Mapping for change: A manifesto for teaching audience research to (future) professional practitioners

Theory in practice

One of the reasons we have seen qualitative audience research resurfacing this past decade across media and cultural research has exactly to do with its access to all those non-aligned imagined and imaginary worlds that inform practices of meaning-making. Making sense of these has always needed forms of theorization, whether in more limited or more extensive ways. Theorization in turn provides a vehicle for making the knowledge gained in even small projects transferable (or ‘useful’ as Marshall et al., 2022: 260 prefer), which is a key methodological indicator to assess the quality of research. That is to say that practice-based research, despite its name and unassuming reputation, much like academic research, uses and produces theory and theory-based knowledge.

If there is a difference, it is also a strength: whether one prefers practice-based or practice-led research as a label (or even ‘applied science’ despite its derogatory connotations), this type of research-on-demand utilises a double connotation of ‘making.’ It is both making sense and making things. The current uptake of design and artistic research in creative industries faculties, such as the one I am in, extends this even further. Audience research, as forged in the Cultural Studies tradition with its strengths in affective-discursive forms of analysis, is a dream partner to provide additional depth to these new research-through-making practices. This returns us to ‘articulation’. Practice-based research’s functional investment in creating economic, social, ecological and cultural value for its partners or for society, has its direct corollary in how Stuart Hall suggested we understand culture, society, identity and power. I will return to this below.

Neither theory nor theorization should scare anyone, -they are but a small step away from curiosity and self-reflexivity- but they do. Theory does little to accommodate the collective wish for ‘clarity’. The public sphere today is geared towards the denial of complexity. A longer story than can be told here charts this development across a half century of the politics of the global North and how these sought to connect to constituencies by smoothing the process of getting the right message across. Political journalist and writer Tom-Jan Meeus reconstructs how politicians were trained to not hesitate, to stay on script and to do forceful one-liners. It strengthens the myth that complexity suggests a conspiracy and that it can and should be avoided. Theory has a close connection to complexity. It has a name for being difficult. As social media and notably Twitter, now X, become an unexpected mega-success, limited character count and all, it becomes clear how we have become inundated against complexity. We have lost the patience for the complex tragic choices that policy-making requires as much as a taste for respecting the complexities of everyday meaning-making (Nussbaum, 1986). Populist politics of course makes the best-possible use of this new set of circumstances. It has built the desire for clarity as intolerance for uncertainty, which in turn translates into a fear of theorization (Meeus, 2024; Rusman, 2024).

Theory and theorisation can make things seem uncertain, but they are not the opposites of clarity and clarification. That is only the case when clarity has to be provided for immediately. Neither are they out of reach for the layman, and most certainly not for professional practitioners who deal with complex issues on a daily basis. Theory, I would say, is in essence storytelling that moves between contexts and examples and picks up on commonalities and differences not just to find patterns and logics (that would still be method), but to explain and understand. Strong theorisation connects the patterns it recognises to concepts and traditions of thought in relevant fields of understanding and explaining the world. For an audience researcher, these might concern the media and media use, or traditions in which method and theory are intertwined (think ethnography or oral history here) or central topics that emerge (identity formation, ambition, consolation, belonging), as well as more abstract concepts to do with affect, experience, resonance or knowledge itself.

Here again, it becomes clear that at the intersection of theory and practice, audience research has relevance beyond the academic context – whether for creative professionals or for those in care or social professions – because it allows for theorization and insights to cross-disciplinary borders as well as the borders between research and professional practice. Using qualitative audience research well boils down to three tasks. They are ‘slowing down’, ‘attending to stories’, and ‘mapping for change’. These will be discussed in the three sections that follow.

Slowing down

As central as speed needs to be to the concerns of professional practitioners, the real danger for practice-based audience research is to move too fast towards solutions and to assume that we can start from a position of overview and authority – an integral part of the colonial mind-set. Contrary to colonialism, solutionism has its uses when processes need fine-tuning and streamlining. Not wasting time and money is important, as is sparing those at the receiving end of those processes headache and heartbreak. Where an engineering logic smoothens the work of practitioners and helps them achieve their goals, it has merit. The problem with wanting to provide solutions is its particular mind-set: it calls for confidence, as opposed to reflexivity. It wittingly and unwittingly assumes the cloak of paternalism and thus of re-establishing unequal social power relations. Importantly, it avoids theorization. Solutionism does not work well when quality and sustainability across different kinds of value are needed. It wants problems cut-to-size rather than understood historically in and across contexts. If the 20th century has taught us anything, it is that there is no innocence to engineering, social or otherwise. In addition to ethics and integrity, we need reflexivity and the responsibility of the respectful co-creator, enabler or moderator.

It can be difficult not to move too fast and conclude you know what people are telling you (whether in physical or digital spaces, and whether live or in recorded text, sound and imagery) before you have fully digested what it is you are being told. It is seductive to understand yourself as a helper without checking whether that was what was asked for. Here, regretfully, I am speaking from experience. I have, for example, found that I am deeply susceptible to assertive and eminently quotable informants and in danger of seeing them as exemplary rather than exceptional. Much too fast a conclusion to draw, but how not? There was an interviewee in a project for a labour union on freelance work in the creative industries who told us that if a job is very boring, the client has to pay for the boredom. If it’s interesting, he’ll work for far less money. Had we understood his approach as exemplary, we would have gone along with an overly happy view of freelance work. In the end, the project showed how neither the so-called new precariat thesis (not all free-lancers live on a bare minimum) nor the free agent neoliberal imagery of the independent worker was quite true. We were left with the inspiring image of his insouciance. It connected with other examples from the data. Who but happy-go-lucky free-lancers were their own boss and started their workday in their bathrobes before Covid? Who dared say that one can work for fun? The more mundane reality was different. It showed a barter economy among independent workers who passed around favours and often were dependent on the income of partners. Still, it felt so true: boring work should be better paid (Hermes et al., 2017). ¹ In actual life, free-lancers often work for very low pay.

In another project, Machteld de Jong and myself were financed by a not-for-profit organisation that supports those with distance to the labour market to find out how internship discrimination could be alleviated. Your ethnic background or even name can set you back as a student when you need to get work experience. We cooperated with a television production company who made a film for national television called Liever Fleur dan Fatima (Rather Faye than Fatima). It offered a multi-faceted portrait of the challenges and obstacles in the Dutch system of internship hiring and was in part based on the research of our team consisting of a large group of student interviewers from diverse backgrounds, with whom we ‘mapped for change’. Charting when and how interviewees had felt discriminated as well as how HR workers and employers experienced hiring interns, suggested surprisingly that ending internship discrimination might well require better ways of turning internship candidates down. It would make individuals feel taken seriously (albeit disappointed at not getting the internship) and employers more reflexive. It could start a learning curve in assessing candidates for their qualities and professional behaviour, we felt but was of course also counter-intuitive and us, as researchers, again going a bit too fast.

While not presented as such, we had, of course, been thinking in terms of a ‘solution.’ Asked about our interpretation of what the people we had interviewed before had been telling us, Doa (a student) showed measured support: ‘I think it is important that employers learn, and not feel threatened, and that they can empathise with the victims of internship discrimination’ (pseudonym chosen by informant). She quite rightly identified that we had been sent on a solutionist errand and that our ‘solution’ was not going to help her personally. She helped us realise we needed to give faces to those turned down and to understand the intuitive and affective knowledges of the employers and of the applicants and their supervisors, to understand how both groups spiralled into negative justifications. Structural problems seldom have only one side to them. For the students it was hard not to give up. While those who hired interns talked about ‘giving people a chance’ and were struck by how ‘ungrateful’ interns could be. Unwittingly, they offered a perfect example of deeply ingrained colonial images of groups that are felt to be ‘other’. No one better exposed this than this project’s most exceptional informant. She chose Esra as a pseudonym. Like the independent worker who suggested others pay him more for boring work, she told us she had effectively turned the tables on an HR manager in a job interview who tried to make her feel she was the problem. ‘They asked me if I would take off my headscarf and I replied by saying: I wouldn’t ask you to take off your pants, would I?’ Her sheer gutsiness, whether based on truth or not, put the whole internship system’s power imbalances in sharp relief.

Self-confident and assertive informants often highlight key aspects of dominant ideology and show its hypocrisies. They remind me of Pippi Longstocking, a 20th-century Swedish children’s book character created by Astrid Lindgren with signature orange pigtails who performs amazing feats in a singularly careless manner. I love Pippi as an icon of self-confidence. She flies a makeshift aeroplane made of wooden crates, a propeller and an old bike and is the child of a sea-faring father and a mother long gone. She has learnt to take care of herself. Pippi’s, however, need to put the audience research teacher on alert. When overly relying on Pippi-type informants, the material may not be done justice. Really listening to others and to the material broadly may feel a bit …. boring. In the interviews with the independent creative workers, it would have been easy to miss how their cherished independence was predicated on organising lifelines, on the generosity they showed each other in what they called their ‘via via’ – I have no time, but I know someone really good – recommendations and on accepting that at times they had very little income. Had we fallen in love with the Pippi-type responses, we would have missed this deeper layer of the story. In much the same way the internship discrimination team who loved the way Esra stood up to the HR guy who wanted her to take off her headscarf, would have missed how everyday racism and discrimination are seldom so clear that they can be challenged by picking a fight.

Working with audiences in practice-based research works best in and as a team, especially when it comes to analysing research materials. When shared with co-researchers, peers or colleagues, it often turns out that field notes, interview transcripts and research memos tell us more than we thought they would. Meaning-making does not show itself at the surface of social interaction. It is the glue that keeps communities together (or, indeed, breaks them apart). Meaning is oftentimes in the bits that are so self-evident they need no introduction or explanation. Self-evidence and common sense are therefore the starting point, but never the end point, for an audience-research project. It took time for us to identify the networks free-lance workers build to pass gigs on to that they have no time for and through which they would get jobs others did not want to do. What they called their ‘via via’ channels unlocked the material in the ‘this is my life’ project with the independent creatives. It was an off-hand remark in a team meeting that started to help us see how often people said they never cold-called but acquired their assignments via others. ‘Via via’ was essential to understanding how our independents could be their Pippi selves by, indeed, depending on others. It was also essential that we had taken the time to go over the material again and again, for phrases such as these to stick and become meaningful. Slowing down made us receptive to what was being said across the interview material.

Attending to stories and storytelling

The second task for audience research, after ‘slowing down’, is to attend to storytelling over identifying and labelling individuals or groups. For some, audience research is about ‘warm bodies’, for others it is about ‘found footage’ such as in online discussions. In either case, sedimentations of open conversations come to speak to us about how others experience the world affectively and discursively. That is to say that meaning-making always involves feelings that are ‘performed’ as emotions. Affect is a term often used to denote the engine behind the performance of feelings. It is useful in pointing to the energy we pick up on in relating to other people or simply the world around us. It makes thinking, commenting and talking about the world a layered practice, which is true as much for professional as it is for non-professional purposes. Thoughts and feelings, when put into words, show them to be the result of unforeseeable connections, of the disciplinary and seductive force of regimes of power, of turning round and adapting to challenges to make them liveable. The surface logic of how lives are lived is not identical or even homological to how life is experienced or how it is talked about.

In audience research, we look for how transcribed materials and research memos connect and how these connections make sense in a given time or place. Training how to listen well therefore does not need live interviews or that a researcher engages directly with personal experience. The easier examples especially of exclusion or of not being recognised for who you are, can be found in discussions relating to popular culture, such as television series, pop music, online celebrity gossip and sports. These can be either ‘live’ or documented in YouTube comments or Reddit discussions. As a feminist invested in social justice, respect and inclusion, I see great merit in qualitative audience research on those examples that are a step away from our personal lives and experiences. During the past years they have served me well in getting a better understanding of anger, hatred and fear (Hermes, 2024). Examples are, for instance, the visceral reactions to women actors. The Breaking Bad character Skyler White became the subject of excessive moral shaming. There was online outrage over a woman embodying the 13th Doctor Who. Based on examples such as these, a case can be made for gender confusion running rife well before the start of President Trump’s second term that soon gets taken out on trans people. Discussing popular culture is also useful in a more positive sense when doing practice-based audience research on inclusive communication. I have used it to research how to promote visiting the theatre or to make the news more appealing for young people (Hermes, 2020). Popular culture offers easy ways to talk about difficult things while it levels the playing field. It does not matter whether I read and write books. You do not have to be an intellectual to discuss a Netflix series or a football match. Everybody knows, I find, that intellectuals are not necessarily popular culture’s best critics or interpreters.

In audience research, listening well translates into ‘slow’ formats such as transcripts. This allows forms of analysis that map the underlying shared knowledge that connects and divides speakers. In qualitative audience research, we can guard against labelling people by identifying them with singular sets of ideas, particular attitudes or perspectives. It is of little use to speak of diverse groups as ‘concerned parents’, or as ‘transphobics’ or as ‘feminists’. All three labels might apply. Using broad evaluation-laden labels, however, (or even well-known socio-technical and demographic ones: women, urban, rural, recent migration histories) amounts to sounding a warning signal. They do not suggest points of overlap that might allow for conversation and connection. Labels are used in professional practice because they make for the speedy delivery of results; they are easy to understand and suggest an overview. But they also diminish people. Almost everyone has access to far more stories with which to interpret the world than the use of broad labels suggests. By paying attention to shared knowledge, it becomes clear where connections are possible.

In friendly conversation and safe environments, people tend to refer broadly to the interpretative frames at their disposal, be it in bits and pieces or partly implicitly (see Wetherell and Potter, 1988). When researching women’s magazines, a long time ago, interviewees would half say, half ask: ‘You know’. I would find myself nodding and hoping that it would become clear what it was I was supposed to know, while the conversation in the meantime would jump to another topic or train of thought. With such a mundane medium, it was often difficult for informants to articulate what made them (continue to) read them. Audience research material is not helped by the mundaneness of what it enquires into. It presents as pieces of several jigsaw puzzles, all jumbled together. Organising the pieces, by recurring keywords or examples (such as victim and ungrateful in the internship project), enables recognition of references across a larger number of interviews, comments or online discussions. Reorganising these snippets by means of commonalities will suggest shared stories that include pairs of opposites that belong to the same frame. These point to shared collective cultural resources to make sense of the world, through which we can agree and disagree. Emerging underlying logics are checked by returning to long quotes. Presenting these, organised under a small number of distinctive themes, is how audience research projects convey a sense of what the ‘original stories’ hidden in the jigsaw-puzzle pieces might look like.

Qualitative audience research in the Cultural Studies tradition can therefore forego identifying groups or individuals by the stories they tell without losing awareness of how all our identities are impacted by structural forces and inequalities. We can centre the stories, no need to reduce the people. When we step away from the characterisation of individuals through singular labels, we can respect that all of us have many identities that do not need to fully align (they are, after all, not all in play at the same time). Football fans can be feminists and share their love of the sport with gender conservatives by using terms they would not use elsewhere. This is a great thing. It helps keep the social tapestry intact. Connecting to others via references to stories allows us to belong to very different groups. We imply, we hint, we use language functionally. By referencing what is assumed to be shared knowledge in everyday conversation, we can test the water, so to speak. When an example or a reference falls flat, we move to the other stories that we have at our disposal. It is the everyday life version of design research’s ‘permanent beta’ logic of inventing, testing and reiterating.

Mapping shared cultural knowledge, the third task for audience research, needs this tilting away from what individuals say until you find where answers, explanations and examples connect. It provides a means of sensing where projects in professional practice may take off and where they will be hindered. The multiple strands that connect within and across communities and that build identities, will become clear. They are repertoires, shared stories, that come as much from feelings and emotions as from reasoning and reflection. ‘Listening well’ is to attend to both the discursive and the affective while hearing through and across accumulated ‘data’ for what is at stake for others.

Mapping for change

The third ‘task’ for audience research is the ongoing need to discuss democracy and address democratic deficit and polarisation. Slowing down and knowing how to listen well builds roads and bridges towards commonality whether through identifying interpretative repertoires or thinking in terms of stories and storytelling in engaged research practice (see Gray, 2002; Wetherell and Potter, 1988). ‘Mapping stories’ can then open up self-evident, shared knowledge to forms of understanding, recognition and respect. It shows how audience research continues to be a key site for Cultural Studies research as it addresses both political and professional questions and challenges. To come into its strength at the moment of analysis, audience research also always needs theory and theorisation. Writing about Stuart Hall’s work and his definition of ‘articulation’, Jennifer Slack describes theory as a necessary detour that helps ‘ground our engagement with what newly confronts us and (-) let(s) that engagement provide the ground for retheorising. Theory is thus a practice in a double sense: it is a formal conceptual tool, as well as a practicing or ‘trying out’ way of theorising. In joining these two senses of practice, we commit to working with momentarily, temporarily ‘objectified’ theories, moments of ‘arbitrary closure’, recognising that in the ongoing analysis of the concrete, the theory must be challenged and revised (Slack, 1996: 114).

Here, unexpectedly (and finally), ‘articulation’ returns. The logics that combine material practices and ideas change over time and retain traces of earlier forms. They are, according to Hall, ‘complex structures’ in which ‘things are related, as much through their differences as through their similarities’. He calls this articulation: as the relationships between their parts are structured, they always involve dominance and subordination (Hall, 1980: 325). A truck and its trailer are also articulated: one part drives while the other is pulled, both move together. At some other time, in a new context, they might be part of other combinations. Becoming cognisant of articulations and the power relations they afford and imply, requires of us that we listen well and recognise who is speaking and who we find it hard to hear.

Practice-based audience research, as I see it, has unique potential. It allows bringing together the professional expertise of work-field practitioners with research methods honed in the academy and with, recently, artistic and design practice (which there is too little space to discuss here). It does not shun co-creation, speculation or theorisation. Instead, it merges these aspects in empirical research. Although a family member, it is different from academic research. It does not have a quest for truth, with a capital T, as its overarching goal and is less invested in the old triumvirate of the good, the true and the beautiful. It depends on service and clarification, on truths plural as they are understood in everyday life, while it aims to demythologise, reconstruct, create and co-create. At its best, it establishes a level playing field between stakeholders. It respects the many kinds of knowledge that a society needs. These range from the kind that can be found in books and academic articles to sensorial knowledge, that which is rooted in experience and in the hands, ears and eyes of artists. It connects across all these and makes the practice of knowing and understanding a reflexive one in which the researcher also assesses their own feelings, ideas, interests and privileges.

Solutionism and neo-colonialism are countered when contexts are made to matter and when there is respect for how others understand their identities, how they understand ours and we our own. Practice-based audience research fares well with an ethics of ‘receptive generosity’, which David Scott tells us he learned from Stuart Hall. It is a self-aware modesty that starts by realising that we need to really listen, because listening enables ‘the work of clarification’ (Scott, 2017: 17). It is to bring to the world what Hall’s essays, talks and co-authored work speaks to: understanding, translating and smoothening the painful impact of colliding traditions (Scott, 2017: 132/3). The only way to do that well is to recognise and move beyond the conceit of omniscient western knowledge production that thinks of itself as context-free, tradition-free and as having unfettered access to the contexts of others, as Scott puts it. It is to realise that the scholarly research I recommend we start doing alongside our practice-based creative and design work, comes from a particular class- race- and gender-imprinted mind-set – and to feel that mind-set change as we make contact.

Making a ‘compass for inclusive communication’ for public institutions in Utrecht, we interviewed citizens, members of the police force, social workers and football-club volunteers as well as the city’s communication specialists (Van Hal et al., 2019). We found how little the professional practitioners that were involved were aware of the punitive power attributed to government organisations and their allies. Communication processes, we suggested, therefore need to start by finding out how public organisations are perceived by local stakeholders, before work can start on building, testing and perfecting appropriate communicative tools. Inclusion benefits little from good intentions or from what professional practitioners feel is in the interest of residents. Inclusion starts by realising how professional identities and projects scare those they should benefit.

Qualitative audience research has found new energy and visibility here in practice-based research. Well done for a research tradition started in Cultural Studies half a century ago. Focused as it is on reconstructing shared stories, it makes for essential cultural criticism and it provides a key training and companion piece to practice-based research for the interlinking social, creative and public domains serviced by the media and creative industries. It can make currently fashionable forms of design and artistic research even stronger as they explore and imagine better ways to use resources to make the world a more socially and ecologically sustainable place to live, work, care and grow old. Audience research allows for an oftentimes humbling surprise of connection that professional practitioners like cultural critics benefit from. Making and feeling such connections builds projects of hope (DiSalvo, 2022; Solnit, 2016).