HUMAN INQUIRY AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES COMS 441: CULTURAL STUDIES IN COMMUNICATIONS surveys the majorapproaches to the study of human communication in the Critical Theory and Cultural Studies traditions, including (a) ideology critique, (b) political economy, (c) ethnography, and (d) narrative inquiry, with a view to understanding how meaning orunderstanding is produced and reproduced in our society. We consider the theoretical and the methodological issues at the heart of the field, emphasizing the intellectual context in which the scholars we study developed these research approaches and apply them to specific cultural texts and a ctivities. This unit offers an introduction to the course, starting with a review of a number of truisms about "inquiry" and "knowing," themes that run through the course. Ultimately, our goal is to understand how selected scholars working in the Critical Theory and the Cultural Studies traditions came to "know" and to "explain" the social and cultural phenomena they studied. We then focus on distinguishing quantitative research from qualitative research. In this way we will sharpen our skills, making us more conscious, rigorous, and explicit in ourinquiries. SOME TRUISMS 1. Inqui ry is a natural human activi ty; that is, pe ople seek a gene ral under stand ing about the world around them. We recognize that present circumstances affect future circumstances. We learn that getting an education will determine the amount of money we earn later in life. 2. Much of what we kn ow we kno w by agre ement --rath er than b y exper ience. That is, we inherit a culture made up, in part, of accepted knowledge about the way the world works. (Our culture tells us who we are, so that we know where to go.) We learn from others that eating too much candy ruins our teeth. We learn from others that, by studying hard, people do well in their exams. We test some of the "truths," but accept the majority as things "everybody knows." 3. By accep ting wha t everyb ody knows, we save ourselves t he task of st artin g from scratch. Tradition and authority are important sources of understanding. But tradition can be detrimental to human inquiry. If we seek a fresh understanding of something everybody already understands, we may be called fools. By the same token, authority can hinder human inquiry. We do well to trust the judgment of people who have special training and expertise in particular matters, especially in the face of contradictory positions, but sometimes experts err. 4. The key to inquiry is observation. We can never understand the way things work without first having something to understand. Understanding through
