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DOI: 10.1177/0196859900024003002 Beyond Cultural Populism: Notes Toward the Critical Ethnography of Media AudiencesIn recent years, a backlash has been brewing against populist approaches to media and cultural studies that celebrate the ability of subcultural audiences to produce divergent or resistive readings of mass media texts. And rightly so. The decade of the 1980s produced a host of critical media studies that were marred, as Morley argues, by a facile insistence on the polysemy of media products and an undocumented claim that interpretive creativity constitutes a powerful form of political resistance. Building on this critique of cultural populism, this article argues that critical audience should refocus its attention on how macrostructures of power pattern, constrain, and are often reproduced within audience interpretations of media texts. In the end, the article presents a model of audience ethnography based on Geertz's notion of thick description, and argues that this model can productively investigate the relationship between powerful social structures and the practice of media consumption in everyday life.
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