Experience and The Social World (Research Methods in Cultural Studies)

Experience is central to cultural studies.

This chapter has three aims:
1. It tries to explain why attending to experience remains an important task for
cultural studies.
2. It examines the implications for research methodology of the fact that while
experience is common to both researcher and researched, the specific experiences
we have are always in some degree different and individual to us, as are the ways
we derive meaning and significance from experience or draw on our experience to
contest other cultural definitions put upon experience, particularly by those in
positions of power, authority and control.
3. the chapter tries to clear the ground for deploying various methods in
researching peoples experience of the social world. It does this by mapping the
conceptual properties of experience in terms of various dualities operative within
the category, such as proximity and distance, cultural process and outcome,
situated and mediated participation, and the balance between speaking and
listening.