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22 Consuming Media

With its emphasis on ethnographic methods, the Passages project can be seen as a
continuation of the ‘ethnographic turn’ in media and cultural studies from the late
1980s, when reception studies began to use ethnographic interviews to explore media
use and interpretation as expressions of cultural identity. 57 By selecting a specific
place as the location of the study, we had also created a context or ‘field’ that
demanded, in addition to interviews, other forms of observation and documentation.
It seemed at the time a natural choice to integrate participant observation, interviews
and photography among our research tools. Many, but not all, of us had previous
experience doing fieldwork using ethnographic methods.
Ethnographic research is, however, rarely conducted as a collective process. In this
sense, the Passages project is unusual in its ethnographic approach to its field.
Fieldwork was collective; even if a researcher made an individual trip to the field, the
field notes and photographs were shared and often discussed with the research group
as a whole. We developed a common set of practices for transcribing and cataloguing
field notes and interviews in order to make them mutually accessible, and made
suggestions from our own observations that would complement, or sometimes
contradict a colleague’s experience from the field. We planned routines and strategies
together, discussed problems we had encountered of both practical and ethical
nature, compared our maps of the shopping centre, and occasionally made field visits
together. This intense collaboration was not without its problems, many of a prac-
tical nature, such as coordinating busy schedules, or sharing the extensive photo-
graphic documentation, which proved far more difficult than exchanging field notes.
Collective efforts also extended into the interpretation and analysis of the material.
We drew on each other’s field notes and interviews in our writing and discussions, and
shared literature. We found common threads and contradictions that we realized carried
meaning for the relationships and connections between different levels of analysis. The
regular meetings and the often lively discussions that arose were instrumental for tying
specific observations from the field into larger analytical structures, and vice versa, for
finding specific examples that supported or contradicted the theoretical framework we
were building. Again, there were inescapable problems. Some voices tended to weigh
more than others in the group, and it would be naïve to claim the collaboration was non-
hierarchical. In practice, one can see a parallel in the distinction between multi- and
cross-disciplinary research in the nature of the collaboration within the Passages project.
On the one hand, each researcher made specific and clearly defined contributions to the
project, at the same time that the results were in many cases a synthesis of insights from
several members of the group. Through a process of research triangulation, the project
produced a body of shared experience, knowledge and texts.
In retrospect, we can trace the fluctuating geographical boundaries of our field in
a series of steps, corresponding roughly to the project’s three main phases. During the
first background stage, we visited other malls in the Stockholm area, writing field
descriptions and photographing them, which cast light on the research we later did
in Solna. Field visits to local shopping centres were complemented by observations
from other cities in Europe and the US, ranging from the classic old arcades of