Thinking culture now updating

Posted on | April 27, 2010 | 2 Comments

Just to cross-promote to readers who may be interested, the GCS blog, Thinking Culture, is now up and running again. I’m hoping some of you will be keen to subscribe to that feed in addition to this one. As well as offering a space for students and staff in our Department to write, I’m trying to build a set of resources for cultural studies students in the blogroll and links section. It needn’t be exhaustive but if you’d like to be included please get in touch. Here’s the first post:

An intention I have for this blog is to further the cultural studies tradition of sharing “Working Papers”. Researching my PhD, I tracked down a number of the original “Working Papers” published by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. These were pretty rudimentary photocopies of typed scripts, but they were useful for showing the kind of research being done within the Centre, as well as the development of staff and students’ ideas over time.

The Centre actually developed this concept to publish a specific journal, Working Papers in Cultural Studies, from 1971. As Graeme Turner explains, the Centre’s collectivist practice – students often published in collaboration with staff – worked against the established hierarchies of teacher and pupil, indeed the publishing program itself was a measure of the Centre’s unconventional institutional ambitions.

We can see this tradition continuing in other initiatives since this time. In Australia, for instance, M/C Journal began in a similar fashion (it would be great to hear more about this history if anyone involved is reading!). Meanwhile postgraduate journals like Melbourne University’s Antithesis offer an important role for students seeking to get involved in publishing, and to have their writing read alongside more senior scholars (the blogroll on that site has links to other postgraduate journals of this type).

At a time when publishing seemed to matter as much as thesis completion, there were conflicts in the BCCCS between the perceived urgency of political and intellectual consolidation and the need to produce more sanctioned qualifications. This is a tension that continues to drive many students in our Department, and I hope that by sharing their work here they may be able to come to some kind of accommodation.

For feminists in the BCCCS, working groups were also important. The Women Thesis Writers’ Group invited feminist grad students and other friends of the Centre “to exchange written work, provide and receive feedback, and discuss ideas” according to the editors of Off Centre: Feminism and Cultural Studies . This important book marked the 10 year anniversary of Women Take Issue – the feminist edition of the Working Papers journal, which holds particular meaning in the scholarly history our Department follows. Perhaps this space can offer a similar, if wider, function of support.

As I have argued in my own research, blogging is useful for thesis writers in particular because it breaks the isolation of the sole-authored project. In increasingly professionalised and competitive graduate programs for cultural studies, it may even provide a space for dialogue across campuses and regions so that the politics and ethics for contemporary cultural theory may continue to be defined and realised.

Category: Web studies

Comments

2 Responses to “Thinking culture now updating”

  1. Rachel @ Musings of An Inappropriate Woman
    April 27th, 2010 @ 1:37 pm

    Great project, Mel – I’m really excited to see a universities taking blogging as a form of getting one’s ideas out there seriously. A lot of the people I’ve spoken to about turning research into blogs seem to be under the impression that blogs are mostly ill-informed rants, but I find the stuff I encounter online much more stimulating than what I usually come across in, say, MSM. But I know I’m preaching to the converted here. :)

  2. Terry
    June 9th, 2010 @ 8:45 am

    Axel Bruns is the person on the subject of M/C’s orgins, although a lot of people around the UQ Media Studies PG program were involved in the mid-late 90s. I think you’ll find that its origins were in an Honours course that David Marshall was running at the time.

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