Wednesday, October 06, 2004

pertinence of cultural studies

Here is something that might be of interest to some of you. It is about cultural studies at a crossroad, and I paste a quote here that is pertinent to as many fields as it is to cultural studies

"But there is another question regarding the "where" of cultural studies. Where might it be found? That is, in one sense, a where (what) is our object of study, our project, that which we want to elucidate or engage and, secondly, where might we find cultural studies being done (and maybe a third question of when ). On what terrain or plateau might we look?ot dig? From many accounts the "where" is a bit of a worn out place. Someplace we've certainly been before and someplace from which bombs have been lofted our direction for years. It's the economy stupid. In this conjuncture junction, where the function is to hook up logics, and peoples, and products, and politics, we're not clear how it is that this time, via an understanding of the new conjuncture, cultural studies will be able to make a difference in a way that it hasn't in the past."

http://info.interactivist.net/print.pl?sid=04/10/02/2021233

Could it be that we are now suffering from the overlapping of fields? Many new-fangled undergraduate and posgraduate courses that have sprung up from the growth of various new fields has led me to think of Hannah Arendt's essays on "Crisis in Education" and "Crisis in Culture" found in her book "Between the past and future", how we often miss the woods for the trees. More on those two later as I will need to revisit them before I can comment further. (:




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