MACS blurb

Posted on | September 7, 2004 |

This is the blurb going out to the CSAA forum list this arvo, summarising what happened on Friday.

On Friday afternoon Graeme Turner and I launched the first meeting of Monthly MACS, a new cross-institutional network of Media and Cultural Studies researchers working across Brisbane. The meetings are aimed at early career researchers, particularly postgraduate students, postdocs, RAs and teaching staff, and we hope they will provide a regular platform for discussing issues which relate to these roles as well as an opportunity to contribute to wider debates taking place in the field. The launch was met with great enthusiasm and it was fabulous to see so many researchers at all levels and from each of the three Brisbane unis (UQ, QUT and Griffith) in attendance.

Each month I’ll be posting a summary of the event here on the forum so that those interested might feel able to contribute their experiences and prolong the discussion.

Friday’s event was called ‘What I did on my holidays’ and featured brief reviews of recent conferences. I spoke about the Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference held in Champaign-Urbana. Amanda Roe, a PhD student here at UQ, talked about the National Screenwriters conference held in Melbourne. Ellie Rennie, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at QUT, described her experience of the Our Media and IAMCR conferences in Porto Alegre, Brazil (an extended version of this talk is available here. Finally, Jean Burgess, PhD student at QUT, spoke about her visit to the Oxford Internet Institute summer doctoral program.

Some of the themes that emerged include:

- Conference mandates and the problems they pose for critical analysis: I speculated whether the Crossroads mandate set an unenviable task for cultural studies scholarship in that it implied our work should be motivated out of a sense of moral obligation. Discussion afterwards led me to wonder what cultural studies can do to *understand* the current political climate rather than dismiss its bankrupcy (which doesn’t seem a particularly useful function for intellectual work)

- Wider, circumstantial factors that influence a conference and its dominant discourse: During the four days of the Crossroads conference, Michael Moore’s film was released in the US, the handover of power in Iraq took place, and Saddam Hussein went on trial, which seemed to add a layer of magnitude if not also some unnecessary US-centric heroics to the conference agenda (remembering this conference is that of the international CS association)

- The difficulties involved in presenting academic work to a non-academic audience: In Amanda’s case, countering pre-conceived ideas about whether academic work belongs at a conference for practitioners, and the joy when practitioners do receive your work ‘well’

- How to maintain conviction about the legitimacy of a scholarly/critical project surrounded by professionals whose work you greatly admire (as Amanda put it: ‘They do what I theorize about’)

- Whether community media are more for the producers’ sake than consumers: Ellie mentioned the need to suspend assumptions about the usefulness of local activism in contexts where the history of media policy and regulation differs greatly from one’s own

- Despite everything, missing theory when it’s not there at a conference

- The curiosity of going to an Establishment institution like Oxford to learn about and create grassroots networks!

- The dominance of debates over regulation, governance, commerce and e-democracy when talking about the internet: Are these the only ways to make internet studies legitimate? (perhaps relates to previous point)

- Cultural studies’ vital role in internet studies: To assert the human side of the medium’s use, to provide the attention to the ordinary and the everyday that’s missing in debates over policy, regulation, etc. These points, so foundational for cultural studies, remain worthwhile and worth repeating

These issues were part of a wider discussion about what makes a conference experience *worthwhile* (important when thinking about funding applications); also the trends emerging (especially through technological innovation - blogging, wireless internet access, new mobile devices) which may improve or significantly change such events in the future. If the time is immanent when we don’t need to go to conferences to get the latest information, what remains of the experience that will keep us wanting to be physically present?

Please feel free to share your responses or thoughts.
The next MACS is on October 1, 3pm at the CCCS. Just ask for more details.

Category: Research

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