Editors: Bruce Burgett (University of Washington Bothell) & Randy Martin (New York University)

There is a fable in which the modern western research university and cultural studies at its emergence share a golden age: born together of the post-WWII expansion of higher education, the institution and field share a progressive and triumphant commitment to the democratization of university access and the building of inclusive national cultures. The protagonists in this fable are most often the founders of the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, with a stress on their commitments to adult education and their interests in working class popular culture.

There are myriad reasons to be suspicious of this narrative. As many have observed, the golden-ness of the fabled age celebrated a specifically white, male, working class, Anglo subject position of professional and epistemological privilege that was already passing. Neither the university nor cultural studies were ever so homogeneous as to have enjoyed this sort of common origin or pinnacle. Most important for our current moment, the nostalgia that inheres in such backward glances neither helps orient toward the future nor positions the present prospects for the university or cultural studies.

This research thread – Universities in Question – is intended to create a space where contributors and participants can rethink the fable of unity in terms of difference – something cultural studies itself has inclined us to do and something that the Cultural Studies Association should be positioned to do. The thread seeks to locate cultural studies in an historical moment when the ideal of the university as a public good has been rendered problematic by forces of privatization and the horizon of culture as a common, national, or bounded object of inquiry has receded, if not entirely vanished.

We seek research that analyzes risks and tracks opportunities for cultural studies and the university at a point where their inter-related claims to autonomy have been undermined. We see the current challenges to business-as-usual – the crisis of publishing, the crisis of the humanities, the crisis of this and that – as an invitation to reflect critically and creatively on the university’s own structures of knowledge-making: its (inter)disciplinary grammars, professional hierarchies, and proprietary ecologies. We particularly seek to foster research and publication aimed at engaging with these structures in action-oriented ways and in relation to one or more of the following lines of inquiry:

i) What does and can cultural studies look like when the research university is not taken as its epicenter? Most higher education today takes place among adult and continuing education, satellite campuses, community and technical colleges, proprietaries and liberal arts colleges, state colleges and professional schools. Some formations of cultural studies began and continue through these sites. What shapes does cultural studies research and curricula take across this diversity? How does this diversity change our narratives of the origins and future of the field.

ii) What does and can cultural studies look like when higher education is not taken as its epicenter? Most cultural work takes place outside of universities and other institutions of higher education – at community-based organizations, museums, arts collectives, galleries, outreach and training programs, among many other sites. How do our understandings of the university-based (inter)discipline of cultural studies need to shift if we consider it as only one sector among others? What practices of engagement, alliance, and professional development are needed and/or emergent? Who are the practitioners of engagement among university faculty, staff, and students, as well as staff and clients of partner organizations?

iii) How should cultural studies be located across disciplines and departments? As indicated by the rise of centers, institutes, and interdisciplinary programs, the separation of the liberal arts from the professions and the division of the liberal arts into discrete areas (the humanities, arts, and natural and social sciences) are quickly becoming things of the past, in no small part because culture cuts across them without affecting unification. How and where can cultural studies forge alliances with other units that study and use culture, but do not claim to be doing cultural studies? Who are the facilitators of these alliances among faculty, staff, and students?

iv) What kinds of claims can and should cultural studies make on shifting policies within higher education concerning access, diversity, debt, and globalization? These four terms interact in complex ways. Debt and selectivity shape the unevenness of higher education’s globalization as students, staff, and faculty flow to privileged national sites, campuses seek satellite expansion, and national hegemony is eroded by internal and external migrants in search of highly ranked degrees and programs. Debt moratoria and challenges to excellence rework established hierarchies and open the question of what and whom education is for. How can the well-established critical discourses about these issues within cultural studies engage with these policy shifts?

v) What does cultural studies have to say to the cultures and practices of assessment across higher education? As demands for curricula and pedagogies with measureable outcomes rise, can cultural studies do more than respond with aversion and avoidance? Where can cultural studies appropriate extant protocols, hack existing resources? Where does and can it invent new strategies of value and evaluation, imagine other scalings of worth? How do these issues factor into the creation of new curricula and programs, the training of cultural studies professionals, and the mutuality by which those who pass through or into the academy may continue to collaborate?

vi) What should be the relation of cultural studies to various types of campus mobilization? Universities have become heated sites where student, faculty and staff movements and organizations have coalesced, where the financial crisis has been contested, where claims about diversity, representation, and the public interest have been critiqued. Where does cultural studies sit with and among these mobilizations? Is it produced differently though them? Does it offer useful rethinkings or reimaginings of existing terms of campus activism?

Contributions that address these question – or others related to them – may take a variety of forms: short polemic pieces; journal length articles; reports from various fields. Questions about format will be fielded by the co-editors of the thread.

Editors Bios

Bruce Burgett is Professor and Director of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell, and graduate faculty in the Department of English at the University of Washington Seattle. He is the founding director of the UW graduate Certificate in Public Scholarship and a core faculty member in the community-based Master of Arts in Cultural Studies at UW Bothell. He is the author of Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic, and co-editor of Keywords for American Cultural Studies (with Glenn Hendler). He is currently working on a book project entitled Sex, Panic, Nation and a second edition of Keywords. He has taught, researched, and published widely in the fields of American studies, cultural studies, and queer studies. He serves on the editorial and advisory boards of American Quarterly and American Literary History, and the press committee of the University of Washington Press. He is Vice President of the Cultural Studies Association and Chair of the National Advisory Board of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life.  He serves on the Board of Trustees of Humanities Washington.

Randy Martin is Professor and Chair of the Department of Art and Public Policy at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, where he directs the graduate program in Arts Politics. He has also served for six years as Associate Dean of Faculty and Interdisciplinary Programs. He is author of An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management; Financialization of Daily Life; On Your Marx: Relinking Socialism and the Left; Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics; Socialist Ensembles: Theater and State in Cuba and Nicaragua; Performance as Political Act: The Embodied Self. He has long maintained an interest in questions of academic labor and the university editing several issues of the journal Social Text, one of which was published as Chalk Lines: The Politics of Work in the Managed University. In addition to doing stints as co-editor of Social Text and Socialism and Democracy he serves on the board of edu-factory, an e-collaborative dedicated to the project of a global autonomous university. He has been past President and Vice President of the Cultural Studies Association and currently sits on the National Advisory Board of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life.

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