Despite a number of retrospective works on cultural studies, to date no
other book dedicates itself to the historical and theoretical
examination of British cultural studies' engagement with the active
audience theory of the Birmingham School and its legacies. However, this
book is no mere reconstruction of active audience theory as Huimin Jin
develops new theoretical insights initially through a critical review of
Stuart Hall's classical model of encoding/decoding and close readings of
David Morley's groundbreaking ethnographic audience studies. Questioning
the discourse model of the active audience proposed by Hall and Morley,
Jin elaborates a new materialistic concept of audiences for the
twenty-first century.