[2] Professor Press' second book coauthored with Elizabeth R. Cole, Speaking of Abortion: Television and Authority in the Lives of Women, examines women's reactions to a television about abortion using “ethnographic focus groups.” [3] As Nina Eliasoph noted in a review in the American Journal of Sociology, this research has broad interdisciplinary appeal, “For scholars of morality, gender, class, and media reception, the book’s intensive and clever use of interview material offers many provocative and thoughtful challenges.”[4]: 234 In addition to several recent articles, in 2010, Professor Press and coauthor Professor Bruce Williams published The New Media Environment: What’s New, What’s Not?
Her forthcoming book CINEMA AND FEMINISM: A QUICK IMMERSION addresses issues of the portrayal and development of feminist thought in popular Hollywood film.
Andrea Press' intellectual concerns center on the nature of culture and the way people appropriate and recreate its meanings.
Media reception provides an idea site for examining the production and reproduction of a popular culture marked by gender and class distinctions.
Press develops and refines a qualitative, interpretive methodology for studying the active reception of popular cultural forms and for examining the role of gender and class in this process, drawing insights from several disciplines such as anthropology, philosophy, literature, and political theory.
Its proponents tend to downplay evidence of limits to the critical content of viewer interpretations, which her interviews illustrate.
Press extends and elaborates her work investigating interpretive television reception for the female audience in a second book, Speaking of Abortion: Television and Authority in the Lives of Women (University of Chicago), co-authored with Elizabeth Cole, currently the Associate Dean of Faculty at the University of Michigan.
In the book, Press and Cole examine non-activist women's discourse about abortion, which has been slighted in a literature focusing primarily on activists.
In particular, they examine how women's views on abortion are formed in dialogue with, and against the background of, mass media discourse about the issue.
With this methodology, Press and Cole amend traditional focus groups in an ethnographic direction, to approximate more fully the setting in which television is most often watched, and the type of public discussion in which women most often engage: they asked each group to discuss the issue of abortion, and then to view and interpret, collectively, a selected fictional television show about the issue.
Press and Cole argue in this book that the public sphere for women is not absent, but exists in realms largely unexamined by current scholarship.
They address the way the private realm often serves as a setting for formulating and expressing contending views about public issues, the role of television in that forum, and the particular form this debate takes for women.
In this respect, the study expands the theoretical tradition established by the many feminist scholars who have challenged traditional definitions of the public/private distinction (Philosopher Nancy Fraser, historians Joan Scott and Linda Gordon, and political theorists Iris Young and Jean Elshtain, to name just a few).
In this study, Press and Cole focus on non-activist women, many of whom do not fall neatly into either opinion camp, or into the conventional definition of political actors; and, building on Press' earlier study, they emphasize the social class differences which divide the interpretations and self-conceptions of women.
Press' new projects continue her exploration of the role culture plays in the way women formulate, express, and live their identities.
Audiences Create Meaning Across Platforms Press and Tripodi draw on focus group data and textual analysis to explore the impact of second wave feminism on current thought about a series of issues including women's body image; sexuality; the "double standard"; work-family balance; and reproductive rights.
Press' pieces in Slate [1] and in the Chronicle of Higher Education [2], both co-edited with Francesca Tripodi, engage issues of feminism and sexism in the online community.
In addition to Press' theoretical interests, questions about the epistemological potential of qualitative and ethnographic methodology in communication studies have long been of concern in her writing and research.