Joke Hermes
Biographic Data
| ID | 640652 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Joke Hermes |
| GIVEN NAMES | Joke |
| FAMILY NAME | Hermes |
| SIGNATURE | HERMES J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Inholland University of Applied Sciences |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4622-0696 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 45 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 94 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 45 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Mapping for change: A manifesto for teaching audience research to (future) professional practitioners
This article will address how qualitative audience research, as forged in Cultural Studies over the past almost half century, can empower practice-based researchers and professionals by teaching them how to listen well. Listening well refers to more than the deeply culturally gendered quality of paying others real attention; it refers to the scholarly skill of analytically hearing across different kinds of audience materials and how they speak to…
Energy! The power of audience research as field, practice and critique
This contribution is the introduction to the Cultural Commons special issue on ‘Energy! The Power of Audience Research as Field, Practice and Critique’, edited by Joke Hermes, Linda Kopitz and Helen Wood. Through the lens of ‘energy’, this special issue explores audience research as a field, practice and critique that both demands and harnesses energy. Between tensions, currents and changes, in light of both rapid development and enduring underst…
The Datafication Challenge. Introduction to Themed Issue
This issue of VIEW will take a closer look at the challenges jo urnalists and multimedia makers face in a datafied world and how they might be trained to deal with them
Friend and Foe. An Analysis of Expert Advice on Educating for Data Literacy in Journalism and the Creative Industries
Analysis of practical advice in regard of developing a data literacy course for students in higher education and for early-career professionals in interviews with 56 experts in data analysis, offered an unexpected shared story among the experts around the perception, affect and power of data. By attending to what data are felt to be and do to you unintentionally, the analysis delivered a new story of how to teach for data literacy. Rather than (o…
Identity is a Verb (which makes Inclusion a Methodological Challenge)
Congratulations DiGeST on this ten-year anniversary! Thinking about research agendas, I find that decades as a unit of time make me hop scotch back several. For three decades now (cultural) citizenship has been my key concept of choice. In alignment with the core focus of this journal, I have tried to understand and employ 'inclusion' as a key part of the 'doing' of cultural citizenship: the way in which others - like me and unlike me -, use medi…
The Pocketbook of Audience Research
Focusing on qualitative methods, The Pocketbook of Audience Research uses contemporary, global television and cross-media examples to explain essential approaches to audience research and outline how they can be employed. This handy guide is divided into three parts: the first part, ‘Watching Post-Television’, offers ‘television’ as a shortcut to understanding today’s platform media and gives an introduction to key theoretical terms such as repre…
Cultural Citizenship and Popular Culture: The Art of Listening
this book uses a series of case studies to show how popular media are important to us, as a source of pleasure and entertainment, but also in communicating about the world with others. Social media platforms have changed how we talk about what we like and dislike in our popular media use. ‘Cultural citizenship’ shows how these discussions speak to ’belonging’ and what we feel our rights and responsibilities are in today’s polarized world. Cultura…
The Rupaul Paradox: Freedom and Stricture in a Competition Reality TV Show
Drag culture in the 1990s seemed to signify emancipation and liberation of enduring and stifling definitions of gender and sexuality. The uptake of drag and camp in mainstream culture were felt to usher in an era of gender freedom coinciding with new appreciation for popular cultural forms. A quarter century on, popular culture no longer connotes bad taste. The realignment of taste and cultural capital has not coincided with decreased social ineq…
Aspiring to Dutchness: Media Literacy, Integration, and Communication with Eritrean Status Holders
Based on 13 interviews with Eritrean status holders and professionals in Amsterdam this article explores how paying attention to media skills and media literacies may help gain a better understanding of what matters in exchanges between professionals and legal refugees in the mandatory Dutch integration process. Media literacy needs to be decolonised in order to do so. Starting as an inquiry into how professionals and their clients have different…
The Loss of the Popular: Reconstructing Fifty Years of Studying Popular Culture
This article starts from the observation that popular culture resides in a contradictory space. On the one hand it seems to be thriving, in that the range of media objects that were previously studied under the rubric of popular culture has certainly expanded. Yet, cultural studies scholars rarely study these media objects as popular culture. Instead, concerns about immaterial labor, about the manipulation of voting behavior and public opinion, a…
Casting for Change: Tracing Gender in Discussions of Casting through Feminist Media Ethnography
The moment of casting is a crucial one in any media production. Casting the ‘right’ person shapes the narrative as much as the way in which the final product might be received by critics and audiences. For this article, casting—as the moment in which gender is hypervisible in its complex intersectional entanglement with class, race and sexuality—will be our gateway to exploring the dynamics of discussion of gender conventions and how we, as femin…
Fear: Introduction to special issue
Fear needs dealing with. Fear demands to be abated, countered or turned into something else, contributing and curtailing how we ‘do’ being human beings. This special issue of the European Journal of Cultural Studies addresses fear within media and popular culture, adopting a cultural studies approach to fear in a variety of socio-cultural and political contexts. A cultural studies approach allows us to enhance the horizon of understanding cultura…
We can sh*t for another 10 years.’ Toilet paper, pandemic politics and cultural citizenship
The global reality of the COVID-19/Corona pandemic paradoxically boosted national politics, broadcasting and citizenship. Media coverage, especially initially, praised citizen solidarity and the creative solutions that were pioneered to care for each other. A year later, a lasting social learning curve throughout and after this crisis seems illusory. The pandemic, this paper argues, needs to be understood in a longer timeframe as the working thro…
Television’s undoing of social distancing
At this critical moment in time, April 2020, when we are living with the cataclysmic event of Covid-19, television – a medium declared almost dead at the beginning of this millennium – has become a vital resource for solace, daydreaming, social ritual, knowledge and storytelling. In conditions of lockdown, we turn towards television, not away from it (Ellis, 2020; Negra, 2020). We are checking news on national channels, and tuning to live broadca…
Tracing cultural citizenship online
From the early 2000s onward the Netherlands has witnessed unex- pected and unprecedented polarization. Right-wing populist acti- vism challenged the right of newcomers to belong in Dutch society. Coinciding with this populist swing, participatory media (web com- munities such as Marokko.nl, blog sites such as GeenStijl – which translates as ‘BadForm’ – and later Facebook and Twitter) have become available as sites for like-minded groups, includin…
Transgression in contemporary media culture
This is the introduction to a special issue on media and transgression, one of early cultural studies’ key terms. It inquires into the uses of transgression as a critical concept to query contemporary media culture which is discussed in six case studies: on political satire, Mukbang, cult drama, the policing of film piracy, media scandals, and online trolls. Transgression points to the energy that fuels the media ecology – from content and conten…
Doctor Who , Ma’am: YouTube Reactions to the 2017 Reveal of the New Doctor
In 2017, BBC released a video revealing that Jodie Whittaker would be the actor to play the thirteenth Doctor in the 2018 season of Doctor Who (1963–), the popular BBC television series. The “reveal” that a woman had been cast in the role of the Doctor prompted an overwhelming backlash and fierce online discussion. The same period saw a number of popular films and series cast women as leads. The intense discussion that the reveal generated indica…
Occupying the intersection: RuPaul's celebration of meritocracy
RuPaul herself is a drag queen, a gay man and a television host, excelling in all three like no other. We are using ‘herself’ rather than ‘himself’, as one of the authors feels more comfortable calling Ru a ‘she’. RuPaul does not care about pronouns: ‘You can call me he. You can call me she. You can call me Regis & Cathy Lee; I don’t care
Hating Skyler White: Audience Engagement, Gender Politics and Celebrity Culture
Skyler White is a protagonist in the top-ranking television series Breaking Bad. She is also one of the most hated characters on television. This paper focuses on how the character of Skyler and Anna Gunn – the actor that plays her – are turned into a ‘composite celebrity’ in audience discussions. This is achieved by analysing threads on the social news website Reddit that specifically discuss Skyler. We discovered three main speaking positions: …
The Role of Social Media in Collective Processes of Place Making: A Study of Two Neighborhood Blogs in Amsterdam
The wide use of social media has facilitated new social practices that influence place meaning. This paper uses a double case study of two neighborhood blogs in gentrifying communities, to explore the role of social media in sharing place associations and community formation. Drawing on Collins’ theory of interaction ritual chains, this research project investigates how the intertwining of online and offline interaction around the blogs creates i…
This is My Life: The Stories of Independent Workers in the Creative Industries in the Netherlands
The new precariat or free agents? Two powerful stories dominate discussion of labour in what are now called the creative industries. A policy invention, the creative industries in the Netherlands combine media, the arts, cultural heritage and creative business services as a new top sector, expected to boost the national income. A large number of workers in the creative industries do so freelance, or as the Dutch have it as Independents without Pe…
Passion: Introduction to Special Issue
There is a dark side to passion: a black heart, something malicious and not to be trusted. This Special Issue1 looks at the tensions between the positive and particularly the negative connotations of passion. This is the kind of passion where an adoring fan can become a menacing stalker. Or a ritual December celebration turns into a contested site of race relations. Often, when we think of media and passion, the first things that come to mind con…
We have given up so much’: Passion and denial in the Dutch Zwarte Piet (Black Pete) controversy
Forceful debate has erupted in the Netherlands over the celebration of Sinterklaas in the 2010s. Sinterklaas festivities revolve around December 5 and the giving of presents, mostly to children. The debate centres around the figure of Sinterklaas’s helper Zwarte Piet (Black Pete). While an object of criticism for its implied racism (Zwarte Piet sports an Afro hairdo, blackface, full red lips and big golden hoops) for over half a century, the curr…
Labour and passion: Introduction to themed section
In this introduction to the themed section on ‘Labour and passion’, it is argued that work has bled into all areas of life. Political economists and media production researchers have shown how both paid and unpaid labour are singularly important and build upon one another. The set of articles presented here is the precursor to a general issue on Media and Passion (to be published later). It is the result of the same invitation. The articles can b…
After the Break: Television Theory Today
Citizenship in the Age of the Internet
New information and communication technologies (ICTs) have allowed for changes in media content and in practices of media reception. How these changes have impacted on practices of citizenship, is the key question for this article. It starts by showing how notions of citizenship are closely related to public opinion formation, which, in turn is felt to be nurtured by journalism. The demise in newspaper readership is in that regard a worrying phen…
Television’s undoing of social distancing
At this critical moment in time, April 2020, when we are living with the cataclysmic event of Covid-19, television – a medium declared almost dead at the beginning of this millennium – has become a vital resource for solace, daydreaming, social ritual, knowledge and storytelling. In conditions of lockdown, we turn towards television, not away from it (Ellis, 2020; Negra, 2020). We are checking news on national channels, and tuning to live broadca…
We have given up so much’: Passion and denial in the Dutch Zwarte Piet (Black Pete) controversy
Forceful debate has erupted in the Netherlands over the celebration of Sinterklaas in the 2010s. Sinterklaas festivities revolve around December 5 and the giving of presents, mostly to children. The debate centres around the figure of Sinterklaas’s helper Zwarte Piet (Black Pete). While an object of criticism for its implied racism (Zwarte Piet sports an Afro hairdo, blackface, full red lips and big golden hoops) for over half a century, the curr…
Labour and passion: Introduction to themed section
In this introduction to the themed section on ‘Labour and passion’, it is argued that work has bled into all areas of life. Political economists and media production researchers have shown how both paid and unpaid labour are singularly important and build upon one another. The set of articles presented here is the precursor to a general issue on Media and Passion (to be published later). It is the result of the same invitation. The articles can b…
The Role of Social Media in Collective Processes of Place Making: A Study of Two Neighborhood Blogs in Amsterdam
The wide use of social media has facilitated new social practices that influence place meaning. This paper uses a double case study of two neighborhood blogs in gentrifying communities, to explore the role of social media in sharing place associations and community formation. Drawing on Collins’ theory of interaction ritual chains, this research project investigates how the intertwining of online and offline interaction around the blogs creates i…
Cultural studies and citizenship
International audience
Burnt Orange: Television, Football, and the Representation of Ethnicity
The Dutch tend to see themselves as a tolerant and antiracist nation, despite frequent evidence to the contrary. One area in cultural life that is both a site of stardom for nonwhite Dutch and a site of extreme racism and prejudice is popular sports and especially football (or soccer). Games played by the national soccer team are major events, in particular when the team comes near the finals in a European or world championship. In such cases, pr…
Tracing cultural citizenship online
From the early 2000s onward the Netherlands has witnessed unex- pected and unprecedented polarization. Right-wing populist acti- vism challenged the right of newcomers to belong in Dutch society. Coinciding with this populist swing, participatory media (web com- munities such as Marokko.nl, blog sites such as GeenStijl – which translates as ‘BadForm’ – and later Facebook and Twitter) have become available as sites for like-minded groups, includin…
Media, meaning and everyday life
What is game studies anyway
In this introduction, game studies is argued to be a force of innovation for cultural studies. While game studies, as it has developed over the last 10 years, fits well within cultural studies' methodology and theory, it does more than benefit from cultural studies as a 'mother discipline'. Game studies proves itself to be a strong force, especially in its productive use of political economy to analyse games and gaming as a (new) cultural form. B…
Cultural citizenship and crime fiction: Politics and the interpretive community
Based on interviews with 19 readers (15 women, 4 men) of detective fiction (broadly defined as crime novels with a central role for the investigator of the crime, whether a professional or an amateur), I aim to investigate both the practice of reading detective fiction and its possible wider ramifications. In particular I am interested in whether and how this popular genre is connected with ‘cultural citizenship’ and with feminism and gender role…
Transgression in contemporary media culture
This is the introduction to a special issue on media and transgression, one of early cultural studies’ key terms. It inquires into the uses of transgression as a critical concept to query contemporary media culture which is discussed in six case studies: on political satire, Mukbang, cult drama, the policing of film piracy, media scandals, and online trolls. Transgression points to the energy that fuels the media ecology – from content and conten…
Sleeping with the enemy: Audience studies and critical literacy
Audience studies is not the vibrant field it was in its 1980s and early 1990s heyday. Cultural studies today has a more balanced interest in production, audiences and texts. A renewed focus in audience studies on everyday meaning production, identity and relations of power could benefit from recent developments. Theorization of power especially has benefited from recent work on governmentality. In accord with recent work on ‘affect’, there is an …
We can sh*t for another 10 years.’ Toilet paper, pandemic politics and cultural citizenship
The global reality of the COVID-19/Corona pandemic paradoxically boosted national politics, broadcasting and citizenship. Media coverage, especially initially, praised citizen solidarity and the creative solutions that were pioneered to care for each other. A year later, a lasting social learning curve throughout and after this crisis seems illusory. The pandemic, this paper argues, needs to be understood in a longer timeframe as the working thro…
Doctor Who , Ma’am: YouTube Reactions to the 2017 Reveal of the New Doctor
In 2017, BBC released a video revealing that Jodie Whittaker would be the actor to play the thirteenth Doctor in the 2018 season of Doctor Who (1963–), the popular BBC television series. The “reveal” that a woman had been cast in the role of the Doctor prompted an overwhelming backlash and fierce online discussion. The same period saw a number of popular films and series cast women as leads. The intense discussion that the reveal generated indica…
Occupying the intersection: RuPaul's celebration of meritocracy
RuPaul herself is a drag queen, a gay man and a television host, excelling in all three like no other. We are using ‘herself’ rather than ‘himself’, as one of the authors feels more comfortable calling Ru a ‘she’. RuPaul does not care about pronouns: ‘You can call me he. You can call me she. You can call me Regis & Cathy Lee; I don’t care
Hating Skyler White: Audience Engagement, Gender Politics and Celebrity Culture
Skyler White is a protagonist in the top-ranking television series Breaking Bad. She is also one of the most hated characters on television. This paper focuses on how the character of Skyler and Anna Gunn – the actor that plays her – are turned into a ‘composite celebrity’ in audience discussions. This is achieved by analysing threads on the social news website Reddit that specifically discuss Skyler. We discovered three main speaking positions: …
The think-tank of American cultural studies
Of irritation, texts and men: Feminist audience studies and cultural citizenship
This is a case study of reading detective fiction which argues that different types of methodological and theoretical questions about relations with informants have not been raised sufficiently often in feminist audience studies or have been lost from its research agenda. They are: how to approach the culturally well established?, what is the place of texts in (feminist) audience research? and, how does this affect the positions of researcher and…
A Case of the Emperor's New Clothes? Reception and Text Analysis of the Dutch Feminist Magazine Opzij
The feminist monthly Opzij is the only general audience feminist publication in the Netherlands. Its readership is growing steadily. Because there are few studies of feminist magazines or their readership and because of the monopoly held by the magazine, the authors decided to research both the reception and content of Opzij, focusing on how feminism and a feminist identity are constructed by the text and by its readers. Eleven female and three m…
Sexuality in Lesbian Romance Fiction
Romance research has mainly concentrated on heterosexual romances. Lesbian romantic novels have, as far as I know, been extensively discussed only in 'Some pulp Sappho' by Fran Koski and Maida Tilchen (1979). Lesbian trash does not figure much in the few other texts on lesbians or lesbianism in literature (see Zimmerman, 1985, 1990, Jay and Glasgow,1990). In this paper, I propose to discuss lesbian romances as a reader, concentrating on a 1950s l…
Media, meaning and everyday life
The Diana debate: Hollywood
The Diana debate: Hollywood Joke Hermes Joke Hermes Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 39, Issue 3, Autumn 1998, Pages 293–295, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/39.3.293 Published: 01 October 1998
Media Figures in Identity Construction
Constructions of cultural studies: Introduction to Themed section
Of irritation, texts and men: Feminist audience studies and cultural citizenship
This is a case study of reading detective fiction which argues that different types of methodological and theoretical questions about relations with informants have not been raised sufficiently often in feminist audience studies or have been lost from its research agenda. They are: how to approach the culturally well established?, what is the place of texts in (feminist) audience research? and, how does this affect the positions of researcher and…
Cultural citizenship and crime fiction: Politics and the interpretive community
Based on interviews with 19 readers (15 women, 4 men) of detective fiction (broadly defined as crime novels with a central role for the investigator of the crime, whether a professional or an amateur), I aim to investigate both the practice of reading detective fiction and its possible wider ramifications. In particular I am interested in whether and how this popular genre is connected with ‘cultural citizenship’ and with feminism and gender role…
A Concise History of Media and Cultural Studies in Three Scripts: Advocacy, Autobiography, and the Chronicle
Atlantic Crossings: Rereading North American Cultural Studies
Re‐Reading Popular Culture
"Re-reading Popular Culture is a key guide to understanding the meanings and value of popular culture today. It explores the theme of cultural citizenship by combining textual analysis and media reception theory to analyze popular culture. It includes such contemporary issues as the rewriting of masculinity after the success of feminism, and the layers of meaning in semi-public and private talk of multiculturalism and ethnicity." "Joke Hermes tac…
Burnt Orange: Television, Football, and the Representation of Ethnicity
The Dutch tend to see themselves as a tolerant and antiracist nation, despite frequent evidence to the contrary. One area in cultural life that is both a site of stardom for nonwhite Dutch and a site of extreme racism and prejudice is popular sports and especially football (or soccer). Games played by the national soccer team are major events, in particular when the team comes near the finals in a European or world championship. In such cases, pr…
New Europe, new cultural studies
International audience
The Popularisation of Dutch TV Drama and the Rise of Multicultural Police Series
The Dutch police series is a new TV drama genre in the Netherlands. During the last five years, several broadcasters have aired new domestic police series, leading the sub-genre to gain a stable position in the prime-time television schedules. This paper analyses the major transitions that have led to the prevalence of Dutch police series: the shift from a public to a dual system of broadcasting in the Netherlands; the transition from broadcaster…
Cultural studies and citizenship
International audience
Citizenship in the Age of the Internet
New information and communication technologies (ICTs) have allowed for changes in media content and in practices of media reception. How these changes have impacted on practices of citizenship, is the key question for this article. It starts by showing how notions of citizenship are closely related to public opinion formation, which, in turn is felt to be nurtured by journalism. The demise in newspaper readership is in that regard a worrying phen…
If You Can't Join Them, Beat Them
What is game studies anyway
In this introduction, game studies is argued to be a force of innovation for cultural studies. While game studies, as it has developed over the last 10 years, fits well within cultural studies' methodology and theory, it does more than benefit from cultural studies as a 'mother discipline'. Game studies proves itself to be a strong force, especially in its productive use of political economy to analyse games and gaming as a (new) cultural form. B…
The think-tank of American cultural studies
After the Break: Television Theory Today
Sleeping with the enemy: Audience studies and critical literacy
Audience studies is not the vibrant field it was in its 1980s and early 1990s heyday. Cultural studies today has a more balanced interest in production, audiences and texts. A renewed focus in audience studies on everyday meaning production, identity and relations of power could benefit from recent developments. Theorization of power especially has benefited from recent work on governmentality. In accord with recent work on ‘affect’, there is an …
Labour and passion: Introduction to themed section
In this introduction to the themed section on ‘Labour and passion’, it is argued that work has bled into all areas of life. Political economists and media production researchers have shown how both paid and unpaid labour are singularly important and build upon one another. The set of articles presented here is the precursor to a general issue on Media and Passion (to be published later). It is the result of the same invitation. The articles can b…
We have given up so much’: Passion and denial in the Dutch Zwarte Piet (Black Pete) controversy
Forceful debate has erupted in the Netherlands over the celebration of Sinterklaas in the 2010s. Sinterklaas festivities revolve around December 5 and the giving of presents, mostly to children. The debate centres around the figure of Sinterklaas’s helper Zwarte Piet (Black Pete). While an object of criticism for its implied racism (Zwarte Piet sports an Afro hairdo, blackface, full red lips and big golden hoops) for over half a century, the curr…
Passion: Introduction to Special Issue
There is a dark side to passion: a black heart, something malicious and not to be trusted. This Special Issue1 looks at the tensions between the positive and particularly the negative connotations of passion. This is the kind of passion where an adoring fan can become a menacing stalker. Or a ritual December celebration turns into a contested site of race relations. Often, when we think of media and passion, the first things that come to mind con…
This is My Life: The Stories of Independent Workers in the Creative Industries in the Netherlands
The new precariat or free agents? Two powerful stories dominate discussion of labour in what are now called the creative industries. A policy invention, the creative industries in the Netherlands combine media, the arts, cultural heritage and creative business services as a new top sector, expected to boost the national income. A large number of workers in the creative industries do so freelance, or as the Dutch have it as Independents without Pe…
Sociology (38 works) · Political science (29 works) · Media studies (24 works) · Law (21 works) · Art (18 works) · Politics (18 works) · Aesthetics (17 works) · Gender Studies (15 works) · Psychology (15 works) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (12 works)