| Andrea L. Press Research Associate Professor of Communications, Associate Professor of Speech
Communication Primary areas of interest: Feminist cultural studies; critical theory;
sociology of media audiences; feminist theory and methodology; epistemological foundations
of qualitative and feminist social science methodologies. Professor Press is interested in
the intersection of feminist and other critical theoretical traditions, particularly as
each bear on the investigation of media influence in contemporary cultural life.
She teaches both graduate and undergraduate courses which draw on
these traditions and investigate questions about the interweaving of the mass media with
modern cultural traditions. In particular, she is interested in the philosophical
foundations of contemporary cultural studies, the intellectual and epistemological
foundations of qualitative methodologies in the social sciences, and the emerging
tradition of feminist cultural studies.
Her own work has focused on the qualitative study of female
television audiences. Her first book, Women Watching Television (University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1991) was based on interviews with working-class and middle-class
women of different generations about entertainment television they had watched. Her
forthcoming book, Speaking of Abortion: Television Women's Talk and the Discourse of
Authority (University of Chicago Press), co-authored with psychologist Elizabeth
Cole, is based on focus-group interviews with pro-life and pro-choice women of different
social classes about abortion and television. She has also written on issues related to
the research process itself, in particular about trends in current feminist theory, the
issue of "feminist" research methodology, and more generally about traditions in
the sociological study of audiences. Ph.D., Sociology, University of California-Berkeley |
