Abstract
In this chapter, Wood argues that Cultural Studies does not have a pedagogy; it is a pedagogy: its purpose, through its intellectual work and within the conditions of its given context, is to invigorate critical thinking and praxis, knowledge production, and change in new and important ways. Rather than approaching the question of pedagogy and Cultural Studies as the need to develop (or formalize or assess) methods, texts, assignments, or forms of authority in the classroom for cultural studies, Wood approaches the question in terms of what it might mean to teach and practice Cultural Studies as a particular pedagogical sensibility. This approach presumes that pedagogy concerns a realm of force extending well beyond formal education and the classroom, and so the responsibility of practitioners of cultural studies is much broader than the classroom, even as the classroom is a very specific site in which public pedagogy takes place. She describes some of what this responsibility to conjunctural thinking has looked like for her own and her undergraduate students’ experiences practicing cultural studies in the “Cultural Studies classroom.”
This essay is most indebted to my mentor and friend, Larry Grossberg, who bears the greatest responsibility for gifting me Cultural Studies. Whether or not he agrees with my words and ideas, his presence in my life saturates them all. I also thank my fellow COMMrades at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who regularly influence my practice—my learning-doing-teaching—of Cultural Studies. Great and many thanks also to the editors, Jaafar Aksikas, Sean Johnson Andrews, and Donald Hedrick, whose diligence made this piece possible.
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Notes
- 1.
“2.0” or “3.0” versions of these syllabi are sometimes authored by others who mean to rectify egregious omissions in previous iterations, or offer disciplinary- or topic-specific spins on the original crisis/issue. Katie Pearce, “Understanding Trumpism: Syllabus Co-Compiled by Johns Hopkins Historian Goes Viral Post-Election,” Hub December 16, 2016, https://hub.jhu.edu/2016/12/09/connolly-trump-syllabus/
- 2.
In this essay, I capitalize “Cultural Studies” as a way of indicating my reference to a particular version of cultural studies: the political-intellectual project typically first associated with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, England that was/is primarily concerned with “describing and intervening in the ways cultural practices are produced within, inserted into, and operate in the everyday life of human beings and social formations, so as to reproduce, struggle against, and perhaps transform the existing structures of power. … It investigates how people are empowered and disempowered by the particular structures and forces that organize their everyday lives in contradictory ways, and how their (everyday) lives are themselves articulated to and by the trajectories of economic, social, cultural, and political power.” This version of Cultural Studies understands itself as “responsible to the changing context (changing geographical, historical, political, intellectual and institutional conditions) in which it works.” Lawrence Grossberg, Cultural Studies in the Future Tense (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 8–9.
- 3.
For an interesting take on the histories of different national formations of cultural studies and their respective relations with academic institutions and with social movements, see Jon D. Cruz, “Cultural Studies and Social Movements: A Crucial Nexus in the American Case,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 15, no. 3 (2012).
- 4.
This way of framing pedagogy has its roots in the work of Henry Giroux, Stuart Hall, Lawrence Grossberg, and others who have worked to develop the notion of “public pedagogy” in their efforts to understand the workings of cultural politics. Giroux considers public pedagogy to be a “referent for analyzing how knowledge, values, desire and social relations are constructed, taken up, and implicated in relations of power in the interaction among cultural texts, institutional forms, authorities, and audiences.” It concerns how and where culture operates both symbolically and institutionally as an educational, political, and economic force. Henry A. Giroux, Public Spaces, Private Lives: Democracy Beyond 9/11 (Lanham, Md.; Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 83.
- 5.
Raymond Williams, “The Future of Cultural Studies (1989),” in Raymond Williams on Culture & Society: Essential Writings, ed. Jim McGuigan (London: Sage, 2014), 151–2.
- 6.
Lawrence Grossberg, “Rage against the Dying of a Light: Stuart Hall (1932–2014),” Truthout February 15, 2014.
- 7.
This chapter is written to be in conversation with Andrew Davis’ chapter in this book. We have both taught the same course, COMM 350: Practices of Cultural Studies, and so share responsibility for the design of the course on which my commentary here is based. Andrew’s piece addresses the significance of the conjuncture concept to Cultural Studies and describes in more detail than I do here the collective conjunctural analysis research practice we engage in with our students.
- 8.
There are several different stories that are told about Cultural Studies’ identity in the U.S. (e.g. its origins in the work of pragmatists and media scholars, its relationship with Birmingham or social movements in the U.S.). While this essay is not the space for reflection on these stories (their contradictions, why they matter, etc.), suffice to say that, in whatever story, the point that Cultural Studies “enters in media res” stands.
- 9.
Stuart Hall, “The Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis of the Humanities,” October 53 (1990): 11.
- 10.
While new ones are written all the time, one pair well-received by my students has been a viewpoint essay by basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in Time magazine called “American Students—and Politicians—Need to Stop Waging War on Reason” and the (less insightful, more polemic) piece by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in The Atlantic titled, “The Coddling of the American Mind.”
- 11.
These include concerns with blind celebration of activisms; ambivalence toward “identity politics” regarding either its successes or failures, class-based critiques, and more.
- 12.
Lawrence Grossberg, “On the Political Responsibilities of Cultural Studies,” Inter-Asia cultural studies 11 (2010): 241. Key here is the idea that at the level of this “conjuncture,” the questions change, and the terms of political engagement and possibility change as well. A visual representation of the first few weeks of our work in my cultural studies course where we build up to this “different way” can be found in the “Asking Questions in Cultural Studies” handout I provide for my COMM 350: Practices in Cultural Studies students. See Appendix for the most recent version.
- 13.
In particular, Stuart Hall, Lawrence Grossberg, John Clarke and Janet Newman, Ann Gray, and Gil Rodman are some of those whose accessible, introductory pieces on topics like the notion of the conjuncture and conjunctural analysis, on cultural studies’ relationship to politics, on concepts like neo-liberalism , on the question of method, and so on. I tend to incorporate, as well as excellent excerpts from the work of lesser known or newer practitioners.
- 14.
For example, once, we transformed a unit on “Resistance” into a unit on “Adulting,” in order to examine the construction of “millennials” changes in the youth experience, and cultural politics. This new unit included both classic Cultural Studies work on style and youth culture, but also “adulting” internet memes, a revisit of theories of class, and a look at empirical generational U.S. social policy data.
- 15.
Grossberg, Cultural Studies in the Future Tense, 241.
- 16.
Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg (1992), 282.
- 17.
Ibid., 286.
- 18.
Ibid., 287.
- 19.
Ien Ang, “Stuart Hall and the Tension between Academic and Intellectual Work,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 19, no. 1 (2016).
- 20.
Ibid., 31.
- 21.
John Clarke, “Living with/in and without Neo-Liberalism,” Focaal 2008, no. 51 (2008): 135.
- 22.
Cruz, “Cultural Studies and Social Movements: A Crucial Nexus in the American Case,” 258, 73.
- 23.
Grossberg, Cultural Studies in the Future Tense, 95.
- 24.
“On the Political Responsibilities of Cultural Studies.”
- 25.
Ibid., 243.
- 26.
Ibid., 244.
- 27.
Larry Grossberg elaborates on what the conversation means to Cultural Studies in his introduction to this collection.
- 28.
Charlotte Brunsdon, “On Being Made History,” Cultural Studies 29, no. 1 (2014): 95.
- 29.
I must say this image rather reminds me of spending time in my mentor’s (Larry Grossberg’s) office: There is not a square inch of that room that is not touched by the floor-to-ceiling archive of books, newspapers, manuscripts, notes, and journals spanning half a century’s time of collection. When discussing new ideas in that space, I always look around and feel as if the whole story of this conjuncture can be found in that office.
- 30.
Brunsdon, “On Being Made History,” 95; Ang, “Stuart Hall and the Tension between Academic and Intellectual Work,” 33.
- 31.
Lawrence Grossberg, “On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues, ed. David Morley; and Kuan-hsing Chen (London: Routledge, 1996), 150.
- 32.
For example, I use very short excerpts and stories from Mortimer Adler’s and Charles Van Doren’s How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading, particularly from the section on “How to Be a Demanding Reader.”
- 33.
Cruz, “Cultural Studies and Social Movements: A Crucial Nexus in the American Case,” 299.
Works Cited
Ang, I. (2016). Stuart Hall and the Tension between Academic and Intellectual Work. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 19(1), 29–41.
Brunsdon, C. (2014). On Being Made History. Cultural Studies, 29(1), 88–99.
Clarke, J. (2008). Living with/in and Without Neo-Liberalism. Focaal, 51, 135–147.
Cruz, J. D. (2012). Cultural Studies and Social Movements: A Crucial Nexus in the American Case. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 15(3), 254–301.
Giroux, H. A. (2003). Public Spaces, Private Lives: Democracy Beyond 9/11. Lanham/Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield.
Grossberg, L. (1996). On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall. In D. Morley & K.-h. Chen (Eds.), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues (pp. 131–150). London: Routledge.
Grossberg, L. (2010a). Cultural Studies in the Future Tense. Durham: Duke University Press.
Grossberg, L. (2010b). On the Political Responsibilities of Cultural Studies. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 11, 241–247.
Grossberg, L. (2014, February 15). Rage Against the Dying of a Light: Stuart Hall (1932–2014). Truthout.
Hall, S. (1990). The Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis of the Humanities. October, 53, 11–23.
Hall, S. (1992). Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies. In L. Grossberg (Ed.), Cultural Studies.
Pearce, K. (2016, December 16). Understanding Trumpism: Syllabus Co-Compiled by Johns Hopkins Historian Goes Viral Post-Election. Hub.
Williams, R. (2014). The Future of Cultural Studies (1989). In J. McGuigan (Ed.), Raymond Williams on Culture & Society: Essential Writings. London: Sage.
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Wood, M.M. (2019). Conjuncturally Teaching: Cultural Studies Pedagogy Beyond Common Sense. In: Aksikas, J., Andrews, S., Hedrick, D. (eds) Cultural Studies in the Classroom and Beyond. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25393-6_15
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