The End of Cultural Studies?
The so-called “teaching” panel at last week’s CSAA conference was high-jacked by discussions about the disciplinary position of cultural studies in Australia and New Zealand. It was a pity, because the relation of teaching to research in the academy is important, but obviously people wanted to talk about the related issue of disciplinary relevance.
The discussion started with Angi Buettner demonstrating that as a discipline, cultural studies does not exist in New Zealand: rather, all institutions offer media studies at the undergraduate level. This was followed up by Chris Healy talking about the positioning of cultural studies at Uni Melbourne. I want to engage with this discussion, and hope that others will share their perspectives, because I’m feeling very pessimistic about the future of CS, and I hope I’m wrong. So please leave a comment.
I see the apparent decline in CS as due to three main forces. The first is the move towards vocationalism: as much as we may decry it, undergraduates want a job at the end of their degrees, and the more focused “media studies”—especially if coupled with some practical training—is a more desirable brand to the open ended, critical project of CS. This is especially so in the political climate that developed during the time of the Keating government, but accelerated under ten years of the Howard government, in which blue-sky or theoretical research was marginalised in favour of applied or focused research. I see no reason to expect this attitude will change under the Rudd government. An emblematic example is the University of Queensland, once one of the top institutions in the country for CS, but now following the restructure which created the “School of English, Media Studies and Art History”, is left without a named CS department. Undergraduate and RHD enrolments have plummeted in recent years.
The second force is a residual suspicion—if not outright hostility—from those disciplines from which CS originally developed: largely English and sociology. Literature teaching programmes suffered because of the move of students who wanted to study aspects of popular culture, and some of our colleagues in the more traditional fields haven’t ever forgiven us for winning the popularity contest. As CS teaching programmes come under increasing pressure from creative writing courses and other new-comers, we get no support from the fields we displaced.
The third force is, I believe, the most serious and the most difficult to recover from, and is, ironically, a problem that was of CS’s own making. Chris Healy touched on this in his presentation in the teaching panel. He talked about the gap between the “fantasy”—the dream that CS would be an interdisciplinary space in the margins between disciplines like English and sociology—and the reality that undergrad enrollment requirements and administrative necessity forced CS into a conventional disciplinary focus. As recently as five years ago I was teaching that CS saw itself as multi- or even anti-disciplinary. This claim for authenticity might have looked cool on paper, but the pragmatists said that without a disciplinary focus, CS would lose out formally in the institutions. And guess what? The pragmatists were right.
I don’t know whether CS can come back from here. In institutions across Australia and NZ CS has lost out to media studies; communication has moved to journalism or the business schools; and even the archetype, the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies, was moved to a sociology department before being closed down altogether. I hope I’m wrong, but I fear that the CS experiment has run its race: a brave attempt, but too unformed, too speculative; maybe too critical, to easily fit into an institutional home.
Maybe CS will continue in the margins, spicing up the more pragmatic disciplines with a critical inflection and a troubling suspicion of totalising narratives.I hope so: I would like the discipline to survive its second generation. Please comment and tell me I’m wrong: I need the encouragement.
Your Comments
Catherine Howell writes:
Very interesting… I’m afraid I share your pessimism to a large extent. The point about the rise of media/communications studies is a specially telling one. So much of the “internet/information society” research that was carried out under cult. stud. umbrellas in the 1990s (and, in many ways, characterised CS at that time) is now being done in shiny new media/comms/information studies depts.
IMHO the best of CS has always been critical/interpretive AND sociological. Looking at social and individual meanings and meaning-making, as well as social (and individual) behaviours. CS did pioneering, important work on oppositional social practices and identities – LGBT studies, and the mediation of teenage identities spring to mind – but as a discipline it often seemed less interested in “mainstream” experiences/practices (TV and film studies being among the many exceptions) and that is a primary problem for a discipline whose practitioners are called (as with the rest of the soc scis) to deliver social / cultural “relevance”.
When I try to think what it was that could be said to characterise the broad church of CS, I’d probably say it’s its reflexivity tic and its commitment to reading “against the grain”. Oppositional critical practice is by definition a marginal activity, and arguably, CS gloried in its marginal status in the academy as a kind of legitimation for its ideological commitments. The wheel turned, CS started to become institutionalised, careers were made, CS academics became “post-feminist”, “post-post-structuralist”, in a word, post-ideological. But then they lost their identity – they were sort of like literary critics, but not really interested in writing for its own sake; sort of like sociologists, but they didn’t much get their hands dirty “in the field”; sort of like psychologists, but they didn’t know about sampling bias and effect size…
There are some interesting parallels to the CS arguments over disciplinary identities in educational research.
More, please!
Posted: 11 12 2007 - 00:28 | Permanent link to this comment
Meaghan Morris writes:
This response was make via email. I post it here with Meaghan’s permission – John.
You know … what strikes me is that it’s the whole topic of pessimism and ‘end of cultural studies’ that has become recognisably Australian in itself. Maybe British too, but i don’t know/much care about that. However, meaning no offence at all, people were saying almost exactly the same things as you and your friends when I left here 8 years ago; different people, same worries. And other people again were saying them all the time I was at UTS (1994-1999). That’s getting on for 14 years of unchanging pessmistic talk. I think it’s something structural. (Not least because the space for saying these things, amazingly, continues to exist).
So to the factors fostering decline that you mention, I’d add another two that foster both decline, and the discourse of decline. One is historical paralysis: an entrenched refusal, inability, I don’t know what it is, to plunge in and joyously develop new and fabulously interesting accounts of Australian intellectual and cultural life in the past that would give the discipline a sense, precisely, of its idiosyncratic disciplinarity. Occasional individuals do this, eg Tim Rowse, but the collective? No. So people always speak from dry ground.
The second is geographical and geo-cultural insulation and insularity. People seem to have NO IDEA now of what is going on beyond the Anglo-sphere, and to care even less. If they do wonder why discipline-building is occurring in Iran and Turkey as well as Shanghai and Tokyo, it often just becomes grounds for another depressive comparison.
Not that I think you’re wrong about here, mind; just that it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy! Maybe people should have stuck to the topic of teaching.
Posted: 13 12 2007 - 14:10 | Permanent link to this comment
Tseen Khoo writes:
Hi John
Thanks for your post – as someone who comes from a mish-mashed disciplinary background (sorta lit.studies, sorta cult.studs, sorta poco studies) I found it really interesting, and it affirmed a few observations I had about CS as an un-discipline. Coming from lit.studies and ending up in sociology, I’ve become less and less wedded to disciplinary praxis as time went on. Even though you’re right about CS diminishing on the institutional radar, I think the number of researchers who would categorise their approach/methodology as ‘CS’ might be surprising.
And as for winning the popularity contest: we all know it was fuelled by jealousy that CS folks could write off TV and movies as ‘work.’ On a vaguely more serious note, I think there was a feeling amongst some academics that some CS researchers were topic-opportunistic and, therefore, mere dabblers in certain fields (or only interested in snazzy conference paper titles…). This is another can of worms that I won’t open here but, yes, I’d like to see what others think about the issues.
Posted: 18 01 2008 - 15:57 | Permanent link to this comment
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