The Passagenwerk and the place of Walter Benjamin in cultural studies: Benjamin,cultural studies,Marxist theories of art

This essay is a reflection on the circumstances that led me to a particular research project, on Cajun dance and music spaces, and also on the project's mutations through subsequent phases of development. Above all, this essay attempts to take stock of the difficulties – personal, scholarly, and theoretical – as well as the personal choices that have gone into developing an ongoing scholarly project. While I indicate the importance of the experiences of personal pleasure that originally inspired my research, I also show how the personal and the pleasurable often necessarily encounter tensions and even certain kinds of conflict when linked to a ‘disciplinary’ domain. This essay therefore traces a particular example of how ‘cultural studies travels’ both geographically within a life and disciplinarily within something that has come to be known as‘French cultural studies’.     

Speaking trajectories: Meaghan Morris,antipodean theory and Australian cultural studies

Over the last 30 years, the term discourse has spread throughout both the social sciences and the humanities. There is a widespread consensus that the current usage of the term ‘discourse’ originated with Foucault. This paper has three related goals: first, it demonstrates that the current usage of ‘discourse‘ did not originate with Foucault, and in some ways contradicts his own limited technical usage. Second, an intellectual history is presented that explains where the term originated – in French and British theory of the 1960s and 1970s – and how it was propagated and transformed by Anglo-American cultural studies theorists. By extending this intellectual history through the 1990s, the paper documents how Anglo-American scholars increasingly began to attribute the concept to Foucault, and how this has contributed to two important misreadings of Foucault. In conclusion, this history is drawn upon to explore and clarify several competing usages of the term in contemporary cultural studies.     

Expatriation: Useful astonishment as cultural studies

Fatherland — a quintessence

My father … called himself English, or rather, an Englishman, usually bitterly, and when reading the newspapers: that is, when he felt betrayed, or wounded in his moral sense. I remember thinking it all rather academic, living as we did in the backveld. However, I did learn early on that while the world English is tricky and elusive enough in England, it is nothing to the variety of meanings it might bear in a Colony, self-governing or otherwise

(Lessing, 1960/68: 7–8).     

Affective rearticulations: cultural studies in and from Taiwan

ABSTRACT

This essay introduces the peculiar state of cultural studies from Taiwan by reflecting on its moments of emergence and the projects it strives to accomplish with recent updates. While it is inevitable that a survey of this nature is doomed to be cursory and selective, it hopes to delineate and address the predicaments of cultural studies in and from Taiwan and the struggles therein, as it strives not only to get its voices heard, but also to chart a critical path towards the decolonization of our consciousness.     

Poverty (lab) oratory: Rastafari and cultural studies

This paper presents Rastafari Experience in Jamaica as one of the first cultural studies projects. This cultural studies project is located as originating in the 1930s in Kingston and in 1960 within the University College of the West Indies. It is argued that the Rastafari approach was demonstrative of a faculty of cultural studies at work – its members being drawn from a folk scholastic tradition originating from before the Haitian Revolution in 1791. It views the emergence of the Movement in Jamaica, as drawing on a multidisciplinary/trans-disciplinary approach towards the work of engagement and social re-interpretation of Jamaican ‘colonized society’. Poverty (lab) Oratory is thus a reading of the historical framework of the indigenous cultural studies project tracing the ‘process of institutionalization’ in the way Mato views this as the net effect of the English speaking intellectual cultural studies project. It concludes by examining what can be rightfully considered the ‘University’ in light of the role and place of the critical scholastic tradition brought by the folk leadership, in particular, Rastafari.     

Remembering reuel denney: Sociology as cultural studies

Selected writings from Reuel Denney’s work as a social analyst are reviewed in order to establish and highlight his often-overlooked contributions to sociology. Denney’s cultural studies of Americans at play, with specific reference to his writings on the subcultures of football and hot-rodding, and on television and the electronic media, advertising and architecture, are reviewed in examining some major themes emphasized in his sociology. These writings are discussed against the backdrop of Denney’s early life experiences drawn from his autobiography to better enable readers to gain an appreciation of his sociological thinking. The beginnings of a Denney postmodern are sketched as a conclusion to this paper’s major contention that Denney anticipated much of today’s sociology as cultural studies. As one of Reuel’s students, nearly forty years ago, I hope that this article serves not only to highlight Denney’s contributions and place within the discipline of sociology, but also that my personal recollections will serve to reveal the strong attachments we students felt toward him as our teacher, mentor, and friend. nt|mis|His teaching and research combine his interests in higher education and the professions, bureaucracy, social thought, mass media, and popular culture. His most recent book, Schooling As Entertainment: Corporate Education Meets Popular Culture, is available from Cedarreek Press.     

Social Contract,Communities and Guardians

This paper examines the way that different notions of social contract and community change the way in which we can look at the obligations guardians have to their charges. A brief analysis of the underpinnings of autonomy based (minimalist) and beneficence based (non-minimalist) ethics is given and the consequences of such points of view are scrutinized. This paper argues that the minimalist ethic is flawed in theory as well as practice. The consequences for guardians of these theories is sketched.     

Museum acrobatics: artistic intervention and the work of cultural studies

This paper responds to questions posed to the panel regarding intellectual work and the division of labour in the academic and non-academic work of cultural studies. Using examples of ‘failed attempts’ at producing change at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the paper re-frames notions of transmission in the project of cultural studies in relation to questions of participation to provide a framework for thinking about how cultural studies practitioners engage with the public sphere.     

Introduction: Chinese cultural studies in the utilitarianism-oriented age

ABSTRACT

This brief essay, introducing the collection of essays on cultural studies in mainland China and the Chinese-speaking societies, relates the emergence and development of Chinese cultural studies to changes in society. It documents the twin pulls in cultural studies between analyzing what is happening and intervening into society with idealistic possibilities for the future. It lays out how ‘the Chinese modern legacy’ and the Chinese Revolution provide resources for cultural studies and offers some analysis of the social changes that currently confront cultural studies.     

Gangs,identity, and cultural performance

Although the notion of identity has received substantial attention from sociologists and psychologists, it has not been well developed in the gang literature. Identity accounts for a person's sense of self, which is based on meaningful social interactions and group participation, and becomes a source for publicly performing social roles. Gang membership is one such role that merits significant attention, and existing theories about identity and role performance can help explain variations in criminal behavior among members. This article applies multiple perspectives on social, personal, and collective identity to gangs and gang members. It offers principles to explain how gang identities fuel social performances that mimic, induce, or involve criminal behavior.     

Social Work,Spirituality, and Diasporic Communities

Abstract

The discourse surrounding the role of spirituality in social work practice has been expanding exponentially in recent years. Similarly, the discourse surrounding the role of spirituality among diasporic communities has expanded in recent times as well. In this paper, we will consider the linkages between social work, spirituality, and diaspora. We will focus our discussion on a particular diasporic spiritual community, the Sathya Sai Baba movement and its social service activities. We will then consider the implications of such spiritual movements for the social work profession. Among the key issues explored in this paper are the change in the social construction of populations that have moved between two countries as 'immigrant communities' to 'diasporic communities' and the implications of these changes for social work. Another critical issue we discuss is how working with spiritual movements may help address the 'spiritual deficit' concern that some social work academics have referred to, and indirectly at least, we begin to address 'the social work crisis' issue that has negatively affected the social work profession over the last few years.