Edited by Jay Daniel Thompson
The CSAA at 30: Reflections of a Departing President
Elizabeth Stephens
In 1992, the year the CSAA was officially inaugurated as an association, Paul Keating was Prime Minister of Australia, the Mabo Case had finally overturned the legal fiction of ‘terra nullius’ in this country, and, in the former colleges of advanced education and institutes of technology that had just been renamed as universities under the Dawkins Act, new-minted Departments of Cultural Studies were graduating their first cohorts of students.
I was one of those students, in the Department of Communication and Cultural Studies at Curtin University (formerly the Western Australian Institute of Technology). This was during the years that Graeme Turner, Noel King, John Hartley, Jon Stratton, amongst others, passed through its Brutalist corridors. Around the same time, at nearby Murdoch University, Ien Ang, Niall Lucy, Tom O’Regan, John Frow, and others were also introducing some of the first Cultural Studies courses in the country. It was an exciting time.
That it was possible to study popular culture, or the practices of everyday life, or the entanglements of power/knowledge, as subjects of a university course was a revelation to teenaged me. Like many of my student peers at Curtin, I was a first-generation university student and largely disinterested in, as well as unfamiliar with, the sort of texts and cultural forms on which more traditional humanities courses then focused. Discovering Cultural Studies made my own cultural experiences and positionality comprehensible in new ways, legitimizing texts and subjects that had previously seemed outside serious scholarly consideration.
Over the past 30 years, the CSAA has not merely survived but flourished – no mean feat in Australia given that at least 20 of these years have been under a conservative government, one increasingly hostile to politically engaged teaching and research. The institutional and academic success of Cultural Studies as a field of research in this region is truly testimony to the commitment of the CSAA’s community of scholars.
This success is especially remarkably given that Cultural Studies has always been a rather scruffy and undisciplined sort of academic discipline. While this has often posed challenges to its institutional footing, it has also been a source of strength, and a key to its endurance. The CSAA has long acted as an incubator for new and emergent fields of research, many of which have since become established as important fields of research in their own right: the environmental humanities, affect studies, critical race study, queer theory, disability studies and more have all had important sites of emergence and engagement within the CSAA community. It is important that the CSAA continue to welcome and foster new fields of research as these emerge in the future, even as it retains a growing sense of its own history and methodological specificity.
To have had the opportunity to serve as President of the CSAA over the past four years, and to complete my tenure as the association celebrates its 30th anniversary, has been an honour and a real joy. It goes without saying that the last few pandemical years have been enormously difficulty and disruptive for the university sector as a whole. I thank both the CSAA Executive and National Committees for their dedication and service during this period: Rob Cover, Holly Randell-Moon, Jay Daniel Thompson, Michael Richardson; and Anita Brady, Karin Sellberg, Daniel Marshall, Katrina Jaworski, Dennis Bruining, Lola Montgomery, Jude Elund, Megan Rose, Elham Golpushnezhad and Brydie Kosmina.
I hand over leadership of this community to incoming President Rebecca Olive knowing that the CSAA, and its future, are in good shape. This is evident in the fact the CSAA has enjoyed no less than two national CSAA conferences in 2022. The first of these was held in Perth at Edith Cowan University in June, having been originally scheduled as the 2020 annual conference. Many thanks to the organization team of Panizza Allmark, Thor Kerr, James Hall, Jessica Taylor and Laura Glitsos for their perseverance in putting on this fantastic conference.
The second was held at RMIT University in December 2022. This conference marked the official 30th anniversary of the CSAA and was held as part of the CHASS consortium of humanities association conferences in Melbourne. Thanks to Rob Cover, Jay Daniel Thompson, Anna Hickey-Moody and Mark Gibson for their hard work on this conference, and to everyone who participated.
The following short pieces by Baden Offord, Lisa Slater, Sukhmani Khorana, Greg Noble, Mark Gibson, Lola Montgomery, and new President Rebecca Olive all reflect on the role of the CSAA and Cultural Studies as a discipline in Australian academia over the past 30 years.
Originally published on the CSAA website as part of a series commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Association, collected here together (in non-chronological order), each of these pieces provides a first-hand account of the kinds of thinking and relationality Cultural Studies has made possible, and the communities to which it has given rise.
Elizabeth Stephens is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland and the outgoing President of the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia (2019–2023).
Meeting at the crossroads
Baden Offord
My free dive into cultural studies began in the borderlands of my PhD research that focused on LGBT human rights, queer theory and Southeast Asia in the mid-to-late 1990s. Having re-located from Eora to Bundjalung Country and finding an academic home at Southern Cross University in Lismore in 1994, I was fortunate to be at the foundation of a School for Humanities, Media and Cultural Studies in 1999.
What emerged was a moment that brought together an incredible constellation of friends, scholars and thinkers: Wanning Sun, Gerard Goggin, Helen Wilson, Ros Mills, Fiona Martin, Justine Lloyd and later on Rob Garbutt, Kim Satchell, Dallas Baker, Rebecca Olive, Erika Kerruish and Soenke Biermann, among others. These wonderful folk were the kind of touchstones you needed in an academy where passion could flower with scholarship and critical enquiry.
Handed the task of establishing a cultural studies programme, I set about understanding how cultural studies would work in a regional context. It was exciting, challenging and daunting! My free dive was not without its moments of confusion, anxiety and pathos, as well as moments of sharp clarity, seriousness and fun. At that time, the energies to activate a cultural studies presence in a rural and regional university were, fortunately unencumbered by the limits and expectations sometimes imposed on and by metropolitan and sandstone universities (like the University of Sydney, where I had studied Indian History, Indonesian and Sanskrit.) in which tradition might trump exploration and experiment.
Something about being in Lismore, at the junction of colonial, agricultural, alternative, Indigenous, media, environmental, counter-cultural, activist and protest-based regional experience and belonging/unbelonging, resonated strongly with the Birmingham roots of the cultural studies project, at least it seemed to us. Emboldened by Nick Couldry’s definition of cultural studies as ‘an expanding space for sustained, rigorous and self-reflexive empirical research into the massive power-laden complexity of contemporary culture,’ we set about framing our approach to cultural studies pedagogy through identity, space and place.
At the heart of this was learning about the best of cultural studies traditions, concepts, methods, and attempting to forge a distinctive way to understand and express the deep structural features of social and cultural life (particularly through the lens of race, gender, sexuality, class, dis/ability), as they shape and mark our lived experience.
As I write this reflection post the catastrophic flooding of the Northern Rivers region earlier this year (2022), I’m reminded of the precarious nature of our academic lives, of how our cultural studies scholarship too can be extinguished by the neo-liberal and managerial oriented university.
I wrote up the entire cultural studies unit, ‘Unruly Subjects: Citizenship’ (which later became a core unit in several humanities degrees) over three days in a motel room in Lismore, surrounded by the thoughts of Michel Foucault, Stuart Hall, Ziauddin Sardar, Ruth Lister and Elspeth Probyn. Sadly, I’ve heard the motel was destroyed by those recent floods. The unit, too, has finally been pulled from the SCU curriculum after 21 years. I suspect the activist thrust of the unit proved too much for management.
But what emerged at Southern Cross University was a cultural studies curriculum and critical pedagogy that offered imaginaries and paths to, and practices, of, hope – where hope is a verb (to use Bjork’s approach) associated with radical transformation. The passion was to develop a cultural studies education that enabled ‘affective voices’, agency and mutual respect drawn directly from the relevance of everyday life and issues of social justice.
Importantly, along the way I was indebted to the CSAA and the ACS as associations of cultural studies folk where the pedagogy of our curriculum and the investigations in our research could be tested and given critical and creative oversight.
I was lucky to attend, present and co-present at many of the annual conferences and events with my PhD students and colleagues over 20 years. With my colleagues, undergrad and postgrad students at SCU we even managed to host the 2010 CSAA conference ‘A Scholarly Affair’, held in the Byron Bay Community Centre. I vividly remember salient talks by postcolonial Indian theorist Vinay Lal, environmental humanities scholar Deborah Bird-Rose, Goorie author of Bundjalung and European heritage, Melissa Lucashenko, and sociologist Raewyn Connell. The conference extrapolated from Toni Morrison’s insight that ‘racism is a scholarly affair.’
The rich, generative and often wild energies of these gatherings can’t be overstated when they work at their best. The generosity of academics and scholars was generally amazing. Even when I felt an outsider (as a queer, non-drinking, Maori academic from a regional uni in sandals), the scope of the CSAA was just open enough to create and sustain interstitial and intersectional relations.
I am immensely grateful to have been a part of this activist and intellectual community. For example, it gave me the strength to move beyond having a ‘mouth full of blood’ to having the intellectual and creative verve to engage with my own lived experience about suicide through a decolonizing frame. It strikes me as a moment of poignant reflection that during my PhD research I presented on a panel alongside Rob Cover in the catalysing queer conference ‘Activate/Reactivate’ at Sydney Uni, I believe held in 1997–1998. Through the years, he and I have met at many cultural studies crossroads. His work in critical suicide studies has radically contributed to cultural studies scholarship. So, it’s noteworthy that he’s now part of the CSAA conference team organizing the 30th anniversary. He is just one example of how powerful these crossroads are!
Baden Offord is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies and Human Rights at Curtin University and is of Māori Pākehā heritage. Among his recent publications are: (co-edited with Fleay, Hartley, Woldeyes and Chan) Activating Cultural and Social Change: Pedagogies of Human Rights, (Routledge, 2022) and the essay ‘Becoming human: lived experience, suicide and the complexities of being’, (https://overland.org.au/2019/07/becoming-human-lived-experience-suicide-and-the-complexities-of-being/). In 2021 he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) ‘For distinguished service to tertiary education in the field of human rights, social justice, and cultural diversity.’
Gundagai: Yarri and Jacky Jacky
Lisa Slater
There is a sculpture in the main street of Gundagai (NSW) that honours two Wiradjuri men, Yarri and Jacky Jacky, local heroes in the Great Flood of 1852.
The inscription notes that the Gundagai community, including Wiradjuri and descendants of those saved, honour and commemorate Yarri and Jacky Jacky who saved many lives. Unlike so many Australian monuments, this statue does not memorialize and legitimize colonialism or celebrate nationalism and white male ‘heroes’.
The monument is testament to the Wiradjuri men’s bravery and skill.
It asks many questions.
Unveiled in 2017, on the 165th anniversary of the flood, the bronze sculpture depicts the two men and a bark canoe used to save 69 townspeople from the floodwaters. At the time, Gundagai’s population was 250. It was estimated that 89 people died in the flood.
Who’s counted and who went uncounted?
The flood remains one of the deadliest natural disasters ever recorded in Australia. After unveiling the sculpture, MP Michael McCormack tweeted, the ‘statue marks one of the greatest acts of bravery in Australian history’.[i] Even more so given Australia’s racist, violent colonial history. Wiradjuri had warned the colonizers not to build the town on the flood plains of the Murrumbidgee River. Their knowledge of Country was ignored.
The rescue continued over several days and nights, yet only Yarri and Jacky Jacky are named. Although it is noted that other Wiradjuri joined the rescue, their names are lost to (public) history. The colonial records resound with generic names for Aboriginal people, like Jacky Jacky, erasing and denying people’s uniqueness, humanity and relationships to people and place.
The sculpture, unmissable on the main street of Gundagai, reminds even the most forgetful onlooker of colonialism. Its presence recounts and recalls local history. As Roslyn Boles, a descendant of Yarri, told the ABC News, ‘Yarri and Jacky Jacky could’ve walked away and said, “We told them, we told them and they decided not to listen”, but they didn’t.’[ii] Standing before the monument I was dumbstruck. Why? Despite the violence, land theft, oppression and ignoring of Wiradjuri warnings, they risked their lives.
The memorial sets me into a reflective mood. It unsettles, troubles and disturbs my trajectory.
We were heading to Tumut, stopped over to grab a coffee and now I’m waylaid by a bronze sculpture. Borrowing from Meaghan Morris, ‘it raises familiar questions about the past represented in the present’, but it does so in the context of everyday activities. Buying a coffee, grocery shopping or tourists meandering along. Unlike the plaque on the Henry Parkes Motor Inn, Tenterfield, which honours a ‘founding father of the modern nation’, the Gundagai legend engenders altogether different effects of place.[iii]
A legend in which Aboriginal men are celebrated for their courage, ingenuity and compassion.
Aunty Sony Piper, Wiradjuri Elder and member of the ‘Yarri and Jacky Jacky Sculpture Committee,’ said: ‘To be Aboriginal men, there’s not many statues around and we wanted that to be in Gundagai.
For a lot of the tourists to come through and see about these heroes – these two Aboriginal heroes.’[iv]
On Saturday the 25th of June 2022, to mark the 170-year anniversary of the flood, the Gundagai Aboriginal community presented the Yarri & Jacky Jacky Commemoration Corroboree. Writing for NITV, organizer Joe Williams wrote: ‘Anyone who was in attendance would agree, that the spirit of the Wiradjuri heroes, and our many ancestors, were with us.’[v]
The statue slowed me down; interrupted my course. Cultural studies, and CSAA, taught me to value everyday disturbances. To not brush aside the affects or pass on by, but to follow the disquiet.
[iii] 1988, ‘At Henry Parkes Motel’, Cultural Studies, 2:1, 1–47.
Lisa Slater is an Associate Professor, University of Wollongong
‘Beyond perceptions of deficit and towards productive discomfort in the classroom’
Sukhmani Khorana
It was with great trepidation and much hope that I accepted a secondment as Academic Program Leader in University of Wollongong’s brand-new South-West Sydney campus, which was to be housed in a couple of floors of a Council building in the Liverpool CBD. For those unaccustomed to Sydney’s western and south-western suburbs beyond the recent incessant focus on Parramatta, Liverpool is about 25 kilometres from the centre of Sydney, a lower median income than the New South Wales average and could be classified as ‘super-diverse’ as no single ethnic group dominates.
Also worth noting are the growing cohort of young people, many of whom are children of migrants and refugees. Liverpool and nearby Fairfield are the two Local Government Areas (LGAs) of Sydney where most newly arrived refugees are resettled, leading to particular needs for housing, education, and employment infrastructure.
In other words, this new position would have been ideal for operationalizing many conceptual tools in my growing scholarly arsenal on multiculturalism and its embodiment in the Australian context. I had also been writing my first monograph on food in inter-cultural contexts and was equally excited to expand my inner-city palate and foodie know-how. Despite these obvious intersections with my 1.5 generation migrant identity and academic pursuits, my first trip to Liverpool for early admission interviews for UOW’s Bachelor of Arts program turned out to be a checklist of privilege and positionality.
During the interviews themselves, I was heartened that so many students who hailed from racialized backgrounds were interested in pursuing an Arts degree. Some were especially interested in majoring in politics and international relations, while others were keen to explore teaching pathways alongside a major in cultural studies or sociology. This interest in understanding their world through the lens of the humanities existed despite the fact that many hailed from schools where ‘Culture and Society’ was not on offer as an HSC subject. They nonetheless understood how the vocabulary of a discipline akin to cultural studies could enable them to self-represent and claim belonging on behalf of their communities.
However, many were candid about how they had an uphill battle ahead convincing their parents about the value of an arts education. Still others had lived complex lives as always-already politicized subjects in Western Sydney and wanted to find the language to both articulate their experiences and advocate for better conditions for their families in Australia as well as in the Global South.
Stepping away from the campus and my teaching and governance hats, what I was less prepared for was the intensity of guilt I would experience in the course of being a walker/ethnographer/insider-outsider in the streets of Liverpool. This was the first time I encountered my own class and educational privilege vis-à-vis many people of colour who call western or south-western Sydney home. While I had been well-versed in the pedagogical and aesthetic dimensions of cultural diversity, my training and life experience did little to expose me to the habitus of these suburbs and the visceral reactions such exposure would evoke.
What I have been endeavouring to do for the last five years is learning from and collaborating with these communities rather than imposing my own understanding of what would work here. This constitutes very slow research and very patient teaching and my cultural studies training has equipped me for both. It means re-conceptualizing cultural capital and what it means to be at home and continue to want to stay in a place that others see as deprived. It implies embracing ‘productive discomfort’, an idea that many cultural studies scholars and colleagues have actively practised and championed.
Dr. Sukhmani Khorana is a Scientia Associate Professor in the School of the Arts and Media at UNSW.
CSAA conference
Greg Noble
It wasn’t long after I graduated when I attended my first CSAA conference in the early 1990s, so I was still quite junior. I’d been reading cultural theory for some years but, completing a thesis in intellectual history, it had never occurred to me that cultural studies was a thing, let alone a thing for me. I hadn’t been part of that generation that had forged cultural studies in Australia.
I’d been to several conferences in other areas and had found them to be clubs that I hadn’t been invited to join. The CSAA conferences in the 1990s, on the other hand, were welcoming. Sure, there was a discourse I hadn’t mastered, and there were debates and histories that were still mysteries, but this mattered less.
I discovered early on that cultural studies operated as a relatively open intellectual space, and this was especially important for postgraduates and early career researchers. Indeed, I would argue that, after that initial phase of the constitution of cultural studies here, it became a space where HDRs and ECRs could play significant roles. This was institutionalized in the CSAA executive and in Continuum.
It’s not that there weren’t celebrities in cultural studies – these were people who had created this space. But I remember that, at an early conference in Fremantle, I found myself sitting with luminaries such as Meaghan Morris and Ien Ang, feeling a bit weird and, yet, at home. And that defined cultural studies for me.
Cultural studies has long agonized over whether it is a discipline. It certainly has not had the kind of institutional solidity that other disciplines have. This has produced problems, and often threatened the viability of cultural studies, but at the time this fluidity offered opportunities for younger academics and students. The absence of an extensive institutional basis meant that most people who gathered at the CSAA conference came from somewhere else. Cultural studies was not what most people had studied or taught.
For me, the CSAA conference was an exploratory space, where people often played with ideas and material they did not deploy in workaday university life. This is what drew me in. There was always a different vibe at cultural studies conferences – perhaps carnivalesque is too strong – but conversations amongst postgrads and ECRs often centred around the ‘stars’: how they looked, performed, whether they disappointed. Indeed, I gave a conference paper on conferences one year which argued that gossip, gurus and groupies were crucial to the ‘communitas’ of the field.
To foreground the degree of open-ness I found is not to suggest that cultural studies conferences were utopian spaces. They had hierarchies, feuds and arseholes. I remember early on I approached someone who had just given a keynote and said it was great: he put me in my place, saying, ‘as if I need your approval’. I shrank away. But the relative flatness of relations gave me my most pleasurable moments. When a feisty female student tore shreds off a pompous senior male (sadly not the one above), I cheered inside.
But that’s an account of a time past. I can’t say that the fluidity of cultural studies has been so advantageous over the last 15 years or so, but then I can no longer claim to experience the excitement of discovering such a space for the first time. The absence of the institutional solidity that disciplines like sociology have leaves a big question mark over the future of cultural studies. But one thing is certain: postgrads and ECRs must be at its heart for it to flourish.
Greg Noble is Professor at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. He was a member of the CSAA executive (1999–2006), ran its newsletter for several years and helped organize 2 conferences (1999, 2016), and an editor of Continuum (2007–2015).
Cultural studies and the Grant-Funding Regime
Mark Gibson
I want to reflect in this piece on the changes I have seen in Cultural Studies as a result of its increasing organization around grant-funded research. The latter has now become so naturalized that it is sometimes hard to remember that there was ever another time. But much of the works we now regard as ‘classics’ in the field were written before research funding applications became a thing.
Examples would include the work in Britain of Stuart Hall and the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies; Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979); Paul Willis’ Learning to Labour (1977) and Angela McRobbie’s Zoot Suits and Second-Hand Dresses (1988) – not to mention Raymond Williams’ extensive writings and Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957).
In Australia, examples of work written before the grant funding regime would include Meaghan Morris’s The Pirate’s Fiancée (1988); John Fiske, Bob Hodge and Graeme Turner’s Myths of Oz (1987); John Hartley’s The Politics of Pictures (1987); McKenzie Wark’s Virtual Geography (1994); Catharine Lumby’s Bad Girls (1997); the essays published in John Frow and Meaghan Morris’s edited collection Australian Cultural Studies: A Reader (1993), the latter a snapshot of some of the best Cultural Studies work of the 1980s and early 1990s.
In short, a lot of people did a lot of very good work without grant funding.
At the CSAA conference at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch in 2003 – ancient history! – I organized a roundtable session on how the grant funding regime was then remoulding Cultural Studies. At least that’s what I intended it to be about. In fact, the session quickly gravitated towards a form that has since become very familiar: an advice session with senior academics who have been successful in the grant-funding game addressed implicitly to postgraduate students and those we were then still learning to call ‘Early Career Researchers’.
The intentions of the advice-givers were, of course, only good: a generous desire to pass on useful information. But I was surprised at how difficult it seemed to be to stage a more critical reflection on the grant funding regime – on the kinds of research it led people to do; indeed, the very framing of Cultural Studies as research, rather than as say ‘theorising’; the sort of relations it set up between scholars; the more explicit involvement of government; the role of that all-important body, the Australian Research Council.
A critical view of the grant funding regime would be that it brought an end to forms of knowledge production that Cultural Studies had borrowed from the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s – particularly what might be called ‘collective-dialogic’ forms. These forms had anchored Cultural Studies very much in teaching practice, the classroom being one of the key institutional contexts in which collective dialogue could be staged.
By contrast, grant-funded research is organized around what economic geographer Gernot Grabher calls ‘project ecologies’. Participants in projects are conceived not as dialogic partners so much as members of a ‘team’, all supposed to be pulling in the same direction. In business contexts, from where the form derives, projects are governed by what Grabher calls a ‘service logic’ – that of solving a problem for a client – and a ‘management logic’ – aimed at keeping the project within time and on budget.
This might all seem a bit depressing. Has the grant funding regime led to the capture of Cultural Studies by utilitarianism? Should we see it as yet another chapter in the sorry tale of our discipline’s submission to neoliberalism? I confess to having had thoughts at times along these lines. But in finishing up a co-authored book that has emerged from a grant-funded project, I have also come recently to a different view.
It is certainly true that research grant applications require a certain alignment with Grabher’s logics, sometimes involving imaginative conceits such as the idea – increasingly explicit in recent years – of the nation whose funding body underwrites the research as ‘client’ (hello Simon Birmingham, hello Stuart Robert!). The art of writing a funding application is, in part, to convey a sense that the project has been fully conceptualized at the outset, needing only to be ‘executed’ to deliver outcomes in the service of the client’s needs.
In practice, however, there are countless unforeseen questions that need to be addressed during the course of the research, not only at an operational level, but also in refining the value horizon of the project – the shared understanding of what is ultimately ‘for’. Projects are therefore much more internally dialogic than their externally facing appearance might suggest. Indeed, they could be thought of as one of the forms preserving a space for collective dialogic practices in the corporatised university.
This at least has been my experience. Am I just trying to put a cheerful spin on things? We should talk more than we do about what the grant-funding regime has done to Cultural Studies.
Professor Mark Gibson is Associate Dean – Media, Writing and Publishing in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University.
The kind of thing that happens
Lola Montgomery
It’s December 2019. I’m about to present a paper at the CSAA conference at the University of Queensland. I’m in a spectacular lecture theatre where I saw the great Meaghan Morris present a paper just yesterday. But the story actually starts back in the 1990s.
My sojourns through the varied terrain of cultural studies began on the Gold Coast, when I took a double major in theatre and visual art at Griffith University. It was as incongruous as it sounds, a bunch of baby goths, stage kids and writers, all flung together finding harbour in a town that wasn’t known for the likes of us. All first-year students, back then, needed to enrol in a subject in their first semester called ‘The Arts in Perspective 1’ and I fully expected us to be quite firmly reminded that the arts were of very little importance; this was the beginning of the Howard era, after all. I was in the first cohort to pay extra for HECS under newly increased fees, and the mood of the country was moving. Pauline Hanson was screeching the airwaves and suddenly ‘refugee’ was a dirty word.
I was expecting to stay humble.
I remember the first lecture. It was a kind of welcome to uni address and then Dr Patricia Wise said something startling, ‘most of you will end up with a PhD.’ Through the next two semesters, she would guide us through a cornucopia of theory texts, which offered lenses to understand, or try to, the place of the artist, or just the place of us, within the world we were coming of age within. When Port Arthur’s bullets shattered our minds, we contextualized it through traditional gender roles and the harm these things can do. I, like many of my cohort, found voices to articulate things we had begun to notice but not yet really say, not on our own.
In a traditional structure of a one-hour lecture and two-hour tute, we learnt a kind of revolution. Instead of ill-formed feelings and anecdotes about our observations of the world, we learnt to communicate them as ideas, of some value – augmented by French theory even! For a bunch of Gold Coast misfits, arty budding intellectuals on the glitzy and seedy Glitter Strip, this was transformative.
I left Cultural Studies aside for two years – my passion was for art and drama, but when my honours year came hurtling towards me, theory returned, and with gusto. I devoured texts by Morris, Barthes, Probyn, Foucault, Spivak, Gatens, Hall, Broadhurst, and the ones we didn’t understand so easily, Deleuze and Guttari (which I always liked to round to D&G, like fashion provocateurs of the day Dolce e Gabbana), Agamben, and so many more. Again, who was there to champion this way of thinking that took our experiences and made them deep thoughts, and eventually works of art, but the same Dr Pat Wise, or Pat as she was colloquially known. I learnt how to tell high theory through storytelling, long before I’d heard of Autotheory.
Then a PhD beckoned with the roll of the new millennium. I’d just completed my honours degree and had become accustomed to this weave of theory and art. Pat became my supervisor.
Now, back to 2019, with the setting being UQ for the CSAA conference. I’m on a panel alongside my actual next-door neighbour – and we live in the mountains outside of the city so it’s quite remarkable, one of the circus performers-now-PhD- academics that I went to uni with, and two or so other cultural theorists discussing their applications of theory to corporeal practice. One of my colleagues, who I now teach cultural studies alongside, sits to the side smiling.
The now-Associate Professor Pat Wise is watching a panel of presentations of at least three of her former students, all from that unexpected little Gold Coast enclave and I can’t quite imagine what seeing that fruition might feel like. She’s seen it all, from me, and from many, weaving through my Cultural Studies career like the roots of a rhizome.
I now teach Cultural Studies and have postgrad students of my own. I’m even the state rep for the CSAA, and I have some new research. It’s leaning on Lacan this time, and Femme theory. Afterwards she tells me ‘I was dead impressed.’ I impressed the impressive.
That’s the kind of thing that happens at a CSAA conference.
Dr Lola Meghann Montgomery is a senior lecturer in the Master of Creative Industries at SAE Institute. Her PhD was an exegesis and creative component, focusing on the lives experience of burlesque performance.
Cultural studies as practice
Rebecca Olive
Like so many, I came to cultural studies after my undergraduate degree, my own being in international relations and anthropology at the University of Sydney. I moved back to the northern rivers, and it was at Southern Cross University where I was introduced to cultural studies by Baden Offord at Southern Cross University. I had been seeking an advisor for an Honours project on surfing as a practice of intercultural connection. My project wasn’t revolutionary, but Baden’s guidance – along with that of Erika Kerruish, Adele Wessell, Kim Satchell, and Rob Garbutt – towards theories and methods that emphasized the role of ethics, care and lived experience, were my introduction to what cultural studies could be.
Further shaped by feminism and queer theory, the politics and requirement for activism that underpins these areas emphasized the activist aspects of cultural studies to me. The cultural studies teaching programme at Southern Cross University really is wonderful.
It was this grounding that led me to understand cultural studies as a practice – it is something I do rather than a field I am in – that impacts the decisions I made about research questions, methodology, relationships, and research translation. As someone who went on to spend many years in sport and exercise science Schools and Departments (including for my PhD), thinking of research as a practice has been essential for maintaining clarity about my research focus and parameters while working outside of a HASS institutional context.
Cultural studies’ focus on everyday life meant that sport, exercise and leisure offer rich worlds to explore. Sport, exercise and leisure intersect with diverse contexts and issues, including identity, subjectivity, literature, media, policy, education, health, environments, industry, and so much more. My own contributions to the knowledge in these sport-focused disciplines has about everyday experiences of recreational sport, exercise and leisure, and the ways people make meaning of their lives, and of the world, through various forms of participation.
Thinking of cultural studies as a practice has strongly influenced how I’ve approached teaching. Working in sport and exercise science contexts meant that when it came to teaching, my students were focused on their vocational goals. A degree is a pathway to accreditation. Students working in physiology and anatomy labs, largely took HASS courses only because they were compulsory. Understandably, most of these students didn’t care what cultural studies is. And yet, the critical questions about definitions, histories, discrimination, and inclusion that were raised in these courses were essential to students’ education as future allied health professionals and sport facilitators.
Following Graeme Turner’s advice, I embraced the unruly-ness of cultural studies to ‘generate excitement amongst students about what cultural studies can do for them’, and always kept in mind Baden Offord’s reminder that pedagogy can ‘activate students’. That is, to help students discover methods and forms of analysis and communication that they can apply in their work (and lives) to improve things for the benefit of diverse people. This was also a productive a way of learning about sport for me, because in their excitement, students shared so much about their own sporting lives in classes.
The ethical imperative I found in cultural studies – that we should be engaged with the effects of our research and teaching – has been essential to my scholarship. It constantly reminds me that what we produce is as important as what we know and how we came to know it.
Rebecca Olive is a Senior Research Fellow at RMIT University. Her research explores recreational sport and leisure in everyday life with a particular focus on swimming and surfing in coastal and ocean ecologies. Influenced by feminist cultural studies approaches, Rebecca is interested in how people navigate in their relationships to other people and to the multispecies communities they’re immersed in. Her work advocates for the importance of recreational sport and leisure in human-environmental health and wellbeing. You can read more about this work at movingoceans.com.