[csaa-forum] Cultural Studies in the UK - a few thoughts on'disciplines' re Cultural studies

[Dr Jason Jacobs]

Here's my take on this for what it's worth. 

I came to Australia from the UK in 2000 and was struck by the way that
'cultural studies' existed as an umbrella term for media, film, television
and other cultural production 'studies'. In the UK cultural studies is
fairly well separated from film and other studies. I never at any point
imagined in the UK that I was doing cultural studies, which had its own
history over there, although I knew a lot of scholars involved in that area,
notably Ann Gray and Tim O'Sullivan who joined our Midlands Television
Research Group in the mid-90s. 

That said, I've come to enjoy the way Australia uses that umbrella concept
to keep us all in touch. Graeme's CRN has been an inspired fillip in this
respect; and I've thoroughly enjoyed meeting a range of scholars and
scholarship that Australian cultural studies offers (and some great people
too: Alan McKee, John Hartley, Frances Bonner, Graeme Turner, Elspeth
Probyn, Catherine Lumby, John Gunders, Liz Jacka, Terry Flew to name only
the ones available to my consciousness at 6.40am).

Of course I do have reservations - in some ways identity seems forged
through a fantasy of marginalisation and oppression which is not really true
to my mind; despite what a few columnist claim, I see CS thriving here and
I'm happy and glad to see it. ECRs will always experience the problems of
starting out in a discipline, finding their feet and grasping the
institutional and political nuances of it; but I'd like to think that more
than most disciplines we're sensitive and responsive to these issues. 





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


-----Original Message-----
From: csaa-forum-bounces at lists.cdu.edu.au
[mailto:csaa-forum-bounces at lists.cdu.edu.au] 
Sent: Wednesday, 31 August 2005 10:03 AM
To: csaa-forum at lists.cdu.edu.au
Subject: [csaa-forum] Cultural Studies in the UK - a few thoughts
on'disciplines' re Cultural studies

Hello all,

I'm a long time lurker/first time poster - prompted to do so by the
very interesting series of discussions on the list recently about the
nature of Cultural Studies as a 'Discipline'. I recently returned to
New Zealand with a PhD in Cultural Studies from the Cultural Studies
Dept of the University of Birmingham - the place where (arguably) the
'discipline' of cultural studies first emerged.

I write this not to try and attach some sort of spurious legitimacy
to my contribution, but as an important introduction to my (and I'll
try and make it brief) tale of how the management of the University of
Birmingham successfully shut our department (discipline??) down -
despite the fact that it had an international reputation, produced
some great research, had a great post-grad culture and ran some great
undergraduate degrees.

The primary rationale given for doing so was that our dept had only
gained a '3' in the Research Assessment Exercise (an ill-thought
through method of measuring and assessing the research output of the
staff, and utilising this as a basis for funding). This was a poor
showing compared to the rest of the University. Yet a very big part of
the problem here was that Cultural Studies - as many of the
contributions here have pointed out - is resolutely
trans-disciplinary, even where it is institutionalised in its 'own'
dept. In fact, Cultural Studies in the UK always actively resisted
'disciplinarity' by definition (but this is another long story). Thus,
choosing a 'panel' to have for the dept to submit to for the RAE was
difficult - it didn't really 'fit in' (there was no category called
'Cultural Studies' in the government's eyes). Arguably, this made it
far more difficult for the staff to have their research assessed
fairly or valued properly. Moreover, getting CS research done in the
first place was always more difficult. For example, getting research
funding for Cultural Studies work was always more difficult as no
funding body had the category of 'Cultural Studies' either (for
example, I had to apply to the ESRC under 'sociology' for PhD
funding). 

To cut to the point - the management of Uni of Brum, who had a long
history of trying to get rid of the dept anyway, took the chance of
the low RAE score to get rid of the dept. The upshot - all the staff
were got rid of, a new lot were hired, and a new sociology dept formed
(which aimed to 'no longer privilege the cultural turn in analysis of
society'). The moral of this story (if there is one), is that it IS
harder to 'do' cultural studies (whatever one deems it to be) in
todays academic environment - in Australia or elsewhere. We are
increasingly categorised, monitored, measured, and - thereby -
manipulated to a greater degree than was the case  in the past. In
such an environment, the CS approach to 'disciplinarity' is
problematic. To name something a discipline, or to establish a
discipline, is not just semantics, it is an exercise in power - it
legitimates. Its precisely the sort of exercise in power, which tends
to close avenues of debate and research down as much as it opens them
up, which CS in the UK actively set out to resist. It did so in Brum
with success for some time. Unfortunately, in the environment of
tertiary education today it also made CS an easy target for the
auditors.

Ian Goodwin

Lecturer
MA Communication Studies
School of Communication Studies
Faculty of Arts
Auckland University of Technology
Private Bag 92006
Auckland 1020
Aotearoa/ New Zealand

Telephone 64-9-917 9999 x 7734
Email ian.goodwin at aut.ac.nz 
_______________________________________

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