A Puzzle Constantly Changing Itself: Cultural Studies in the 21st Century A review of (original) (raw)
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Cultural Studies Review, 2020
Two prevailing inflections of ‘persistence’ occupy the social imagination. In the first, generally considered the domain of toddlers, journalists and telemarketers, persistence comes as something troublesome, incessant, and largely irritating. In the other, persistence is held as a virtue; a capacity maintained by those capable of ‘seeing things through’. Each version of the term may well share a common foundation (hanging on too long can, after all, descend to irritation), but either way, persistence is a capacity that declares its presence; a signifier of the ‘stuff’ of its bearer, and the nature of the situation. Persistence notifies the intention that whatever may come is here to stay. I want to outline two visions of Cultural Studies in light of these inflections of persistence in order to pose questions of what it is that Cultural Studies should hope to achieve in a world grown precarious. In extension to recent, notable expressions that have surveyed this consideration1, I make the point that Cultural Studies needs to be a little more careful in how it continues to understand itself, and perhaps more crucially, how it should continue to imagine its ‘project’. What I mean by this is that, in this current moment of direct challenge to all that seems reasonable and rational, from multiple angles both within the University (as the primary site of Cultural Studies’ practice; we are institutionalised, after all) and those wider publics from which we claim we speak, it is with the persistence of troubling ways of doing things that Cultural Studies has customarily identified a primary purpose.
Interrogating Cultural Studies
INTERROGATING CULTURAL STUDIES Contents Acknowledgements Contributors Introduction: Interrogating Cultural Studies Section One: From Cultural Studies Catherine Belsey: From Cultural Studies to Cultural Criticism? Mieke Bal: From Cultural Studies to Cultural Analysis: ‘a controlled reflection on the formation of method’ Martin McQuillan: The Projection of Cultural Studies Section Two: Cultural Studies (&) Philosophy Simon Critchley: Why I Love Cultural Studies Chris Norris: Two Cheers for Cultural Studies: A Philosopher’s View Section Three: For Cultural Studies Adrian Rifkin: Inventing Recollection Griselda Pollock: Becoming Cultural Studies: the Daydream of the Political Section Four: What Cultural Studies Jeremy Gilbert: Friends and Enemies: Which Side is Cultural Studies On? Julian Wolfreys: …as if such a thing existed… Section Five: Positioning Cultural Studies John Mowitt: Cultural Studies, in Theory Jeremy Valentine: The Subject Position of Cultural Studies: Is There A Problem? Steven Connor: What Can Cultural Studies Do? Section Six: Against Cultural Studies Thomas Docherty: responses Lynette Hunter: unruly fugues Index
What it is and what it isn't: Introducing…Cultural Studies
A Companion to Cultural Studies, 2000
Cultural studies is magnetic. 1 It accretes various tendencies that are splintering the human sciences: Marxism, feminism, queer theory, and the postcolonial. Thè`c ultural'' has become a``master-trope'' in the humanities, blending and blurring textual analysis of popular culture with social theory, and focusing on the margins of power rather than reproducing established lines of force and authority (Czaplicka et al. 1995: 3). In place of focusing on canonical works of art, governmental leadership, or quantitative social data, cultural studies devotes time to subcultures, popular media, music, clothing, and sport. By looking at how culture is used and transformed by``ordinary'' and``marginal'' social groups, cultural studies sees people not simply as consumers, but as potential producers of new social values and cultural languages. This amounts to a comprehensive challenge to academic business as usual. And the investment in the popular makes waves in the extramural world, too, as the humanities' historic task of criticizing entertainment is sidestepped and new commercial trends become part of cultural studies itself. Cultural studies is a tendency across disciplines, rather than a discipline itself. This is evident in practitioners' simultaneously expressed desires to: refuse definition, insist on differentiation, and sustain conventional departmental credentials (as well as pyrotechnic, polymathematical capacities for reasoning and research). Cultural studies' continuities come from shared concerns and methods: the concern is the reproduction of culture through structural determinations on subjects versus their own agency, and the method is historical materialism (Morrow 1995: 3, 6). Cultural studies is animated by subjectivity and power ± how human subjects are formed and how they experience cultural and social space. It takes its agenda and mode of analysis from economics, politics, media and communication studies, sociology, literature, education, the law, science and technology studies, anthropology, and history, with a particular focus on gender, race, class, and sexuality in everyday life, commingling textual and social theory under the sign of a commitment to progressive social change.
Cultural studies: Crossing borders, defending distinctions
International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2020
What and where is cultural studies today? What is it becoming? What should or could it become? What is its meaning? What is at stake as we assess the ongoing development and maturation of cultural studies as field? The International Journal of Cultural Studies is soliciting provocative answers to these and related questions, from a range of scholars internationally. We will publish their responses as an ongoing series, across multiple issues.
Pedagogy is foundational to cultural studies. At the very outset cultural studies positioned pedagogy as significantly more than just formalised and institutionally-centred activations of teaching and learning. For cultural studies, pedagogy is witnessed in the social practices, relationships, routines and life-ways that people engage in the living of lives. This collection presents accounts that move beyond simple (and simplistic) articulations of pedagogy as occurring solely within the classroom. Taking the Self, the disciplinary formations and institutional settings of cultural studies as its sites of activation, The Pedagogies of Cultural Studies seeks to look again at the implications presented by pedagogy and the foundation that pedagogy provides for doing cultural studies. Evident not only in the objects of study prefigured by cultural studies but also in the practice of the discipline itself, pedagogy mediates cultural studies' disciplinary terrain and the signatures that shape its conduct.
Cultural Studies in Canada: Past, Present and Future
One of the problems of identifying and describing what constitutes the field of Canadian cultural studies is that, in practice, cultural studies would itself raise an alarm about the presumptions and conceptual problems guiding such a project. Rather than assume a clear and neatly defined area of scholarly inquiry that takes place within an equally clearly defined geographical area-the fiction guiding all forms of area and nation-specific studies-cultural studies would draw attention to the mistakes, limits, and problems of imagining a national culture, national-cultural movement, or an intellectual heritage delimited by transient and necessarily artificial political borders. Cultural studies would point instead to the ways in which sites and fields of analysis are always already connected to numerous other spaces of invention and creation, whether local, regional, or national. It would draw attention to the ways in which researchers in Canada who are engaged in the interdisciplinary critical analysis of culture and of the relations between culture and power-what defines cultural studies at its core-make use of conceptual antecedents and intellectual heirs with origins around the world, primarily (though not exclusively) in the English-language academic traditions of the United States and Britain, German philosophy and social sciences, and French sciences humaines. Cultural studies would point to the major divide that still exists in the approaches to the study of culture and power in the anglophone and francophone academy, as well as to the growing influence and impact of First Nations writing and theory within Canada. And it would attend to the very real significance of the belated development of cultural studies in Canada, which has tended to undercut a specifically Canadian contribution to cultural studies, and which has meant that cultural studies north of the 49th parallel is very similar to that practiced south of that line: "a highly disaggregated field composed of several dozen relatively autonomous subfields, whose numbers seemed ready to increase … an accepted term of convenience for all kinds of OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF -FIRSTPROOFS, Wed Jun 10 2015, NEWGEN Sugars060315OUS.indb 110 6/10/2015 8:35:48 PM
Cultural Studies and its Politics: Theory and Practice
Marxism has long been implicitly involved in breaking down barriers between...domains (culture from social and economic and political relations) making each a site of interpretive activityby politicizing interpretive and cultural practices, by looking at economic determinations of cultural production, by radically historicizing our understanding of signifying practices, and by continuing to revise and enlarge a body of theory with multidisciplinary implications. i
From Cultural Studies to Cultural Research: Engaged Scholarship in the Twenty-first Century
Cultural Studies Review, 2011
Is, or should cultural studies be, a discipline or not? What exactly is its object? Should cultural studies be focused on influencing policy or be an agent of critique? What is the role of theory? What kind of theory? Should textual analysis or ethnography predominate? The regular reiteration of such questions reveals an ongoing sense of crisis, a general apprehensiveness over the question whether cultural studies is able to live up to its own self-declared aspirations, both intellectually and politically.