Abstract
Cultural studies as a field seems to have passed into the shadows of academic interests. Globalization and political economy have become the privileged concerns of left academics as we move into the new millennium. While we do not want to suggest that the newfound interest in globalization and political economy is unwarranted, we do want to stress that cultural studies’s long-standing interest in the interrelationship between power, politics, and culture is much too important at present to be dismissed as the passage of another academic fashion. Matters of agency, consciousness, pedagogy, rhetoric, and persuasion are central to any public discourse about politics, not to mention education itself. In fact, as we argue below, culture is a central sphere of politics; it is the one site that offers both a language of critique and possibility, a sphere in which matters of economy, institutional power relations, globalization, and politics can be recognized, critically understood, and collectively engaged. Hence, the promise of cultural studies, especially as a fundamental aspect of higher education, does not reside in a false opposition between culture and material relations of power, but in a project that bridges these concerns as part of a larger transformative and democratic politics in which matters of pedagogy and agency play a central role.
If you accept my definition that this is really what Cultural Studies has been about, of taking the best we can in intellectual work and going with it in this very open way to confront people for whom it is not a way of life, for whom it is not in any probability a job, but for whom it is a matter of their own intellectual interest, their own understanding of the pressures on them, pressures of every kind, from the most personal to the most broadly political—if we are prepared to take that kind of work and to revise the syllabus and discipline as best we can, on this site which allows that kind of interchange, then Cultural Studies has a very remarkable future indeed.
—Raymond Williamsl
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Notes
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© 2004 Henry A. Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux
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Giroux, H.A., Giroux, S.S. (2004). Cultural Studies and Critical Pedagogy in the Academy. In: Take Back Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403982667_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403982667_4
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