ABSTRACT
Soja argues that time and history have occupied a privileged position in critical theory while, as Foucault puts it, "Space was treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile. Time, on the contrary, was richness, fecundity, life, dialectic". In recent years there has been considerable debate concerning the methodological issues surrounding the practice of ethnographic and other types of qualitative audience research. In recent years, one cause of concern in media studies has been the viability of any concept of texts as independent of their "activations" and "readings" in particular contexts. Certainly, any analysis that offers people only an understanding of the micro-process of television consumption in this or that domestic context, without reference to the broader cultural questions at stake, is ultimately going to be of only limited value. The fundamental issue is of some long standing.
