Thinking Culture

Every year Cultural Studies at USyd is represented at the Cultural Studies Association of Australia Annual Conference by staff, postgrad and sometimes Honours researchers. This year it's being held in Canberra with the theme "UnAustralia". It's always fun and interesting, and always allows us a new way to get to know each other's research.

Our speakers this time around are as follows, for anyone interested in coming along or just knowing what we're doing:

• Kath Albury, Curious Wives: Same-sex Attracted Women in Non-Gay-and-Lesbian Sex Cultures
• Amy Bauder, Un-Australian Sex
• Pru Black, The Detail: The Materiality of Time
• Kate Crawford, Hard times at Krispy Kreme: The Mythology of the Generational Worker
• Catherine Driscoll, The Subject of Consent
• Michael Moller, Disciples of Discipline
• Emilie Severino, The Literary Ordeal: Feminism, Fiction, and the Philosophy of ‘Syncope’
• Will Tregoning, Business Management gets Utopic
• And another participant on this blog is there too - Melissa Hardie (from English), Picnic at Hanging Rock: Folding Terror into the National Imaginary

If you want to read the abstracts for any of these papers, or find out where and when they're on, you can search for them here.

The University organises a group of functions within which "gifted students" visit the campus in order to see what they might study and learn and experience at university. These are senior students who are selected as particularly able to gain things from that experience. Departments are offered the opportunity to provide a demonstration or presentation of either the training they offer or the topics they address.

Our department has offered presentations in previous years on topics like "Gender in the Media". This year, we proposed a group effort - a mix of both Gender Studies and Cultural Studies perspectives on the contentious question of pornography - on some of the debates around what pornography is for and the kinds of problem it is often seen to be. Four of us agreed to present short pieces on different approaches to debates around pornography.

So far so good. Pornography is certainly one of the issues where both gender studies and cultural studies have a lot to say, and an issue that's clearly of general public interest as any survey of mainstream media indicates. But the organising body within the university came back to us with the decision that pornography was not an appropriate topic to offer to these students experiencing what university is like.

It's a strange decision, given that "current affairs" and "social issues" segments in newspapers and on television which these same students will be encouraged to consider as a valid field of public debate address similar questions. It would be a rare 17yr old who had no opinion on the various debates around pornography and those people could clearly choose not to select our session from among those available. It would, indeed, be a rare 17yr old who had never encountered a piece of pornography (although we were never intending to show any).

Last week I went to Macquarie University to the Everyday Multiculturalism Conference [Day Two on Cronulla] to present a paper on the Cronulla Riots. My paper was on bonding processes for groups of young men and localism - a territorial process of surfing.

Key to the day was the involvement of community groups, as well as academics. In fact, the organisers copped a bit of flak for the language being used in the call for papers. It was suggested that the general public wouldn't be able to take part in the dialogue if the material to be presented wasn't made accessible enough.

On the day I found myself struggling with the abstraction that kept being put forward in the papers, and obtuse language being used to address the issues arising out of December 11, 2005 and its aftermath. While some papers, such as the opening address of Greg Noble, tried to make sure everyone would feel comfortable at the conference, many of the other papers didn't. There was repeated reference to dense academic theory and abstraction. Just backing, say the work of RW Connell or Emmanuel Levinas, up to the event and using it to explain what happened doesn't work. (In fact Connell is wrong about gender, but that's another post) Such a tactic distances us from what happened, the people involved and says: 'the evnt is interesting to my work and career'.

Theory IS important to analysis, and new langauge has to be used to unpack diffcuolt events. However, there is a time and place for it. Nothing was learnt by some speakers from the attack on the organisers [who tried to set up the community academic engagement from the outset]. I overheard a lot of comments asking what the hell the speaker meant and what planet they were from. Some people were polite about it, others were not. In the sessions, it often felt as if the speakers were talking 'about' Cronulla rather than engaging with it. Many papers felt very 'academic' and pretty far from what happened. All nice in theory, but so what? What were the speakers going to do with the material politically? How were their lives affected? What could be done on the ground?

In the afternoon there was a special session by community workers from Cronulla and other suburbs that were implicated. The speakers were very clear in the way they spoke - too many powerpoints but - yet simplified what were important areas, like racism etc. They also were pretty passive aggressive against the academics present, and some even challenged the academic analysis by refuting some of the confusing questions asked of them. I felt that the community workers still had the old 'ivory tower' opinion of academics.

What happened was that there was far too little to and froing in discussion as people had their guards up, so to speak.Future collaborative work was put in jeopardy.

We need to address the disjuncture between the theory we use as academics, the way we analyse things, and what the community wants , and quickly. I can't really blame the community and general public because they came along to the conference in the understanding that the talks would be in everyday langauge. But they weren't. Hence the frustration that bubbled along.

As academics we need to be situated in our talks, and work hard at translating the theoretical material so that others have access to it and the opportunity to debate it alongside us. It's not easy and can be very draining and expose us to critique more. Particularly when we are the work. We have to work twice as hard to make our work theoretically sound, but also very accessible. Our ocmmunity engagement needs to be very visible. Not to blow our own horn so to speak but to evidence our solidarity with community work and be seen to be 'putting ourselves politically on the line too' (in ways the public understand to be political). In this way we won't alienate the very people who would like to work alongside us and we would like to work with.

I know academics do community work all the time, but something was missing at the conference. Soething that demands us to revisit when we want to engage in very public debates and speak in ways that allow others into the work we do.

NB: Crossposted at blownglass

The Department of Gender & Cultural Studies is pleased to announce the next seminar in its fortnightly series;

Doing Commissioned Sex Research
Speakers: Dr Kane Race (UNSW): "Engaging in a Culture of Barebacking: Gay Men and the Risk of HIV Prevention"

Dr David McInnes (UWS): "Academic Sex Work: A musical"

The seminar will be held on Friday Sept 8 in the Refectory Room (downstairs in the main Quad, in the corner opposite the jacaranda tree) from 2pm-4pm.

All welcome.

Drinks afterwards in the Manning Bar

This is the blog of the Australian Research Council funded project:

The Well-Rounded Person: The Role of Sport in Shaping Physical, Emotional and Social Development.

The chief investigators are: Catharine Lumby; Elspeth Probyn; Jenny O'Dea; Kath Albury

The reason why I have started this blog is to provide a central hub for the project. As project manager it enables me to provide an online office for those involved. The chief investigators can know where the project is at, have easy access to the research and literature review, be informed about upcoming events, and provide feedback for one another. Often chief investigators and researchers are very busy with many projects, so it can be hard to get them together in a 'real' sense.

The blog also offers a central filing system and up-to-date database. Further to this, it's free and saves money for the project because we don't have to have a website built and a html-code expert to maintain it.

The user-friendly format and online aspect also makes the research available to other researchers, community groups and the media .The project is very public. Anyone can make use of the research as it happens and have a space to offer up-to-date suggestions and requests.

As a fan of cultural studies I like the way the blog offers up a way of doing cultural research that places it square in the public sphere for debate as it happens. The research is then with the public rather than about them. The blog opens up the research to as many voices as possible who may wish to debate the direction of the project, and the political, cultural and social issues that the research will bring up. By placing the research in the public sphere I hope it works to demand that the writing up of the research is as accessible and as practical as possible. .

This is the new blog for talking about Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, hosted by the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies.

In this blog you'll find information about Cultural Studies research and teaching at USyd, but you'll also find staff and postgraduate researchers talking about topics of current interest to them, and to the contemporary discipline of Cultural Studies in Australia.

Reading Australian newspapers in the last year or so might lead us to believe that Cultural Studies is responsible for many things - the decline of education, the corruption of Literature, and the end of History. But those dismissals are often not very clear about what Cultural Studies might be, apart from a Bad Thing. We hope this blog will give a picture of what Cultural Studies in practice means for one small slice of the discipline in Australia.

Comments are always welcome.

For anyone who doesn't want to specify their own avatar for the blog, these are going to be the two default ones. Jane Simon made them for us for our publications. One for Gender Studies and one for Cultural Studies. When used as your avatar they'll be placed where my Dodgson photograph is. If you want one of these as your avatar just email me and say so.

In general I might not think this worth a post to the blog, as it's sort of internal business, but I wanted a chance to publicly thank Jane - one of our postgraduate researchers and teachers for anyone else reading - for making these available to us. When I have some time I may explore working one or both of them into a banner for the blog.

Hi everybody and happy posting! Paula.