Seminar Directors

Jaafar Aksikas
Associate Professor of Cultural Studies
Columbia College, Chicago,

Donald Hedrick
Professor of English and Director of the Program in Cultural Studies
Kansas State University

Seminar Description

The seminar will consider how and what kind of cultural studies needs to be taught or emphasized at the current conjuncture. Participants will circulate short position or consideration papers with abstracts, explaining their rationale for classroom practices that in some way address the importance of the current historical moment. Without focusing on or trying to create a competition among areas of cultural studies, the seminar will explore the best pedagogical practices for engaging students with the urgency of the present, whatever urgency is specified. Common interests will be considered as a group.

Seminar participants will be requested to send 1) a one-paragraph statement of interest and 2) a short (1 to 2 pages) position paper describing your particular subject of inquiry by February 7, 2012. The following are meant to be prompt questions, not exhaustive, from which the participants may generate their own questions if they wish to:
• What cultural studies “tools” are there to address the U.S. national elections? (Media study, ideological analysis, class analysis, or?)
• Are students best engaged with local issues and issues to which they have a direct connection, as opposed to global or universal ones? Or do global concerns call for greater attention? And can one even engage local issues independently of global ones, and vice versa?
• Does the currency or urgency of an issue entail consideration and encouragement of activism? Or is activism always the implicit or explicit agenda?
• More and more students are from personal and family economic experience acutely aware of the recession and slowdown, if not anticipating greater and greater debt themselves. What teaching is most relevant to their experience, especially if they are not forthcoming about their experience?
• What is the value of preparing the student to have “coverage”. i.e., the CS toolbox or classic canon, for a particular charged issue?
• Is popular culture the most or least relevant subject for engaging students with urgent issues? How does one do this?
• Does the issue of urgency call for understandings inside or outside one’s disciplinary boundaries? Inside or outside the academy?

Application Process

Interested scholars should send an email of interest to Jaafar Aksikas and Donald Hedrick.