understanding?' is, after all, not simply rhetorical; it is a question that can only be answered by talking with users, consumers, viewers, listeners, and publics at home engaging, or perhaps disengaging, with the world through their media.

In this light, this dissertation employs a bottom-up approach in examining how individuals express perceptions of otherness in relation to images that they encounter in the media. How do individuals define 'us' and 'them' in their reception of news about suffering others, or even fiction films about marginalized groups? Between broadcasts of a disaster in the West or the non-West, how do audiences express notions of guilt, pity, and responsibility? Furthermore, the study aims to examine the links between media discourse, individuals’ everyday discourse, and individuals’ practices and actions. How do individuals with various kinds of mobility and transnational connections get involved with peoples of other cultures in their media-related practices? Are people more willing to donate to telethons in their home countries or regions? How do labor migrants exposed to a variety of global, local, transnational, and national media ‘think or act beyond the local’ (Pollock et al, 2000) as compared to rural workers with more restrictive media diets? Here I wish to examine the media’s tenuous double economy of freedom and constraint, as it enables or disables moral responsibility for the Other depending on the quality of representation.

This study gains even greater relevance in the primary site of investigation: the Philippines. While much theorization has been made in relation to how Western publics are interpellated into a position of we-ness by the 'global' media, it is crucial to reverse the angle of spectator-/scholar-ship and see the world through the eyes of others. As non-Western people are routinely represented by the global media, it is important to ask how they themselves see their ‘others’, who they are, and how they develop feelings of care, trust, or fear towards them. As Filipino families are greatly affected by the material and symbolic flows of migration, with 11% of the population living abroad, stories about the globe and its many ‘others’ feed the national imagination. As such, it is crucial to look at how they negotiate the ever-shifting boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’. For example, in what occasions do they see themselves as part of the CNN public or the Al-Jazeera public? And how do their media talk and media practices make them reflect on what it means to be Filipino and at the same time ‘citizen of the world’? Cosmopolitanism then becomes an important analytical tool for this study, as I pay close attention to how forms of solidarity and sociality are enabled or disabled in the context of mediation. And cosmopolitanism—imagined as idealistic and utopian, but empirically many and discrepant (Clifford 1998; Beck 2006)--deserves its own examination outside Western spaces for it to live up to its vision after all. By comparing Filipinos living in Manila (urban), Davao (rural), and London (1st- and 2nd-generation migrants), we examine how different cosmopolitanisms can exist in multiply mediated contexts of asymmetry and responsibility.