Ien Ang

Ien Ang
Born	17 June 1954 Surabaya, Indonesia
Academic background
School or tradition	Cultural Studies
Academic work
Main interests	media, cultural consumption, audiences, identity politics

May Ien Ang (born 1954) is Professor of Cultural Studies at the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Western Sydney (UWS), Australia, where she was the founding director and is currently an ARC Professorial Fellow. She is also a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Born in Java, but raised and educated in the Netherlands, Ang received her Doctorate in the Social and Cultural Sciences, from the University of Amsterdam in 1990. She is among the global leaders in cultural studies. Her work focuses on media and cultural consumption, the study of media audiences, identity politics, nationalism and globalisation, migration and ethnicity, and issues of representation in contemporary cultural institutions. In 2001 she was awarded the Centenary Medal 'for service to Australian society and the humanities in cultural research'.

Her writing encompasses contemporary Asia and the changing new world (dis)order, Australia-Asia relations, as well as theoretical and methodological issues. She is a prominent public commentator in Australia and a member of the Council of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Ang relies heavily on the use qualitative case studies to illustrate her research instead of using quantitative methods to analyse audiences as was popular. Her first book Watching Dallas relied on the letters of 42 Dutch viewers of the popular television soap Dallas. Ang writes of her analytical method for the letters; they "cannot be taken at face value, 'they should be read 'symptomatically': we must search for what is behind the explicitly written, for the presuppositions and accepted attitudes concealed within them. In other words the letters must be regarded as texts, as discourses people produce when they want to express or have to account for their own preference…" Furthermore, Ang does not attempt to generalise or triangulate the cases study to apply it to other cases instead arguing that it was sufficient to illustrate the audience response to Dallas in this instance alone, a style which is increasing in popularity. Ang pioneered this method whilst other practitioners were developing pseudo scientific models to apply to the social sciences, Louise Spence a fellow soap opera researcher, praises Ang's methodological style: “She had to redefine the position of the analyst and the language of analysis, challenging the once-dominant ideal of a detached observer using neutral language to describe ‘brute facts’, demystifying the idea of any strict separation of theory and data. Her effort reminds us that researchers are neither innocent nor omniscient”

...
Wikipedia