I am an LSE Fellow in the Department of Media and Communications. I jointly lecture on the Media Audiences course (MC402) and the Methods course (MC4M1), and I am leading seminars on the MC421 course in the Media, Communication and Development strand. I will supervise MSc students on topics including media audiences, Japan and East Asia, popular music and generational uses of media. Prior to my current appointment, I completed my PhD in the Department of Media and Communications at the LSE while teaching at the LSE100 course and MC Labs, as well as guest lecturing about music audiences outside the LSE. I also did various consultancy work for research projects funded by, among others, BBC, Nominet Trust, and the MacArthur Foundation.
In my research I have been interested in the critical approach, the co-evolution of media audiences and media institutions, as well as in innovative, critical, qualitative methods of academic inquiry. My doctoral thesis is an empirical analysis of Japanese audience engagements in a social and cultural context and an attempt to theoretically reformulate the concept of audience practices for both Japanese studies as well as audience and music studies. My previous research at Tohoku University critically approached the concept of ordinariness and youth values in popular song content.
Specifically, in my research I discuss the nature, quality and implications of audience engagements with popular music in everyday life. My doctoral thesis looked historically at two post-war Japanese generations and analysed their practices and interpretations of music encounters through a qualitative, mixed-method approach. I have argued that listening to music is a complex social practice whose significance has been undervalued in audience research. Following the legacy of audience studies, I have proposed an account of music listening in terms of audience engagements linked to institutions, texts, contexts, performances and authorship. I have argued that concepts of proximity (cultural proximity and the proximity between performers and audiences) inform and update the circuit of culture model, offering new insight into modes of engagement and production processes. Following on this, I have mapped meanings and emotions into media practices and included social and cultural dimensions in the concept of ‘practice’, arguing that to understand the role of music in everyday life we need to analyse it through sets of interactive relations of texts, meanings and emotions; production and receptions; the personal, the social and the cultural. I have also argued that nuanced co-evolution between production and reception processes challenges linear accounts of media reception and requires a dynamic, interlinked model to investigate further.
In my current research I remain interested in music reception and empirical inquiries into social practices of listening and generational engagements with music media. I am fascinated by media engagements as cultural and social practices and I try to understand how generational positions affect work and leisure. Parallel to that, I am also extending my research area to East Asia to compare processes of production, circulation and reception between Japan, South Korea and Taiwan (among others). While these regions have sometimes been presented as challenges to the Western, hegemonic model of cultural industries, the empirical investigation of the area is still scarce. Finally, based on my current data, and enhancing it with a more focused empirical investigation of gender perceptions, I am also investigating representation and gender performance in Japanese popular songs.
Zaborowski, R. (2016) “Hatsune Miku and Japanese virtual idols”, in S. Whiteley and S. Rambarran (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Music and Virtuality, New York: Oxford University Press.
Zaborowski, R. (ed.) (in press) “Audiences and their musics: New approaches”, special issue ofNetworking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA-PGN, Vol 8(3), 2016.
Zaborowski, R. and Dhaenens, F. (in press) “Reception of what? Approaches to the concept in recent audience studies”, Participations, 12(2).
Zaborowski, R. (2012) “‘Simple unchanging stories about things we already know’: Japanese youth and popular songs”, Participations, 9(2).
Zaborowski, R. (2008) “American Japan–Japanese America”, review of Japanamerica: How Japanese pop culture has invaded the U.S. by R. Kelts, Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies.