Abstract
As my title suggests, this essay argues that it is not possible to teach people how to do cultural studies. There are three major obstacles that matter here. The first is cultural studies’ status as a political project (rather than just an intellectual one) and the concurrent difficulties inherent in trying to teach students how to be politically engaged. The second involves the institutional pressures toward professionalization that currently dominate universities (at least in the US) and the impact those pressures have on graduate curricula and mentoring. The third involves a more general (albeit often unacknowledged) problem of teaching anyone anything: that is, the fact that most institutional forms of pedagogy are characterized by a kind of failure since most of our students are unlikely to take up whatever projects and dreams we may be trying to put into our teaching.
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Notes
- 1.
At the University of South Florida, this seminar was officially called “Contemporary Cultural Studies.” At the University of Minnesota, its formal name is “Critical Communication Studies.” Syllabi for all those courses—as well as compressed, four-week version of the course I taught at the University of Turku in 2015—can be found online at http://www.gilrodman.com/syllabi
- 2.
If there are major exceptions to this pessimistic vision, they involve the various “identity”-based disciplines—for example, Women’s Studies, African American Studies, and so on—that already have political agendas at their core. Even in these departments, though, there is often pressure (both from administrators and from students) for instructors to steer clear of pedagogy that looks like political “indoctrination.” Instructors are encouraged to teach students about, for example, feminist activism rather than to teach students how to engage in such activism themselves. Similarly, courses that require students merely to read and analyze “minority” literature as aesthetic texts—rather than to take up the pointed challenges that such literature often poses to hegemonic cultural and political norms—don’t ruffle administrators’ feathers as much as courses that require students to read and produce critical analyses of institutional racism.
- 3.
Syllabi for the different iterations of this course can be found online at http://www.gilrodman.com/syllabi
- 4.
There isn’t enough space here to do the subject the justice it deserves, but this would be a good moment to point out that most traditional measures of both “good” teaching and “good” learning—for example, grades, course evaluations, and so on—are deeply flawed. Outside of contexts where our primary pedagogical goals involve the rote memorization of facts (and maybe not even then), there’s usually a vast chasm between what we most want our students to learn and what we can actually assess in a meaningful way.
- 5.
This is one of the many lies about education that our students have been told. Some of the others are summed up here: https://www.gilrodman.com/2015/02/01/lies-we-tell-our-students-rerun-sunday/
- 6.
This isn’t the place to address in full the long history of cultural studies folks questioning the proper place of Birmingham in the history of cultural studies (see Rodman 2015, 120–157). Suffice it to say that there are multiple legitimate versions of cultural studies’ origins, and that the Centre doesn’t figure prominently in all of them. Nonetheless, the Centre is an oft-cited choice for cultural studies’ birthplace, and—for better or worse—it is (probably) the first site where the term “cultural studies” was adopted and broadly recognized as a label for a particular kind of blending of intellectual and political projects.
- 7.
When I presented a very early version of this essay at a conference, Michael Denning suggested that the known successes in the list of former CCCS students above might actually be better understood as the failures. These, after all, are the people who wound up in the academy, rather than in the proverbial trenches. I’m not sure I agree with this sentiment entirely. Is Angela McRobbie (for instance) really a “failure” because she carved out a successful academic career against all odds? That seems like too harsh an assessment. But part of what I value about Denning’s suggestion is the acknowledgment that what counts as a pedagogical success story may not always be the obvious outcome. At least some of our pedagogical “failures” may actually turn out to be successes in ways that we never actually witness.
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Rodman, G.B. (2019). The Impossibility of Teaching Cultural Studies. 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_6
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