Energy! The power of audience research as field,practice and critique

This special issue will tell tales of change and continuity, of the ‘new’ and the ‘old’ and of a disciplinary strength in Cultural Studies that, while always present, was also always contested. Tensions. Around the millennium change, qualitative audience research seemed to experience something of a dip: Although audience research was still conducted (including by some of the authors brought together here), there was a prevailing sense that ‘not much new’ was emerging, that we ‘knew’ what there was to know about audiences, that we could predict findings and that the really interesting developments in media and cultural studies were in fact elsewhere – in infrastructures and platforms, in networks and technologies … as though these were not inhabited by audiences as well. Currents. This was of course also roughly the time when the Internet became a real presence, both in everyday experiences and academic discussion. From the active audience, reconfigured (Tincknell and Raghuram, 2002) to microaudiences (Lotz, 2025), the changing media landscape has also generated new conceptualisations of the audience – who the audience is and what the audience does – but it has not necessarily generated a new conceptualisation of the discipline of audience research in light of these same-yet-different audiences. Changes.

This is where our framing of ‘energy’ takes shape: Between tensions, currents and changes, in light of both rapid development and enduring understandings, we are constantly challenged to bring new energies to our research – while also being energised by these challenges. ‘Energy’, as a thematic title, aims to capture and encapsulate the ongoing (re) formation of audience studies. It is simply not true that nothing much was or is happening in audience studies. Following on from discussions of the difference between and convergence of reception studies and audience ethnography (cf. Alasuutari, 1999) to contemporary debate about where platforms, users and producers intersect (Livingstone, 2013), we are not aiming to (re)write the history of audience research. Instead, this special issue aims to open a space to cement audience research as the signature field of Cultural Studies research that it continues to be. Audience research both demands energy and also harnesses it: for example, in its ability to address representation and identity or explore intersectionality in the life-worlds of people, as well as in its engagement with broader social, cultural, technological and ecological developments as they impact upon how lives can be lived.

Throughout this special issue of the Cultural Commons section, we position audience research as field, practice and critique. Rather than thinking about a ‘return to’, or ‘return of’, audience research, this special issue both reflects on (recent) developments in the field of audience research and speculates about the future. In our initial approach to the authors brought together here, we asked them to think about ‘energy’: For us, this term implies reciprocity and collectivity – energy is both the power and ability to do something, but also the power received italicise from something (as the dictionary definition suggests). ‘Energy’ proves a useful lens to explore audience research from doing via teaching, to sharing and practicing, and functioned as a starting point for our authors to articulate not just current approaches but also future ambitions in understanding, doing and developing audience research.

Following this introductory framing, the first two contributions in this special issue of the Cultural Commons section by Alfred L. Martin and Annette Hill and Peter Lunt offer specific takes on the current state of audience research while highlighting that, as a field, audience research was, is and remains a site of (productive) tension. While this might signal the need for reparation, it also points to new futures and new possibilities. Honing in on the practice of doing audience research, the contributions by Joke Hermes, Hanna Surma and Judith Keilbach and Linda Kopitz engage with current practice(s) of doing audience research within and beyond the academic context. With this, these articles also position audience research, and the endurance of qualitative inquiry, as an act of care towards our students, our collaborators and our readers. Countering the possible ‘slipping’ of audience research into a descriptive mode of the state of affairs (a noticeable fear in the field), the final three contributions to this special issue by Helen Wood, Ranjana Das and Filipus Gilang Wicaksono and Sander de Ridder encourage us to keep thinking about audience research as a form of critique. They consider the current challenge of disinformation and the far right, the tensions between algorithmic personalisation and audience studies’ search for community, as well as the mythologies of AI in a plea for human-centred research.

Taken together, this special issue of the Cultural Commons section offers a range of perspectives that point out where audience research generates, but also would benefit from, new energy – methodologically, conceptually, politically or personally. Reading the contributions together, now, we are struck that ‘energy’ is even more than what we initially considered. More than the different currents, frictions and tensions, we are struck by the power invested in and unleashed by audience research. Whether as a field, sustaining key critical traditions, as a practice using the strengths of its long tradition and also innovating (to merge, for instance, with forms of action, design and artistic research) or through the routes it offers for critique, there is awesome power in audience research.