Elizabeth Bird
Biographic Data
| ID | 589197 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Elizabeth Bird |
| GIVEN NAMES | Elizabeth |
| FAMILY NAME | Bird |
| SIGNATURE | BIRD E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Bristol |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 184 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1980 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Theorising Media and Practice
Although practice theory has been a mainstay of social theory for nearly three decades, so far it has had very limited impact on media studies. This book draws on the work of practice theorists such as Wittgenstein, Foucault, Bourdieu, Barth and Schatzki and rethinks the study of media from the perspective of practice theory. Drawing on ethnographic case studies from places such as Zambia, India, Hong Kong, the United States, Britain, Norway and …
Restoration and the Affective Ecologies of Healing: Buffalo and the Fort Peck Tribes
Intentional acts of restoration are purported to have a multitude of benefits, not only for non-human nature, but for the people who conduct restoration. Yet, there is limited scholarship that considers the nature of these benefits in all of their complexity, including psychological and spiritual dimensions. Using the case study of the restoration of bison/buffalo by the Sioux and Assiniboine tribes to their reservation in Montana, USA, we observ…
Theatrical Performance and the Archaeological Imagination: A Transformational Journey
What happens when you take archaeological artifacts out of the lab or the museum, and use them to inspire a storytelling performance? How might artifacts inspire theater, and how might theater animate artifacts? Here, in a dialogue between a writer/performer and an anthropologist, we explore these questions, using a recent solo performance piece to think about the possibilities of theater inspired by an "archaeological imagination
The Asaba massacre and the Nigerian civil war: Reclaiming Hidden History
This article explores the consequences of a massacre of civilians in Asaba, a town on the west bank of the river Niger, during the early stages of the Nigerian civil war. While ethnically Igbo, Asaba was not part of the Igbo-dominated Biafra, remaining part of the ethnically diverse midwest region. In the international memory of the war, the midwest action, which claimed several thousand lives, has been eclipsed by the catastrophic events east of…
The Audience in Everyday Life: Living in a Media World
The Audience in Everyday Life argues that a media audience cannot be studied in front of the television alone--their interaction with media does not simply end when the set is turned off. Instead, we must study the daily lives of audiences to find the undercurrents of media influence in everyday life. Bird provides a host of useful tools and methods for scholars and students interested in the ways media is consumed in everyday life
News at Work: Imitation in an Age of Information Abundance
The History and Legacy of the Asaba, Nigeria, Massacres
In early October 1967, four months into the Nigerian Civil War, federal troops massacred hundreds in Asaba, a town in southeast Nigeria on the west bank of the Niger. While ethnically Igbo, Asaba was not part of Igbo-dominated Biafra. Through the reconstruction of this event, the article fills a significant gap in the historical record and contributes to the discussion on the impact of traumatic memory at the local and national levels. It also su…
Anthropological Engagement with News Media: Why Now
The future of journalism in the digital environment
Film in the Undergraduate Anthropology Classroom: Applying Audience Response Research in Pedagogical Practice
While we often assume media are highly effective tools for learning, research shows an unpredictable relationship between text and audience response, with variable interpretation being the norm. This can be especially problematic in anthropology, whose central goal is to understand different cultures; some studies suggest that films may reinforce ethnocentrism, especially if used without framing or analysis. We report on a project that studied st…
Working Images: Visual Research and Representation in Ethnography
Working Images: Visual Research and Representation in Ethnography. Sarah Pink, László Kürti, and Ana Isabel Afonso. New York: Routledge, 2004. 224 pp
The sexual politics of introducing women's studies: Memories and reflections from North America and the United Kingdom 1965–1995
The paper is part of a wider study into how women's studies was introduced in the academic curriculum in the United Kingdom, Canada and the USA. It looks at the sexual politics of the academy during the 1970s and 1980s, and at how they are now remembered. Women's studies was inextricably bound up in the politics of feminist activism in the period, including the ideal of working collectively in women‐only groups. But the academy was male‐dominated…
The Audience in Everyday Life: Living in a Media World
Chapter 1 Introduction: Living in a Media World Chapter 2 What a Story! Understanding the Audience for Scandal Chapter 3: Chatting on Cynthia's Porch: Creating Community in an E-mail Fan Group Chapter 4 Indians Are Like that: Negotiating Identity in a Media World Chapter 5 Supermarket Tabloids and the Question of Belief Chapter 6 CJ's Revenge: Media, Folklore, and the World of AIDS Chapter 7 Cultural Studies and Taste: Ethnography and TV Fan Cult…
Women's studies and the women's movement in Britain: Origins and Evolution, 1970-2000
The article is based on research carried out in 1998-99 which involved interviewing United Kingdom based women who had been responsible for introducing degree courses in women's studies into British universities and polytechnics. The interviews are records of the memories of those women as they look back on a political moment when they were engaged in collective attempts to transform the academic curriculum. Personal memories are placed alongside…
The academic arm of the women's liberation movement
It Makes Sense to Us: Cultural Identity in Local Legends of Place
In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in the role of narrative in constructing culture, deriving from scholarship in anthropology, geography, folklore, and communication studies. In this article, the author uses popular folk legends, collected in one state, to bring together some of this interdisciplinary scholarship on the central role of narrative in everyday life. In particular, the author focuses on how these shared narratives s…
Disciplining the Interdisciplinary: Radicalism and the academic curriculum
Having first reviewed the lack of a sociology of the academic curriculum, this paper looks back at a period when radical critiques of conventional knowledge were being developed in the context of 'revolutionary' politics, both outside and inside the academy. Interdisciplinarity was central to some attacks on the established curriculum, and the praxis of interdisciplinary work marked the emergence of 'new' subjects such as Cultural Studies and Wom…
Between the Margins and the Mainstream: Women's studies and academic feminism
This book is based on Louise Morley's doctoral thesis and draws on material from interviews (carried out in the period 1995-1997) with forty women based in the academy: twenty-five teaching staff and fifteen post-doctoral, doctoral and post graduate students, of whom twenty two were based in the United Kingdom, ten in Greece, 7 in Sweden, and 1 in Spain. There were three areas of enquiry: the institutional context; feminism in the academy-mainly …
Facing the distracted audience: Journalism and Cultural Context
Lifelines and life lines: Re-training for women returning to higher level occupations - policy and practice in the UK
The concept of a woman returner is first defined in the context of British practice and tradition. Women returners are then located in relation to demographic patterns of female participation in the labour market in the United Kingdom. The paper reviews the late 1980s as a period in which women returners were seen as a source of labour to replace a demographic downturn in those leaving school at 16 or 18. At this time several initiatives were mou…
Chatting on Cynthia's porch: Creating community in an e‐mail fan group
This is an enthnographic study of an e‐mail list devoted to fans of the television show Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. The central question is whether e‐mail groups can function as “communities,” and if so, how. I examine the practices of the list members, including the establishment of rules, nurturing of community, and communal fantasy activities. I conclude that although virtual communities are not the same as face‐to‐face communities, they may in…
Beyond Bones and Stones
Inventing the Savage: The Social Construction of Native American Criminality
Luana Ross writes, Native Americans disappear into Euro-American institutions of confinement at alarming rates. People from my reservation appeared to simply vanish and magically return. As a child I did not realize what a 'real' prison was and did not give it any thought. I imagined this as normal; that all families had relatives who went away and then returned. In this pathfinding study, Ross draws upon the life histories of imprisoned Native A…
High Class Cookery: Gender, status and domestic subjects, 1890-1930 [1]
Drawing on archives in Bristol and Gloucester, cities in the west of England, the article traces the history of the Bristol School of Cookery (founded in 1893) and the Gloucestershire School of Cookery and Domestic Economy (founded in 1890) and the Bristol University BSc in Domestic Science, introduced in 1926 and withdrawn in 1971. It relates these developments to the technical education movement and the teaching of domestic subjects in the peri…
News We Can Use: An Audience Perspective on the Tabloidisation of News in the United States
In the United States, television news is where the issue of tabloidisation is most loudly debated, as news merges into the countless talk shows and syndicated “reality” programming. While critics often place the blame on the journalism profession itself, I focus on the audience drive toward tabloidisation, critiquing both the uncritical celebration of the “active” audience, and the view that audiences are simply mindless recipients of whatever jo…
Theorising Media and Practice
Although practice theory has been a mainstay of social theory for nearly three decades, so far it has had very limited impact on media studies. This book draws on the work of practice theorists such as Wittgenstein, Foucault, Bourdieu, Barth and Schatzki and rethinks the study of media from the perspective of practice theory. Drawing on ethnographic case studies from places such as Zambia, India, Hong Kong, the United States, Britain, Norway and …
The Audience in Everyday Life: Living in a Media World
The Audience in Everyday Life argues that a media audience cannot be studied in front of the television alone--their interaction with media does not simply end when the set is turned off. Instead, we must study the daily lives of audiences to find the undercurrents of media influence in everyday life. Bird provides a host of useful tools and methods for scholars and students interested in the ways media is consumed in everyday life
Storytelling on the far side: Journalism and the weekly tabloid
The National Enquirer and other weekly “supermarket tabloids” have been branded a “disgrace to journalism” and seen as the epitome of “low‐taste” media. But are the tabloids really an entirely different species, fit only to be incinerated? This paper discusses how the tabloids report and write their stories, the relationship tabloid writing has to “straight” journalistic practice and how tabloid writers relate to such journalistic tenets as objec…
It Makes Sense to Us: Cultural Identity in Local Legends of Place
In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in the role of narrative in constructing culture, deriving from scholarship in anthropology, geography, folklore, and communication studies. In this article, the author uses popular folk legends, collected in one state, to bring together some of this interdisciplinary scholarship on the central role of narrative in everyday life. In particular, the author focuses on how these shared narratives s…
News We Can Use: An Audience Perspective on the Tabloidisation of News in the United States
In the United States, television news is where the issue of tabloidisation is most loudly debated, as news merges into the countless talk shows and syndicated “reality” programming. While critics often place the blame on the journalism profession itself, I focus on the audience drive toward tabloidisation, critiquing both the uncritical celebration of the “active” audience, and the view that audiences are simply mindless recipients of whatever jo…
Travels in nowhere land: Ethnography and the "impossible"; audience
This article addresses recent trends in ethnographic studies of media audiences. While much of this rethinking of ethnography has been necessary and useful, it also has the potential to paralyze research of this sort and to continue building an ever-more-abstract theoretical narcissism. The future of cultural audience studies lies not with more abstraction, but with attempts to improve ethnographic practice. In particular, it is argued that femin…
The future of journalism in the digital environment
CJ's revenge: Media, folklore, and the cultural construction of Aids
On October 10, 1991, ABC's news magazine Prime Time live, retold a story that had been causing a sensation in Dallas since early September, when Ebony magazine published a letter from a writer signing herself CJ, Dallas, Texas. The writer claimed to be deliberately infecting up to four men a week with the AIDS virus. The letter led to a flood of calls to a local talk show host, and a major scare began in Dallas, fed by local, and then national ne…
Anthropological Engagement with News Media: Why Now
The History and Legacy of the Asaba, Nigeria, Massacres
In early October 1967, four months into the Nigerian Civil War, federal troops massacred hundreds in Asaba, a town in southeast Nigeria on the west bank of the Niger. While ethnically Igbo, Asaba was not part of Igbo-dominated Biafra. Through the reconstruction of this event, the article fills a significant gap in the historical record and contributes to the discussion on the impact of traumatic memory at the local and national levels. It also su…
Disciplining the Interdisciplinary: Radicalism and the academic curriculum
Having first reviewed the lack of a sociology of the academic curriculum, this paper looks back at a period when radical critiques of conventional knowledge were being developed in the context of 'revolutionary' politics, both outside and inside the academy. Interdisciplinarity was central to some attacks on the established curriculum, and the praxis of interdisciplinary work marked the emergence of 'new' subjects such as Cultural Studies and Wom…
Chatting on Cynthia's porch: Creating community in an e‐mail fan group
This is an enthnographic study of an e‐mail list devoted to fans of the television show Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. The central question is whether e‐mail groups can function as “communities,” and if so, how. I examine the practices of the list members, including the establishment of rules, nurturing of community, and communal fantasy activities. I conclude that although virtual communities are not the same as face‐to‐face communities, they may in…
The academic arm of the women's liberation movement
Playing with Fear: Interpreting the Adolescent Legend Trip
L'etude de la legende et des activites des adolescents liees a la statue de l'Ange Noir dans le cimetiere de Iowa City montre une difference d'interpretation entre les adultes qui rapprochent l'ange a la mere et les jeunes qui soulignent le danger d'approcher cette statue devenue noire suite a l'adultere de la femme. Les jeunes qui se rencontrent autour de cet Ange « jouent » avec la peur : les garcons doivent la maitriser et les filles admirent …
News and Storytelling in American Culture: Reevaluating the Sensational Dimension
The sexual politics of introducing women's studies: Memories and reflections from North America and the United Kingdom 1965–1995
The paper is part of a wider study into how women's studies was introduced in the academic curriculum in the United Kingdom, Canada and the USA. It looks at the sexual politics of the academy during the 1970s and 1980s, and at how they are now remembered. Women's studies was inextricably bound up in the politics of feminist activism in the period, including the ideal of working collectively in women‐only groups. But the academy was male‐dominated…
Facing the distracted audience: Journalism and Cultural Context
The Impact of Private Estate Ownership on Social Development in a Scottish Rural Community
This paper discusses the effect that large scale private landowncrship has had on social development in a Scottish rural parish. Much of Scotland's land area is concentrated in the hands of a few owners, and it is argued that their decisions on land use continue to have a significant impact on potential for growth or decline in Scottish rural settlements, in spite of powers accorded to local and nationally appointed bodies.RésuméCet article analy…
Lifelines and life lines: Re-training for women returning to higher level occupations - policy and practice in the UK
The concept of a woman returner is first defined in the context of British practice and tradition. Women returners are then located in relation to demographic patterns of female participation in the labour market in the United Kingdom. The paper reviews the late 1980s as a period in which women returners were seen as a source of labour to replace a demographic downturn in those leaving school at 16 or 18. At this time several initiatives were mou…
The Asaba massacre and the Nigerian civil war: Reclaiming Hidden History
This article explores the consequences of a massacre of civilians in Asaba, a town on the west bank of the river Niger, during the early stages of the Nigerian civil war. While ethnically Igbo, Asaba was not part of the Igbo-dominated Biafra, remaining part of the ethnically diverse midwest region. In the international memory of the war, the midwest action, which claimed several thousand lives, has been eclipsed by the catastrophic events east of…
Film in the Undergraduate Anthropology Classroom: Applying Audience Response Research in Pedagogical Practice
While we often assume media are highly effective tools for learning, research shows an unpredictable relationship between text and audience response, with variable interpretation being the norm. This can be especially problematic in anthropology, whose central goal is to understand different cultures; some studies suggest that films may reinforce ethnocentrism, especially if used without framing or analysis. We report on a project that studied st…
Beyond Bones and Stones
High Class Cookery: Gender, status and domestic subjects, 1890-1930 [1]
Drawing on archives in Bristol and Gloucester, cities in the west of England, the article traces the history of the Bristol School of Cookery (founded in 1893) and the Gloucestershire School of Cookery and Domestic Economy (founded in 1890) and the Bristol University BSc in Domestic Science, introduced in 1926 and withdrawn in 1971. It relates these developments to the technical education movement and the teaching of domestic subjects in the peri…
To Cook or to Conjugate: Gender and class in the adult curriculum 1865‐1900 in Bristol, United Kingdom
The paper compares and contrasts two historical moments in the education of women in Bristol (UK) in the period 1865‐1900. It first traces the university extension movement and the admitting of women to the new University College in 1876. Then, evening classes founded in the 1880s are discussed, where, in contrast to the university curriculum, women and girls were taught domestic skills. These different curricula are related to the social class b…
Changing Images of the Family
The Impact of Private Estate Ownership on Social Development in a Scottish Rural Community
This paper discusses the effect that large scale private landowncrship has had on social development in a Scottish rural parish. Much of Scotland's land area is concentrated in the hands of a few owners, and it is argued that their decisions on land use continue to have a significant impact on potential for growth or decline in Scottish rural settlements, in spite of powers accorded to local and nationally appointed bodies.RésuméCet article analy…
Storytelling on the far side: Journalism and the weekly tabloid
The National Enquirer and other weekly “supermarket tabloids” have been branded a “disgrace to journalism” and seen as the epitome of “low‐taste” media. But are the tabloids really an entirely different species, fit only to be incinerated? This paper discusses how the tabloids report and write their stories, the relationship tabloid writing has to “straight” journalistic practice and how tabloid writers relate to such journalistic tenets as objec…
News and Storytelling in American Culture: Reevaluating the Sensational Dimension
To Cook or to Conjugate: Gender and class in the adult curriculum 1865‐1900 in Bristol, United Kingdom
The paper compares and contrasts two historical moments in the education of women in Bristol (UK) in the period 1865‐1900. It first traces the university extension movement and the admitting of women to the new University College in 1876. Then, evening classes founded in the 1880s are discussed, where, in contrast to the university curriculum, women and girls were taught domestic skills. These different curricula are related to the social class b…
Travels in nowhere land: Ethnography and the "impossible"; audience
This article addresses recent trends in ethnographic studies of media audiences. While much of this rethinking of ethnography has been necessary and useful, it also has the potential to paralyze research of this sort and to continue building an ever-more-abstract theoretical narcissism. The future of cultural audience studies lies not with more abstraction, but with attempts to improve ethnographic practice. In particular, it is argued that femin…
Playing with Fear: Interpreting the Adolescent Legend Trip
L'etude de la legende et des activites des adolescents liees a la statue de l'Ange Noir dans le cimetiere de Iowa City montre une difference d'interpretation entre les adultes qui rapprochent l'ange a la mere et les jeunes qui soulignent le danger d'approcher cette statue devenue noire suite a l'adultere de la femme. Les jeunes qui se rencontrent autour de cet Ange « jouent » avec la peur : les garcons doivent la maitriser et les filles admirent …
Women's Studies in European Higher Education: Sigma and Coimbra
CJ's revenge: Media, folklore, and the cultural construction of Aids
On October 10, 1991, ABC's news magazine Prime Time live, retold a story that had been causing a sensation in Dallas since early September, when Ebony magazine published a letter from a writer signing herself CJ, Dallas, Texas. The writer claimed to be deliberately infecting up to four men a week with the AIDS virus. The letter led to a flood of calls to a local talk show host, and a major scare began in Dallas, fed by local, and then national ne…
Dressing in Feathers: The Construction of the Indian in American Popular Culture
High Class Cookery: Gender, status and domestic subjects, 1890-1930 [1]
Drawing on archives in Bristol and Gloucester, cities in the west of England, the article traces the history of the Bristol School of Cookery (founded in 1893) and the Gloucestershire School of Cookery and Domestic Economy (founded in 1890) and the Bristol University BSc in Domestic Science, introduced in 1926 and withdrawn in 1971. It relates these developments to the technical education movement and the teaching of domestic subjects in the peri…
News We Can Use: An Audience Perspective on the Tabloidisation of News in the United States
In the United States, television news is where the issue of tabloidisation is most loudly debated, as news merges into the countless talk shows and syndicated “reality” programming. While critics often place the blame on the journalism profession itself, I focus on the audience drive toward tabloidisation, critiquing both the uncritical celebration of the “active” audience, and the view that audiences are simply mindless recipients of whatever jo…
Lifelines and life lines: Re-training for women returning to higher level occupations - policy and practice in the UK
The concept of a woman returner is first defined in the context of British practice and tradition. Women returners are then located in relation to demographic patterns of female participation in the labour market in the United Kingdom. The paper reviews the late 1980s as a period in which women returners were seen as a source of labour to replace a demographic downturn in those leaving school at 16 or 18. At this time several initiatives were mou…
Chatting on Cynthia's porch: Creating community in an e‐mail fan group
This is an enthnographic study of an e‐mail list devoted to fans of the television show Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. The central question is whether e‐mail groups can function as “communities,” and if so, how. I examine the practices of the list members, including the establishment of rules, nurturing of community, and communal fantasy activities. I conclude that although virtual communities are not the same as face‐to‐face communities, they may in…
Beyond Bones and Stones
Inventing the Savage: The Social Construction of Native American Criminality
Luana Ross writes, Native Americans disappear into Euro-American institutions of confinement at alarming rates. People from my reservation appeared to simply vanish and magically return. As a child I did not realize what a 'real' prison was and did not give it any thought. I imagined this as normal; that all families had relatives who went away and then returned. In this pathfinding study, Ross draws upon the life histories of imprisoned Native A…
Between the Margins and the Mainstream: Women's studies and academic feminism
This book is based on Louise Morley's doctoral thesis and draws on material from interviews (carried out in the period 1995-1997) with forty women based in the academy: twenty-five teaching staff and fifteen post-doctoral, doctoral and post graduate students, of whom twenty two were based in the United Kingdom, ten in Greece, 7 in Sweden, and 1 in Spain. There were three areas of enquiry: the institutional context; feminism in the academy-mainly …
Facing the distracted audience: Journalism and Cultural Context
Disciplining the Interdisciplinary: Radicalism and the academic curriculum
Having first reviewed the lack of a sociology of the academic curriculum, this paper looks back at a period when radical critiques of conventional knowledge were being developed in the context of 'revolutionary' politics, both outside and inside the academy. Interdisciplinarity was central to some attacks on the established curriculum, and the praxis of interdisciplinary work marked the emergence of 'new' subjects such as Cultural Studies and Wom…
The academic arm of the women's liberation movement
It Makes Sense to Us: Cultural Identity in Local Legends of Place
In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in the role of narrative in constructing culture, deriving from scholarship in anthropology, geography, folklore, and communication studies. In this article, the author uses popular folk legends, collected in one state, to bring together some of this interdisciplinary scholarship on the central role of narrative in everyday life. In particular, the author focuses on how these shared narratives s…
The Audience in Everyday Life: Living in a Media World
Chapter 1 Introduction: Living in a Media World Chapter 2 What a Story! Understanding the Audience for Scandal Chapter 3: Chatting on Cynthia's Porch: Creating Community in an E-mail Fan Group Chapter 4 Indians Are Like that: Negotiating Identity in a Media World Chapter 5 Supermarket Tabloids and the Question of Belief Chapter 6 CJ's Revenge: Media, Folklore, and the World of AIDS Chapter 7 Cultural Studies and Taste: Ethnography and TV Fan Cult…
Women's studies and the women's movement in Britain: Origins and Evolution, 1970-2000
The article is based on research carried out in 1998-99 which involved interviewing United Kingdom based women who had been responsible for introducing degree courses in women's studies into British universities and polytechnics. The interviews are records of the memories of those women as they look back on a political moment when they were engaged in collective attempts to transform the academic curriculum. Personal memories are placed alongside…
The sexual politics of introducing women's studies: Memories and reflections from North America and the United Kingdom 1965–1995
The paper is part of a wider study into how women's studies was introduced in the academic curriculum in the United Kingdom, Canada and the USA. It looks at the sexual politics of the academy during the 1970s and 1980s, and at how they are now remembered. Women's studies was inextricably bound up in the politics of feminist activism in the period, including the ideal of working collectively in women‐only groups. But the academy was male‐dominated…
Working Images: Visual Research and Representation in Ethnography
Working Images: Visual Research and Representation in Ethnography. Sarah Pink, László Kürti, and Ana Isabel Afonso. New York: Routledge, 2004. 224 pp
Sociology (27 works) · Political science (21 works) · Art (15 works) · History (15 works) · Psychology (14 works) · Law (12 works) · Media studies (12 works) · Anthropology (10 works) · Media Studies and Communication (10 works) · History (9 works)