Ask the audience: television, security and Homeland

ABSTRACT

This article puts forward a synthesis of work from Security Studies and Cultural Studies in order to trace the link between popular culture and security. This analysis contributes to the growing research in Critical Security Studies on the role of popular culture in the representation and reproduction of terrorism, security, and identity. It brings in approaches from Television Studies to Critical Terrorism Studies to theorise the process of meaning creation for audiences of terrorism shows on television. This synthesis enables an original contribution to the conceptualisation, theorisation, and methodology of the study of terrorism discourse, which allows me to draw together and operationalise the growing concerns with identity, emotions, and the everyday in Security Studies. It brings in examples from an analysis that applied this approach to an analysis of the television series Homeland, which considers both the meaning within Homeland and the process of meaning making by members of the show’s British audience. Using data gathered in focus groups, it shows how viewers read, reproduce, and resist the dominant narratives within the text demonstrating the utility of audience studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Popular culture
• television
• audience
• Homeland
• cultural studies
• narrative

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. These citation details apply to, but are not included for, all subsequent mentions of Homeland.

Additional information

Funding

This research was undertaken as part of an ESRC funded PhD.

Notes on contributors

Louise Pears

Louise Pears has recently submitted her doctoral thesis at the University of Leeds, and has begun working as a Research Fellow in the Security and Justice Research Group at Leeds University. Her PhD research looked at the negotiation of race, gender, and nation in terrorism TV. Prior to this, she completed an MA in Gender Research at the University of Leeds, an MSc in Gender and International Relations at the University of Bristol, and an MA (cantab) in Social Political Sciences at the University of Cambridge.