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Adele Clarke's Situational Analysis and Its Potential for Popular Music Studies

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  • Authors: Daniel Suer and Florian Heesch
  • Source: The Intellect Handbook of Popular Music Methodologies , pp 256-275
  • Publication Date: June 2025
  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1386/9781835951033_17
  • Language: English
  • Accessibility Summary:  EPUB 3 and pdf file included; compatible with devices and software which can read these formats. Adjustable font size, spacing, contrast, text justification, number of columns (ePUB only). Alternative text for images. Tagged with a logical reading order to assist screen readers. Navigation between in-text citations and reference list, and endnotes and endnote markers.

This chapter discusses Adele Clarke's Situational Analysis (SitA) and interweaves an overview of SitA's basics with an evaluation of its potential for popular music studies. It introduces SitA's notion of ‘situation’ and its main analytic strategy of mapping through situational maps, social worlds/arenas maps, and positional maps. These facilitate the systematic analysis of relations between a situation's elements. Hence, SitA provides a relational ecology that situates musical artefacts and practices in relation to a variety of actors and actants, temporal and spatial aspects, discourses, and ideologies. These components are all illustrated by providing a hands-on situational analysis of metal dance practices during the COVID-19 pandemic. The chapter closes by elaborating SitA's benefits to popular music studies more generally, focusing on the integration of music into situational mapping and on SitA's capacity to overcome the text-context divide.

Keywords: Circle pits ; Co-constitution ; COVID-19 pandemic ; Mapping ; Metal music ; Popular dance ; Qualitative-empirical research ; Relationality ; Situation ; Text-context divide

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Adele Clarke's Situational Analysis and Its Potential for Popular Music Studies
Intellect , 256 (2025); https://doi.org/10.1386/9781835951033_17
/content/books/9781835951033.c15
/content/books/9781835951033.c15
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References

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References

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  2. Berger, Harris M. (1999), Metal, Rock, and Jazz: Perception and the Phenomenology of Musical Experience, Music/Culture, Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press and University Press of New England.
     [Google Scholar]
  3. Blumer, Herbert (1986), Symbolic Interactionism, Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles, CA and London: University of California Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  4. Bohlman, Philip V. (2003), ‘Music and culture: Historiographies of disjuncture’, in M. Clayton , T. Herbert and R. Middleton (eds), The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, New York: Routledge, pp. 45–56.
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  6. Charmaz, Kathy (2006), Constructing Grounded Theory: A Practical Guide through Qualitative Analysis, Introducing Qualitative Methods, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi: Sage Publishing.
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  7. Christe, Ian (2003), Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal, New York: It Books.
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  8. Clarke, Adele E. (2003), ‘Situational analyses: Grounded theory mapping after the postmodern turn’, Symbolic Interaction, 26:4, pp. 553–76.
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  9. Clarke, Adele E. (2005), Situational Analysis: Grounded Theory after the Postmodern Turn, Thousand Oaks, CA, London and New Delhi: Sage Publishing.
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  10. Clarke, Adele E. , Friese, Carrie and Washburn, Rachel (eds) (2015), Situational Analysis in Practice: Mapping Research with Grounded Theory, Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
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  12. Clarke, Adele E. and Keller, Reiner (2014), ‘Engaging complexities: Working against simplification as an agenda for qualitative research today. Adele Clarke in conversation with Reiner Keller’, Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 15:2, n.pag., https://doi.org/10.17169/fqs-15.2.2186.
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  14. Clayton, Martin , Herbert, Trevor and Middleton, Richard (eds) (2012), The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, 2nd ed., New York and London: Routledge.
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  16. DeNora, Tia (2003), After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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  17. Dong Open Air Official Website (2020), ‘The rules of the Moshbox’, 28 July, https://www.dongopenair.de/en/news/post/the-rules-of-the-moshbox. Accessed 2 August 2022 .
  18. du Gay, Paul, Hall, Stuart, Janes, Linda, Koed Madsen, Anders, Mackay, Hugh and Negus, Keith (2013), Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman, 2nd ed., Los Angeles and Milton Keynes: Sage and The Open University.
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     [Google Scholar]
  20. Encyclopaedia Metallum (2022), ‘Rules & guidelines’, Encyclopaedia Metallum: The Metal Archives, 30 May, https://www.metal-archives.com/content/rules. Accessed 11 August 2022 .
  21. Finnegan, Ruth (1989), The Hidden Musicians: Music-Making in an English Town, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  22. Goffman, Erving (1964), ‘The neglected situation’, American Anthropologist, Special Issue: ‘The Ethnography of Communication’, 66:6, pp. 133–36.
     [Google Scholar]
  23. Göllner, Michael and Niessen, Anne (2021), ‘Potenziale der Situationsanalyse nach A. E. Clarke für qualitative musikpädagogische Studien’, Beiträge empirischer Musikpädagogik, 12, pp. 1–18.
     [Google Scholar]
  24. Haraway, Donna (1988), ‘Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective’, Feminist Studies, 14:3, pp. 575–99.
     [Google Scholar]
  25. Heesch, Florian and Suer, Daniel (2025), ‘Dances with tables: Materialities of dance practices in metal during COVID-19’, in S. Schroedter (ed.), Music in Motion: Interweaving of Artistic Practice & Theory, Bielefeld and Vienna: transcript and mdw-press.
     [Google Scholar]
  26. HMHTVchannel (2020), ‘Dong Open Air Moshbox 2020’, YouTube, 4 August, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFBneB8_e8c. Accessed 2 August 2022 .
  27. Just, Steffen (2019), ‘Musikanalyse als Mediendispositivanalyse: Perspektiven einer Neuorientierung für die Popmusikforschung’, in R. v. Appen and M. Dunkel (eds), (Dis-)Orienting Sounds: Machtkritische Perspektiven auf populäre Musik, Beiträge zur Popularmusikforschung, Bielefeld: transcript, pp. 187–209.
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  28. Kahn-Harris, Keith (2007), Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge, Oxford and New York: Berg.
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  29. Kenny, Ailbhe (2016), Communities of Musical Practice, SEMPRE Studies in the Psychology of Music, New York and London: Routledge.
     [Google Scholar]
  30. Korsyn, Kevin (2003), Decentering Music: A Critique of Contemporary Musical Research, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  31. Lempert, Lora Bex (2007), ‘Asking questions of the data: Memo writing in the grounded theory tradition’, in A. Bryant and K. Charmaz (eds), The Sage Handbook of Grounded Theory, Sage Handbooks, Los Angeles, CA, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC, MD: Sage, pp. 245–64.
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  32. Middleton, Richard (1990), Studying Popular Music, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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  33. Petri-Preis, Axel (2022), Musikvermittlung lernen: Analysen und Empfehlungen zur Aus- und Weiterbildung von Musiker_innen, Forum Musikvermittlung – Perspektiven aus Forschung und Praxis, Bielefeld: transcript.
     [Google Scholar]
  34. Shepherd, John (1991), Music as Social Text, Cambridge: Polity Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  35. Strübing, Jörg (2018), ‘Situationsanalyse: Eine pragmatistische Erweiterung der Grounded Theory unter dem Eindruck der Postmoderne’, in L. Akremi , N. Baur , H. Knoblauch and B. Traue (eds), Handbuch Interpretativ Forschen, Grundlagentexte Methoden, Weinheim and Basel: Beltz Juventa, pp. 681–706.
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  36. Varas-Díaz, Nelson (2021), Decolonial Metal Music in Latin America, Advances in Metal Music and Culture, Bristol and Chicago, IL: Intellect.
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  37. Weinstein, Deena (2000), Heavy Metal: The Music and Its Culture, 2nd ed., Boulder, CO: Da Capo Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  38. Wenger, Etienne (1998), Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity, Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive, and Computational Perspectives, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  39. Wenger-Trayner, Etienne and Wenger-Trayner, Beverly (2015), ‘Introduction to communities of practice: A brief overview of the concept and its uses’, Wenger-Trayner, 15 April, https://wenger-trayner.com/introduction-to-communities-of-practice/. Accessed 11 August 2022 .

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