A special relationship? Cultural studies, academia and pedagogy

Abstract

Abstract For all the vigorous debate within cultural studies, little attention has been paid to its own institutional practices and pedagogies. A misunderstanding of 'institutionalization' can lead to the idealist positioning of the cultural studies practitioner as an 'outsider' or a romantically marginal 'semiotic guerrilla'. Individual subjects (including deconstructionists!) are always positioned within various institutional practices (which are also crossed by wider sociohistorical forces), and hence are neither fully 'inside' nor 'outside' any of them. Why has cultural studies, which specializes in the analysis of closure, and also in pedagogy (cultural transmission), such an underdeveloped analysis of its own practices? There have been several pressures towards a pedagogic orthodoxy in the field: institutional marginality and the need to demonstrate 'scholarliness', pushing innovative energy into writing not teaching; increasing workloads, encouraging routinization and repetition; and political caution in the context of the minefields of identity politics and the critique of Eurocentrism. But the expansion of higher education is pushing pedagogy back on to the agenda: new kinds of students are forcing academics to reconsider how to teach without taking either traditional cultural capital or literacy for granted. What now constitutes the cultural politics of their teaching? Giroux and colleagues have revitalized the discussion of a critical pedagogy which minimizes closure. But some of this work shares the weaknesses of an earlier 'student‐centred' discourse in attempting to supersede the inevitably differential positioning of teacher and student. Academics should not (because they cannot) renounce their intellectual authority, their 'maps', and should remember that students only negotiate, rather than absorb, those maps. Making these differential positionings an object of study for students is not only as 'open' as we can probably get, but also embodies the political 'project' of cultural studies, with its focus on critique, reflexiveness, inclusiveness, contingency and many‐sidedness.