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competencies and putting them in joint motion. We needed specific capacities for
deciphering specific media circuits, and we also needed combinations of historical,
social and aesthetic perspectives. Third, we had to go against the grain of standard
divisions in media research between producers, texts and publics. We knew that we
had to deconstruct the strict line between production and consumption, as well as
that between text and context.
All this was a great methodological challenge, forcing us to elaborate an innovative
‘intersectional ethnography’. The current discourses on intersectional identity forma-
tions emphasize how dimensions like class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality,
age and generation co-constitute each other and are always interlinked. We shared
that perspective and expanded it onto other dimensions as well. Our intersectional
ethnography was thus devised to overcome the common isolation of production from
consumption, of media texts from spatial contexts, of media circuits from each other,
of archival research from field studies, of social categories, and of academic disci-
plines. This could not be done by just lumping everything together, but had to be
carefully engineered to make the resulting insights really useful.
We drew inspiration for this collective, cross-disciplinary effort from several
sources. One was the classical Frankfurt School of critical theory, where dialogic
forms of inquiry were crucial. Another was cultural studies, where the Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham in the 1960s and 1970s developed
collaborative research in working groups that crossed and combined perspectives
from a range of disciplines. A third strand of inspiration was even closer at hand,
namely the Nordic tradition of alternative or popular education, including study
circles at various levels, but also the Nordic Summer University, which since its foun-
dation in 1950 has offered young academics an alternative public sphere for
pioneering projects and discussions. As individuals, we could all add our own experi-
ences of collaborative research work.
We built a reference group of respected researchers serving as a sounding board at
the project’s annual seminars, and added co-researchers to supplement the compe-
tences of the initial research group with specialists from media and cultural studies,
comparative literature, economic history, ethnology, social anthropology and ethno-
musicology. We expected these disciplinary perspectives to complement each other
and, more importantly, to contribute to a synthesis of new methodological and the-
oretical insights, relevant to the place and phenomenon we were studying. Whereas
multidisciplinary research assumes an additive model of research collaboration, we
had as our goal to challenge the borders between our respective disciplines and in so
doing develop new perspectives and syntheses between the fields we represented.
Rather than a summation of knowledge from our respective backgrounds, we aimed
to develop something new in the ‘crossover’ spaces between the collaborating areas of
work. In order to stimulate these trans- or interdisciplinary syntheses, we held
monthly meetings to discuss the research and texts we were reading and writing, and
made our research materials available to each other. All field notes, interviews and
images went into a common ‘bank’ of information to which we all had access.

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