Creativity and Academic Activism

Instituting Cultural Studies

Meaghan Morris, Mette Hjort

• Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
• Year: 2012
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9789882208384
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This work explores in detail how innovative academic activism can transform our everyday workplaces in contexts of considerable adversity. Personal essays by prominent scholars provide critical reflections on their institution-building triumphs and setbacks across a range of cultural institutions. Often adopting narrative approaches, the contributors examine how effective programmes and activities are built in varying local and national contexts within a common global regime of university management policy. Here they share experiences based on developing new undergraduate degrees, setting up research centers and postgraduate schools, editing field-shaping book series and journals, establishing international artist-in-residence programs and founding social activist networks. This book also investigates the impact of managerialism, marketization and globalization on university cultures, asking what critical cultural scholarship can do in such increasingly adversarial conditions. Experiments in Asian universities are emphasized as exemplary of what can or could be achieved in other contexts of globalized university policy. Contributors include Tony Bennett, Stephen Ching-Kiu Chan, Kuan-Hsing Chen, Douglas Crimp, Dai Jinhua, John Nguyet Erni, Josephine Ho, Koichi Iwabuchi, Tejaswini Niranjana, Wang Xiaoming, and Audrey Yue.

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Book Synopsis
• Author Biography
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Instituting Cultural Studies
• Institutional Culture: A Manifesto with Rules
• 1 The Desire for Cultural Studies
• 2 Social Movements, Cultural Studies, and Institutions: On the Shifting Conditions of Practices
• 3 Life of a Parasite: One Survival Story in Cultural Studies
• 4 The Assessment Game: On Institutions That Punch Above Their Weight, and Why the Quality of the Work Environment Also Matters
• 5 Three Tough Questions of Cultural Studies: The Case of the Program in Cultural Studies at the University of Shanghai
• 6 Doing Cultural Studies: Critique, Pedagogy, and the Pragmatics of Cultural Education in Hong Kong
• 7 Coordinates, Confusions, and Cultural Studies
• 8 Uses of Media Culture, Usefulness of Media Culture Studies: Beyond Brand Nationalism into Public Dialogue
• 9 Way Out on a Nut
• 10 Who Needs Human Rights? Cultural Studies and Public Institutions
• 11 From Gatekeepers to Gateways: Pragmatism, Politics, Sexuality, and Cultural Policy in Creative Singapore
• 12 Culture, Institution, Conduct: The Perspective of Metaculture
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index