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This paper explores some aspects of the present crisis, including the problem of how to think about crises in the current conjuncture. It has four main parts: the first and second explore the changing imagery of markets as disenchantment sets in; the third considers what sort of crisis is taking place; and the fourth and final part of the paper considers how innovations and interventions directed at solving the crisis are being framed. It concludes that being 'after neo-liberalism' may not be the same as the disappearance of neo-liberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the perspectives of science studies and actor-network-theory, this paper develops the perspective of 'culture studies' to offer an account of the ways in which culture, understood as a specific form of public organisation, is produced and sustained through the assemblage of materially heterogeneous elements. This is related to an account of the ways in which culture acts on the social through the distinctive 'working surfaces on the social' that it organises. The distinctiveness of the perspective of 'culture studies' is highlighted by comparing it with more familiar traditions of analysis within cultural studies and cultural sociology. Francis Mulhern's account of cultural studies' relations to the practice of Kulturkritik associated with the formation of Bildung and the programme that Jeffrey Alexander proposes for the development of cultural sociology are paid particular attention in this regard. The paper concludes with a consideration of the forms of analytical attention that are needed to investigate the ways in which cultural and social science disciplines interact in the production of 'working surfaces on the social' through which their modes of action on the social are coordinated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the extent to which the perspectives of science studies and actor-network theory can be combined with those of post-Foucauldian governmentality theory to understand the processes through which cultural institutions fabricate distinctive entities and bring these to bear on the governance of the social. The argument is developed by considering the respects in which the procedures of museums and the distinctive forms of cultural objecthood these give rise to can be illuminated by comparing them to laboratories. This prepares the way for an examination of the ways in which such forms of objecthood have been mobilized in programmes of social and civic governance both within museums and outside them, paying due attention to the differences between their functioning in these regards in the context of liberal forms of government and more directive forms of role. These general arguments are then illustrated with reference to contemporary debates focused on the refashioning of museums as instruments of cultural diversity. The paper concludes by reviewing the respects in which the perspectives it develops suggest the need to question the analytical effects of the extended concept of culture that has underlain the development of cultural studies and contemporary sociological understandings of culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the rethinking of everyday life as a central, if highly diverse and problematic, theme of modern philosophy and social theory. The focus of the essay concerns the uncertain ontological status of 'the everyday' within the human sciences. An initial exploration of the ambiguity of the expression 'everyday life' points to a more consequential type of undecidability once it is fully recognized how the ideology of 'everyday life' functions to suppress the materiality, contingency, and historicity of human experience. This can be seen in the contrast between powerful atemporal conceptions of everyday life and more critical understandings of the lifeworld framed in temporal categories. The distinction between everyday life and lifeworld proves useful as a marker for two very different approaches to the ordinary. The paper claims that the ordinary has been systematically denigrated in the very act of being theorized as 'everyday life'. A tradition of binary and dichotomous theorizing is uncovered as one of the fundamental sources of the myth of an ahistorical, unmediated everyday life. After mapping a range of more reflexive perspectives toward the investigation of ordinary life, the paper concludes on a positive and reconstructive note by suggesting that any attempt to go beyond the dualisms and antinomies of contemporary theory must first abandon this mythology to reveal the histor(icit)y and alterity of lifeworlds in their rich natural, incarnate, political, and reflexive imbrications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Applying mathematics to solve any problem inevitably grants an aura of objectivity and truth to the results generated through such methodology. However, mathematics remains a means of elucidation that functions within strict constraints of tractability and stylization. Despite the aesthetics of models and the precision of computation, mathematical representations are but a shadow of the reality they seek to characterize. Nonetheless, because mathematics' pure form hides its own limitations, it becomes a privileged site of scholastic reason and, at the same time, of symbolic violence, two notions that Bourdieu theorized in his work. Despite this handicap, Bourdieu recognized the importance of formalizing tools such as those derived from mathematics. He thus devised many strategies to take advantage of their power of elucidation while avoiding the distortions and dogmatic stance they unavoidably bring about. This paper examines these strategies in detail to further inspire the identification of a number of reflexive approaches that can deflect the potential symbolic violence of mathematical reasoning. In this analysis, particular attention is given to the specific needs of practitioners engaged in mathematical formulation such as economists, statisticians, operations researchers and other quantitative scientists. This process of reflexive discovery is then used to enrich the notion of 'specific intellectual' that Foucault introduced and that Bourdieu further specified and 'lived'. The paper concludes by foregrounding the perhaps unexpected moral dimensions of applied mathematics, a discipline that otherwise often appear distant and esoteric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last 30 years, the term discourse has spread throughout both the social sciences and the humanities. There is a widespread consensus that the current usage of the term 'discourse' originated with Foucault. This paper has three related goals: first, it demonstrates that the current usage of 'discourse' did not originate with Foucault, and in some ways contradicts his own limited technical usage. Second, an intellectual history is presented that explains where the term originated - in French and British theory of the 1960s and 1970s - and how it was propagated and transformed by Anglo-American cultural studies theorists. By extending this intellectual history through the 1990s, the paper documents how Anglo-American scholars increasingly began to attribute the concept to Foucault, and how this has contributed to two important misreadings of Foucault. In conclusion, this history is drawn upon to explore and clarify several competing usages of the term in contemporary cultural studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I offer an intervention into two prevailing approaches to the non-place - those spaces of transit that include hotels, airports, theme parks, and refugee camps. The non-place is treated on the one hand as an apolitical space of hypermediated consumption and mobility while, on the other hand, it also figures as exemplary of the biopolitical regulation of life within a 'contemporary camp'. I argue that the non-place must be read, not as spectacle or camp, but as housing a very specific politics of place wherein the logic of the camp and the spectacle collide. What is of interest to me is not so much the camp as the hidden space of modernity, but how it finds a willing alibi in the spectacular media saturated spaces of capital. Within the non-place, the forces of global corporate capital have found an amiable space to both invest (lifestyle) and reduce (bare life) human life to maximize and optimize its own power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes as its point of departure the ethical problematization of debating both sides - having students argue both affirmative and negative on a debate resolution - in order to highlight the role of communication as a cultural technology of liberalism. It argues that debating both sides contributed to the cultural governance of cold war liberalism by separating speech from conviction to cultivate the value of debate as a method of democratic decision-making. The valorization of free and full expression as a pre-requisite for 'decision by debate' prepared the ground for dis-articulating debate from cold war liberalism and re-articulating it as a game of freedom that contributes to the moral education of liberal citizens. In so doing, debate becomes a global technology of liberalism creating exceptional subjects by circulating the communicative norms of deliberative democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the place of technology in Pierre Bourdieu's social theory, and argues for the relevance of Bourdieu's thought to the study of technology. In moving from an examination of the status of technology in Bourdieu's work through to his broad approach to social practice and his widely cited concept of habitus , it is argued that technologies are crystalliz­ations of socially organized action. As such, they should be considered not as exceptional or special phenomena in a social theory, but rather as very much like other kinds of social practices that recur over time. Ultimately, through the use of Bourdieu's concepts of habitus , field , and capital , we are able to overcome the binary divisions such as technology/society and subject/object that have plagued technology studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While 'cultural studies is caught in a traffic jam', at the same time the seemingly global crisis of cultural studies coincides with the late reception and high popularity of cultural studies in the German-speaking countries after the 'cultural' and the 'linguistic turns'. Yet, the political and academic history and the contexts of the emergence of cultural studies and 'Kulturwissenschaften', as well as their by now established academic traditions and the manifold relations to current developments, are rarely defined and scrutinized. In this paper,we will relate some theoretical and historical perspectives concerning the relationship between cultural studies and the historical disciplines in the German-speaking context. We shall try to trace the potential of mutual benefits between cultural studies and history by foregrounding the political commitment of academic work that still seems to be one of the most important traits of CS as much as the necessity of a stronger notion of the contextualization that history and historiographical methodology provides. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the relationship between sociology and cultural studies, arguing that sociological cultural studies represent an important transdisciplinary platform. The discussion highlights the work of a number of under-valued authors, positing, in a provisional way, that where sociology remains drawn to an ethos of 'explanatory' causal reasoning, cultural studies typically occupies a register of evocative and engaged social 'description'. Despite the heuristic value of this schema, which casts light on more recent theoretical initiatives (such as'the method of articulation') as well as 'canonical' figures, the distinction between explanation and description is shown to be ultimately difficult to sustain. This reinforces the overall theme of the paper that whilst there are sometimes very different emphases at work within sociology and cultural studies, they need to be seen as complementary discourses operating within the same intellectual field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines some of the current metacritical perspectives to postcolonial cultural studies, and discusses an alternative cultural contextualist perspective through the case of Hong Kong cultural studies. I first demarcate between contextualist and non-contextualist metacritical perspectives as well as between political-economic and cultural-contextualist ones. Then I identify major metacritiques that are currently made against postcolonial studies, and by showing how they may be applicable to Hong Kong cultural studies, I suggest ways to re-interpret these metacritiques from a cultural sociological perspective. I shall highlight important structural characteristics of Hong Kong cultural studies, and analyse them in terms of a cultural sociology of the postcolonial intellectual field. Ultimately, I argue that the problems associated with this postcolonial intellectual field appear to originate from the hierarchical global cultural context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Se non è vero è ben trovato': if it is not true, then it is well put. What is it that is 'well put'? This article argues that there must be two kinds of truth: empirical, applying to the first part of the adage, and another, applying to the second. This study tries the twelve positive and negative permutations of the two parts of the adage, first semantically, then with regard to human relations, and finally, with regard to this paper. This sort of taxonomic orgy becomes tiresome, however, thus leading to a call for and demonstration of playfulness – also as a component of a social science different from the mainstream, but the more 'scientific' for it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on Tenth David Nicol Smith Conference on Eighteenth-Century Studies. The main theme for the HRC during 1996 will be 'Culture and Science, exploring dialogues between various strands of the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences in both western and non-western social contexts. The conveners are particularly interested in papers which address the uses and understandings of flora, fauna, land, intellectual and cultural property and bio-technologies. Science, as well as literature, was a key site of this cultural interaction.

Should cultural studies defend itself against charges of 'postmodern cultural relativism'? Does anyone believe that their own culture is 'just one among many'? If we do not believe that the differences among cultures are just so much dressing up, that the differences are arbitrary, then there must be something at the core that really matters. This core is verging on the absolute, or the sacred; and its passionate defence is at odds with liberal pluralism. Anthropologists have been good at discerning the core values of the exotic cultures they study, but not so good at reflecting on the core values of their own democratic western cultures. The 'architecture' of western modernity (its concepts and practices) remains obscured for a reason: it is increasingly unsustainable from a generalized ecological viewpoint. This 'generalized ecology' asks questions like 'who or what has the chance to exist?' In a foundational moment, Durkheim used the primitivity of Australian Aboriginal religion to shore up the project of modern social science in Europe, and in the process gave the sacred a 'social function'. I will argue that as 'western' and 'non-western' knowledges negotiate with each other the sacred (that absolute I will never relinquish) is expressed, not as a normalizing 'function', but as cultural excess and sustainable life-line. It is now time to mount a critique of European modernity from an ecological platform in which indigenous knowledges play a significant role. This is not because indigenous people are 'closer to nature', but precisely because they have no interest in any generalized Nature. It is the European invention of this scientistic metaphysics of a singular Nature that stands opposite, and enables, the muddled pluralism of contemporary cultural studies. When, with Bruno Latour, we open up 'natures', and 'bring the sciences into democracy', then we can negotiate with a range of stakeholders about what really matters in a situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diverse representations of the economy exist in both academic and nonacademic, everyday contexts. I show how investigating these representations challenges existing conceptions of both the discipline of economics and “real” economic relations and institutions - such that they can be denaturalized, and new ones can be produced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the importance of 'borders' to the construction of political, social, and cultural imaginaries of Latin America. He refers to the effort called 'the modernity/coloniality research program' which believes that there are other ways of thinking and acknowledging the world. The modernity/coloniality project has been met with challenges and alternatives such as feminism, ecology, and environmentalism. The author believes that the modernization of Latin American politics, society, and culture is possible.

In the wake of the closure of the Department of Cultural Studies and Sociology at the University of Birmingham, UK, in July 2002, this article argues that an important legacy of cultural studies, critical and reflexive pedagogy, is the real casualty of this event and future generations of highly motivated and strong students its victims. The closure is presented as a case study of the penetrations of an audit culture into the intellectual fabric of higher education and academic and scholarly identities. Whilst cultural studies has permeated many areas of human sciences, the abrupt ending of the Birmingham Unit severs its connection with the 'mythic wellspring' of the CCCS and serves as a dire warning for the future of our lives as teachers, critical intellectuals and scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the findings of an Arts and Humanities Research Board project on London's Millennium Dome exposition in the year 2000. The Dome was generally considered to be a cultural disaster in the news media and public conversation. It became a political embarrassment for Britain's New Labour government but did not prove damaging in the 2001 general election. The article does not dispute the media's damnation of the Dome but questions its acuity. It also questions the managerialist perspective on the Dome's 'failure' whilst taking into account claims regarding a managerial 'turnaround' and an 'under-reported success'. Empirical evidence and theoretical analysis concerning the political economy of the Dome's production, its representational meanings and visitor reception provide a more complex and multidimensional explanation. Corporate sponsorship played a key role in the cultural disaster and, in this particular case study, it exemplifies social democracy's symbolic as well as material coalescence with neo-liberalism. A distinction is made between associative and deep sponsorship that is illustrated with examples from the Dome. A typology of generous and reflexive visiting is also formulated in order to analyse the visitor data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the UK we have recently witnessed a series of attacks on the overall project of cultural studies, both in the popular press and, within the academy, by scholars associated with the more established disciplines of sociology and anthropology. The critiques variously argue that cultural studies has led us into a political ‘dead end’ (in particular, in its emphasis on the study of cultural consumption); has abandoned ‘politics’ altogether (at least, in one definition of the term); has done little more than reinvent (in ignorance) the old (and indeed outmoded) theoretical wheels of an earlier intellectual tradition, and/or that, in general, the ‘excesses’ of its project have only confirmed the worst fears of those who were opposed to it in the first place. In these critiques it is argued that it is (somehow) both time to move ‘beyond’ cultural studies altogether, and time to return to the more secure disciplinary foundations and rigorous methodological procedures of sociology, and/or political economy and anthropology. This article considers the theoretical and political occasions of this interesting (hyper?) critical phenomenon, and considers whether, notwithstanding the very real current problems and divisions within cultural studies itself, the contributions of cultural studies over the last twenty years have now so transformed our field of study that the critics' proposed return to ‘The Good Old Ways’ may simply no longer be possible (even if it were desirable). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the book Eighteenth Brumaue related to sociology. It informs that in the book "Eighteenth Brumaue," sociologist Karl Marx pursues a double strategy: history is represented, on the one hand, as a catastrophic decline from Napoleon to Louis Bonaparte; while on the other, this debased repetition is depicted as unsettling the notion of a heroic past. Marx developed a brilliant account of literary and political representation and of repetition as the unsettling of origins. He did this, above all, through a direct and indirect rereading of the book Hamlet as parody or farce, in which the dead father is rewritten as an 'old mole'.