Full Description
How is cultural activity shaped by the places where it unfolds? One answer has been found in the 'scenes perspective', a development within popular music studies that explains change and transformation within musical practices in terms of the social and institutional histories of scenes. Scene Thinking: Cultural Studies from the Scenes Perspective takes up this framework - and the mode of analysis that goes with it - as an important contribution to cultural analysis and social research more generally.
In a series of focused case studies - ranging across practices like drag kinging, Bangladeshi underground music, urban arts interventions and sites like single performance venues, urban neighbourhoods in various states of gentrification, and virtual networks of game consoles in countless living rooms - the authors demonstrate how 'scene thinking' can enrich cultural studies inquiry. As a humanistic, empirically oriented alternative to network-based social ontologies, thinking in terms of scenes sensitizes researchers to complex, fluid processes that are nonetheless anchored and made meaningful at the level of lived experience. This book was originally published as a special issue of Cultural Studies.
Contents
Scene Thinking: Introduction 1. Border Scenes: Detroit ± Windsor 2. 'We Weren't Hip, Downtown People': The Kids in the Hall, the Rivoli and the Nostalgia of the Queen West Scene 3. When Scenes Fade: Methodological Lessons from Sydney's Drag King Culture 4. Copy Machines and Downtown Scenes: Deterritorializing Urban Culture in a Pre-Digital Era 5. Little Big Scene: Making and Playing Culture in Media Molecule's Little Big Planet 6. Approaching the Underground: The Production of Alternatives in the Bangladeshi Metal Scene 7. The Power of Scenes: Quantities of Amenities and Qualities of Places 8. Bodies that Remember: Gleaning Scenic Fragments of a Brothel District in Yokohama 9. Some things a Scene might be: Postface
