Introduction to Part III: Context Analyses and Conflict Zone Methodologies

Summary

In an effort to explain why the audience members interpreted Sesame Street in the manner they did, in Part III I ground their responses in the multi-sited ethnographies I conducted within each of the ethno-political grouping community contexts, moving beyond my analysis relating their reception to inter-“group” stereotypes and attitudes. I link the children to their specific communities of residence and discuss how the glocalization of interstate systemic forces at that level socialized them and, in turn, how their everyday lives became quietly and discretely reshaped by their respective conflict zones, altering their readings of the text. This allows me to elaborate on what the resultant segmented audience decodings tell us about their Palestinian, Jewish Israeli and Arab/Palestinian Israeli cultures-in-the-making, and trace the pathways that altered their interpretations and why, as well as to offer redesign recommendations.