[csaa-forum] Rebecca and the beach

[Karen Dean]

Crikey mikey!  Assessment will be a right bastard!

_____________________________
Dr Karen Gai Dean
School of Behavioural & Social Sciences & Humanities
University of Ballarat
PO Box 663
Victoria 3353
Australia
k.dean at ballarat.edu.au 
ph: 61-3 5327 9627
fax: 61-3 5327 9840
CRICOS Provider Number 00103D

>>> j.jacobs at griffith.edu.au 11/08/2004 3:01:01 pm >>>
I don't buy the story that before the meteor of cultural studies
clarified 
everything humanities teaching and research was a theoretical Jurassic

forest, full of nasty creatures. In fact cultural studies today is
every 
bit as ideologically naive as what came before. Today the ideology is 
this: anti-human, anti-Enlightenment, anti-reason, anti-judgement and 
pro-relativist. You see it dripping from every set of scare quotes 
('truth' 'real' etc) and every lame assertion that what we see and hear
is 
constructed by social and historical conditions. (What insight!) I'm 
currently teaching a new course which is about cultivating judgement, 
eschewing relativism and actually engaging with artworks (film and 
television); the students find it hard because it does not arrogantly 
claim to have all the answers. It grants that there may be aspects of
the 
world that cultural studies has neither the imagination nor the theory
to 
grasp, that there are works of excellence whose achievements might take
a 
lifetime to account for. I'd rather be teaching that than supplying the

false idea that everything can be explained (or 'approached' - since
I'm 
sure there can be no 'final' 'truthful' explanation...) by a bit of 
Foucault, Adorno, Deleuze or any other theoretically bankrupt mystic. 


Dr Jason Jacobs
Senior Lecturer
School of Arts, Media and Culture
Griffith University
Nathan Campus
Queensland 4111
Australia
Phone: (07) 3875 5164
Fax: (07) 3875 7730