ABSTRACT
Over recent decades, scholars have experimented with a range of methodologies to describe the emotional and affective investments involved in everyday media consumption. From studies that highlight the role of popular culture in ‘making it through the day’ (Grossberg 1997: 115) to accounts of fan cultures that develop around particular television shows or book characters (e.g. Tulloch and Jenkins 1995; Penley 1997; Saxey 2001), researchers have sought to explain what is meaningful and pleasurable about favoured texts and objects – the ‘mattering maps’ (Grossberg 1992) that guide people’s media and cultural preferences. In these situations, academics have occupied an ambiguous role given that, as Henry Jenkins (1992) has perhaps most forcefully demonstrated, scholars are often also fans of the media products they seek to study. Subsequent generations of critics have shown that researchers blur the line between expert and fan in studies of media texts and their accompanying subcultures (e.g. Hills 2002; Jenkins et al. 2003). This is not to say that their work cannot be considered authoritative as a result. Rather, it is this partial perspective that allows insight into a cultural phenomenon (Frow and Morris 1993). In this way, one of the foundational premises of cultural studies approaches to media and popular culture has been to recognize that the distinction between scholar and fan is often secondary in understanding how something works. Cultural studies insist that the judgment of the scholar is itself affected by the culture of which he or she is part. By admitting this from the outset, researchers can be held to account for the benefits and limitations of the techniques they adopt to study others. This chapter develops this principle in relation to the growing interest in
the concept of ‘affective labour’ in media and cultural studies. It begins with an overview of two discernible trends in the field: the fan tradition pioneered
by Jenkins and a range of other media scholars, and a developing area of research that studies the conditions of the contemporary workplace. Drawing connections between these two trajectories, the second half of the chapter describes recent changes to the white-collar workplace and discusses the consequences for scholarship given that academics encounter a range of incentives to hold a strong investment in the workplace as a source of identity. Just as fan studies encouraged academics to recognize their complicity in the leisure cultures of consumption they sought to study, the chapter suggests a companion move is necessary in studies of affective labour: that academics must acknowledge the context of their own labour to provide more comprehensive accounts of the contemporary workplace – specifically the production cultures of knowledge work. More reflexive studies of the academic workplace can reveal the ways that scholars are already ‘working with affect’ as part of the portfolio of attributes and responsibilities expected of employees in today’s corporate university. Urging increased attention to the experiences and motivations shared between academics and other white-collar workers, the chapter considers which methodologies best assist in understanding the seductive appeal of the information workplace and the production cultures it rewards and sanctions.
