ABSTRACT
Discussions about the television audience have proliferated recently. After a period of preoccupation with textual analyses of television, audience studies have been an attempt, in part, to verify empirically the kinds of ideological readings constructed by (white and middle-class) critics.1 The new critical interest in television audiences can be traced to 1980 when David Morley published his study of Nationwide, but it was in 1986 that the debate on television audiences emerged as the focus of scholarly attention at gatherings such as the International Television Studies Conference. Recently, the debate about audience studies has taken place at a high level of abstraction, as witness Martin Allor’s useful essay ‘Relocating the site of the audience’ published with four responses in a recent issue of Critical Studies in Mass Communication.2 In this paper I wish to discuss the political issues of audience studies in the terms laid out in Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction, and to discuss the problem of the ‘self-reflexive’ researcher in the context of one case study. By doing so, I hope to encourage a change within the current academic discussion of audiences. I feel we need to take up more concretely the problems of research as a practice.
