[csaa-forum] Trashy magpies and Aussie CS

[Danny Butt]

A small point on Furedi at the risk of furthering his unfortunate appearance
in this forum. While I'm not a fan of "disinterested" scholarship, I am a
fan of "professionalism" and doing things properly according to the evolving
traditions of the fields we work in (call me old fashioned). In social
theory today that would entail writing articles and books acknowledging that
there are women under 70 who've contributed quite a lot to our understanding
of intellectual practice.

Alan chose to make fun of the question about Art history/theory/CS
crossovers with:

>And of course it would be nice to see more people working across cultural
>studies and mass culture - doing some tabloid journalism, reality
>television, market research, etc

I'd like to ask you Alan, which disciplines are covering tabloid journalism
and reality TV *other* than culture & media studies? Do you feel that the
discipline has neglected these issues in favour of the arts? (I think an
empirical, quantitative survey of recent publications in the cultural
studies category on amazon might suggest otherwise).

But I'm more interested to go back to Adrian's comments, about a perceived
or actual larger number of scholars traversing the arts and popular culture
in Australia twenty years ago. Is this true, or are there plenty, as
Felicity suggested, doing this now? What are the differences between then
and now in terms of contributing to the "field"?

I remember discussing potential PhD study a while back with an established
Art Historian from the US a while back. I mentioned that before I'd realised
that I couldn't live in the US, I'd thought of studying at UC Santa Cruz
seeing as three of my top ten academics were there. He immediately responded
with stories of people who'd done "interdisciplinary" PhDs at Santa Cruz and
"couldn't get jobs". I think there's more than purely vocational issues at
play in disciplinarity but those are sentiments I've often heard repeated.

The work of Adrian (and others he mentioned) were the impetus for my
investment  in Australian Cultural Studies, but it seems to me that the
field has changed somewhat, even if I can't say exactly how yet. The
dispersal of a "public", and the growth and fragmentation of cultural
production, education, and expertise have something to do with it. I feel
like I have at least five distinct spheres of activity I work across, but
little way to bring them together in the elegant way that seemed appropriate
"back then". I'd be interested to hear from those trying to sustain
multi-disciplinary practices about how they feel about the situation now
(for working across the arts and popular culture, for instance) and the
pressures and opportunities they see ahead.

x.d

On 10/26/04 7:08 PM, "Jason Jacobs" <j.jacobs at griffith.edu.au> wrote:

> If you can show me an example of disinterested scholarship I'll actually buy
> you a drink. All scholarship should have an interest, otherwise why would one
> bother to read it?

--
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