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The porosity of the online media space blurs the boundary between the political, the popular and the social. While most media scholarship concentrates on the ‘DIY participation’ that the internet enables, it overlooks the fact that most of the users are just consumers of the array of political platforms. Employing Ranciere’s notion of the aesthetics of the everyday and using the case of online radio listening, the paper re-examines the politics of participatory practices in the politicized everyday, as the audience traverses fan practices and quotidian virtual activism. This paper focuses on elderly and female listener communities, to discuss how the porous social mediascape may foster a ‘participation of the sensible’, where ‘the ordinary’ engages in online radio listening as subversive act against the government, but also calculated political AND social strategy against the harshening political reality and social division. The case of Hong Kong would also hope to articulate the nuanced interplay...

This paper explores the potential for the formation of political solidarities across the spatial divisions being intensified by dominant responses to the European crisis. In doing so it takes inspiration from Doreen Massey’s thinking around the contested terms on which space and politics are articulated and her engagement with the 2008 crisis through projects such as the Kilburn Manifesto. We argue that her book World City powerfully articulates a way of thinking about the spatial politics of a particular conjuncture. The paper traces the ways in which various political interventions in post-crisis politics have been shaped by distinctive ‘nationed’ geographical imaginaries. In particular we explore how left-wing nationed narratives impact on the discursive horizon and unpack their implications for the articulation of solidarities and emancipatory politics in the context of the ‘European Crisis’. Building on this, we reflect on how trans-local solidarities and alliances might be articulated across socio-spatial divisions and contest the decidedly uneven, racialised, gendered and classed impacts of dominant European politics. We argue that such solidarities and alliances can form a crucial intervention in challenging the dominant spatial politics of crisis and articulating left political strategies on different terms.

Gayatri Spivak asserts that subalternity is a position without identity and has no examples. This paper demonstrates that identities – imposed and subscribed to, contingent yet naturalized – have to be taken into account, particularly when we consider that such identities are inscribed into a war of positions. It argues that the notion of ‘subaltern’ in Gramsci, followed through in the idea of ‘subjugated knowledges’ in Foucault, read commonly as marginality, intervenes in established social relations to expose that Time is asynonymous with History. Subalternity, emblematized through positions, which are held by identities, plays a crucial role in negotiating that discontinuity between Time and History. The paper ‘relocates’ subalternity by redefining it as a process – in order to convey this, I use ‘subalternized’ instead of ‘subaltern’; identity, then, is also necessarily a process, captured temporarily in the course of political–cultural engagement. The essay reads the positions of racialized a...

For the past few decades, cultural studies scholars and critical educators in such contexts as North America, Australia and the UK have called upon their fellow scholars to cross disciplinary borders in framing and addressing educational issues. Inter-disciplinary work as such would recognize cultural studies as bodies of knowledges and approaches to be applied in new educational settings. It would also acknowledge the need for more and better studies of schooling in order to reflect on the problematics of the sites in their specific historical and institutional contexts. This paper discusses my earlier work that investigated a pedagogical issue of project learning in the Hong Kong senior secondary school subject Liberal Studies as a case of doing cultural studies and education between the disciplinary borders of the two fields. The paper examines the interdisciplinary conceptual-analytical framework of drama and the performative I adopted to understand the complex nature of project learning as a mode of ...

Extensive research indicates that mothers in particular grieve a variety of losses – miscarriage, stillbirth, ectopic pregnancy, induced abortions, newborn deaths – at all gestational stages, yet often find their grief invalidated. In turn, the lack of support or affirmation of these grief responses can be experienced as an exacerbation of the initial impact of death. This painful social silence that parents have expressed as part of their reproductive loss serves as the foundation for this paper, which explores both the strategic silences and discourses in the network of knowledges constituting reproductive loss in an era of biopower. The first section of the paper outlines the (bio)medicalization of the pregnant-unborn body, tracing this process through the deployment of sexuality that socialized fertility and the female body in the early eighteenth century. The second section discusses the responsibilization of the pregnant-unborn body through the technology of risk. Here I show how death infuses the d...

Tourism in the ‘third world’ is seen as a consumption of culture, and attempts at investigating it within a cultural studies framework have not adequately addressed key social and cultural aspects. Bourdieu's analytical legacy which is significant as a cultural legacy is largely misappropriated. This article, reviewing recent research in cultural studies in tourism, highlights and critically interrogates the treatment Bourdieu's theory has received in tourism studies. Arguing that Bourdieu's sociological framework is often misinterpreted, this article sketches out the key components of a Bourdieusian approach to a cultural analysis of tourism. Reflexive return in tourism research remains largely unexplored. This conceptual paper emphasizes the significance of working with Bourdieusian methodological approach and explores the possibilities of employing a reflexive sociology in tourism studies. The paper further highlights the difficulties of pursuing such a theoretical approach and proposes the need to acc...

This paper uses the glass and steel Urbis building in Manchester as a prism via which we might look at cultural, political and economic change in England over the last twenty years or so. It takes stock of neoliberalism, museum and popular culture in England during that time, and tries to sense different political, cultural and economic turns, at the same time as it acknowledges that ‘uneven development’ on any landscape makes the attempt to describe macro change problematic. To deal with this, the paper introduces a particular figuring of the term ‘degentrification’, in order to think about the ways in which these essentially dialectical movements operate. We are soliciting a cultural dialectic here, which focuses on one site, but then uses the insights made there – in the tradition of Walter Benjamin and the Situationists – to think through wider cultural, economic and political temperatures in England between the early 1990s and the present day.

At the beginning of his paper, Escobar states ‘How one thinks about these processes is itself an object of struggle and debate, and it is at this juncture that this paper is situated’. He acknowled...

The concept of whiteness is seductive; it strikes a chord and resonates, highlighting what was long ignored in the history of immigrants in America. However, in reading the literature, one cannot help but be troubled by the reduction of a plethora of relations to a singular binary, as important as that binary may be. This paper examines the experience of Polonia (the Polish Diaspora) in America, drawing on broad historical evidence as well as a particular ritual of identification (the Pulaski Day Parade in Philadelphia), in order to highlight the follies of reducing the immigrant experience to one of ‘becoming white.’ This paper challenges three major assumptions in whiteness studies: the particular relationship between ethnicity and race found therein; the assumptions regarding the assimilation of immigrant groups; and the centrality of the white/black binary in processes of identification. Ultimately, the argument presented here posits that to maintain whiteness as an analytically useful concept, it nee...

This paper explores the sexuality, subculture and solidarity of young women who work in the hospitality and entertainment sectors in Cambodia. Specifically, the focus is on women described as 'professional girlfriends' and 'bar girls' employed in the hostess bar scene in the capital city of Phnom Penh. Professional girlfriends are young women who engage in a performance of intimacy within multiple sexual or non-sexual 'transactional' relationships with 'western boyfriends' in order to benefit materially and support their livelihoods. Because of their initial material motivations within the multiple partnerships and the strict cultural taboos surrounding sex and sexuality, professional girlfriends, and most other bar girls, are simultaneously stereotyped as 'prostitutes' and 'broken women' by general society, and as 'victims' by the development community. Despite their simultaneous stigmatization and victimization, however, these young women utilize bar girl subculture, alternative kinship systems, linguistic ability, consumption, intimacy and interpersonal partnerships in order to improve their social status, secure their futures and achieve a sense of enjoyment in their otherwise complicated lives. Homosocial friendship groups that emerge from subcultural networks and communal living work to provide support, social cohesion and care in the face of marginalization, structural constraints and gendered violence. 'Hedonistic' bar girl subculture also provides the space for young women to experiment with their sexualities and explore heteroflexibility. Through the lens of cultural studies, and via the practice of 'intimate ethnography', this paper also pays particular attention to the negotiation of intimacy and friendship between the respondents and researcher.

The paper focuses on the close collaborative work our research team has been engaged in with two local schools to study how action research measures may help to facilitate the improvement of the Integrated Humanities (IH) curriculum through school–university partnerships. It attempts to understand action research as a form of cultural practice for education, and examines how such collaborative work with local schools may contribute to sustainable cultural work of education and intervene at different levels of the schooling practices. In all, the paper seeks to offer preliminary analysis and reflection on the re-orientation of Cultural Studies as a research and problem-solving, intellectual and critical project with a potential for long-term input to cultural policy-making. It also aims at examining the role of cultural studies practitioners as action researchers in the process of doing cultural work of education.

This paper will focus on an applied research initiative1 we are currently engaged in, which brings together academics (both from conventional institutions – the university, the research centers and undergraduate colleges – and from ‘new and innovative institutional structures’) with policy-makers and grant-making organizations. The initiative has to do with the entire field of higher education (India having one of the biggest higher education systems in the world), but interestingly it was incubated by the Center for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS). The painstaking process of the gestation of collaborative interdisciplinary themes/fields of research/teaching and the labor of negotiation with policy-makers and grantees in the field of higher education by a Cultural Studies centre is thus the focus of this paper. Called the Higher Education Cell, an important aspect of the initiative's genealogy is that it is based on (a) a critique of the existing disciplines and an attention to the birthing of ‘ne...

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.

In Barbados economic hardship has a color. Ask Barbadians ‘how're you doing?’ and, if things are difficult in any way they might answer, ‘Tings brown!’ This seems to be an especially appropriate phrase for this paper which explores the inter-relations between contemporary racialized identificatory strategies and economic hardship in the Caribbean. My interest is in exploring the challenges Caribbean citizens and governments face in trying to pursue both democracy and economic sustainability at this time. One way in which these challenges continue to manifest themselves is in the overt and covert debates about who has the right to claim the protection of state institutions. Within these debates ‘brown’ surfaces as a way of drawing a line between those claims which are deemed legitimate and those which are deemed illegitimate. This paper focuses on four ways in which ‘brown’ defines the borders of dominant nationalist projects in Barbados. At the center of this article is an exploration of the difficulties ...

This paper examines how the concepts of hybridity and transnationalism can be salvaged from a neo-liberal discourse of identity politics and rescued for a critical Cultural Studies project that takes into account historical materialism. Focusing on a ‘place-based notion of identity’ in the context of Hawai‘i’s diverse ethnic population, and with specific reference to the hybrid and transnational formation of a ‘local Chinese consciousness’, the paper argues that understanding the complex local Chinese identity formation in Hawai‘i requires re-conceptualizing hybridity and diasporic consciousness along the lines of Aihwa Ong's notion of ‘embedded citizenship’, Adam McKeon's emphasis on diasporic network relations, and Ien Ang's definition of hybridity as denoting ‘complicated entanglement’ and ‘togetherness-in-difference’. Applying these conceptual distinctions to a careful reading of the celebrated play, ‘A Little Bit Like You’, by local playwright Darrell Lum, the paper shows that beyond the humorous, al...

This paper is a dialogue with particular threads of Hall's work on racialized subjectification and the words and other practices of a single respondent. Framed by re-emergent notions of fixed, unchanging identities and bounded, homogeneous 'secular' and 'religious' cultures and communities embedded in contemporary political discourse on the 'rights' and 'responsibilities' and 'core values' of 'Britain's citizens', this paper considers how post-colonial authority is interiorized or incorporated and re-emerges and re-circulates in our daily practical life. It further considers Hall's theorizations of cultural identity with which to understand an internally heterogeneous, obedient and defiant subject composed of different, dissonant, potentially irreconcilable selves. The paper considers particular strands of Hall's work to develop our understandings of a subject who polices their own practice and protects the experiential effect of a self-governing, internally homogeneous and bounded self. It further considers contemporary formations of political community in a late modern, post-colonial, neo-liberal disciplinary social order.

This introductory paper seeks to locate Stuart Hall's writing on ‘race’ and ethnicity in the broader context of his work and life. The paper seeks to examine Hall's significance as one of the most important theorists of race globally, and as a theorist of Black Britain, before exploring the intersection of the personal and political dimensions of his work. The paper finally considers the continuities of Hall's writing on race and considers the implications of this for ‘illuminating Dark Times’. It serves also as background and introduction to the papers included in this special issue.

This paper employs a proposed alterity discourse analysis (ADA) framework to argue that The Passing of Traditional Society – the bible of the modernization paradigm of development communication research – exemplifies far less a discourse on the relationship between empathy and development, as it does on the political/ideological imperatives governing the construction of the Other (i.e. the Middle East) by the Self (i.e. the US). To substantiate this claim, the paper debunks the book's claim to social scientific objectivity by pinpointing the methodological shortcomings of the empathy model and of the Middle East project from which the model was derived, and highlights the paradigm's dogma by revealing the religious metaphors with which the book's narrative is infused.

This paper begins with Slack and Whitt's (‘Ethics and cultural studies’ in Cultural Studies, eds L. Grossberg et al., Routledge, New York, 1992) crucial imperative to cultural studies: that we need to (re)develop its normative commitment, and that ecological relations are the site from which to do so. Although their argument eventually relies on a problematic understanding of nature as an integrative totality ‘beyond’ culture, this paper maintains that it is nevertheless important to follow their lead and consider ecological relations in their articulation with, and implication in, other relations of power in late capitalism. ‘Queer’ ecocultural studies, given its considerable skepticism with ‘normative’ natures as well as its emphasis on sex/nature articulations, would have us focus precisely on challenging the intersections of power, beginning with heteronormativity, and ecological relations. For an example of queer ecocultural studies, the paper then reads Jane Rule's novel The Young in One Another's A...

This paper traces the changing political/cultural formations of publicness in Britain, and how these intersect with emerging strategies for governing the social. It draws on three sets of discursive oppositions or elisions – those of public/community; community/bureaucracy; and public/social – to trace successive struggles over the fortunes of a public institution that, I argue, stands as an icon of the public sphere – the public library service. The account illuminates how notions of publics and publicness have been made and remade, expanded and residualized, by state professionals in Britain over the last 50 years as they struggled with the incursions of ‘new’ publics as well as seeking to mediate the impact of the Thatcher years and Blair governments. But rather than reading the decline of the public library service in Britain as just another example of neo-liberal governance, the paper argues for an approach that pays attention to the specificity of institutional histories and to the organizational an...

Nineteenth-century Britain is often seen as being the great age of liberalism. It was also a great age of engineering and building. This paper explores the interconnections between liberalism and technology, using Samuel Smiles as its point of departure. Smiles eulogised liberal individualism in Self-Help (1859), and engineers in his multi-volume Lives of the Engineers (1862). In the first part of the paper, I produce a typology of ‘liberal objects’ – the machine, the network, and the device – paying particular attention to the kinds of human agency such artifacts made possible. In the second part, I connect this typology to the theory of liberalism and its historical practice. Liberalism, I argue, often functioned by using technology to materialise a mode of indirect rule. Machines, networks and devices encouraged a set of practices – productive labour, mobility, health, cleanliness, attention, independence – essential to liberal subjectivity, and were promoted and imagined as such. Considering liberalis...

This paper examines the establishment and appropriation of a hitherto overlooked space: the modern cubicle. The principal aim of the paper is to develop a political understanding of cubicle space in terms of the everyday practice of liberalism, and in particular Victorian liberalism. The key function it played in this respect was to afford subjects the freedom to operate on themselves in private and effect a moral and physical individuation of the self; part of its novelty as a site of power was the relative intensity with which it bound together various ethical norms, the body and the senses. But the modern cubicle illuminates much else besides. It allows for an exploration of the various cultural values – class, nature, gender, economy, amongst others – that liberalism sought to secure in material terms, and the equally varied spatial, technological and administrative tactics through which it operated. The cubicle, however, was always something of a fragile and indeterminate amalgam of human and non-hum...

The debate about the patenting of research is perhaps the most passionate now taking place about science and scientific culture. It is widely maintained that the expansion of patenting since about 1980 betrays a scientific tradition to which norms of universalism and common ownership of knowledge were central. This paper goes back to mid-twentieth century debates about science and intellectual property (IP) to argue that many of the norms we take as so central to science were themselves first articulated to critique patenting practices. In particular, it looks at how an economist (Arnold Plant), a scientist/philosopher (Michael Polanyi), and an information theorist (Norbert Wiener) responded to such practices. It especially focuses on the role of intellectual-property concerns in the making of Polanyi's philosophy of science, which it excavates through a reading of his unpublished papers. This reveals that the modern field of ‘science studies’ is indebted for some of its key concepts to an earlier generat...

This text was the original second chapter of the author's doctoral dissertation (Escobar 1987); this chapter was never included in the book that eventually grew from the dissertation (Escobar 1995). Although the chapter's contribution to debates on the economy are largely synthetic and certainly not original, the author wanted to publish it for a number of reasons. First, the alleged triumph of neo-liberal ideologies and the increase in depth and scope of market cultures at present make even more important the task of cultural analysis of economics and the economy. This paper was an effort in this direction, particularly to mapping the genealogies of what in the paper is called ‘the Western economy’. Second, there have been some recent claims that the cultural analysis of economics and the economy has hardly been broached. References to Polanyi's foundational role in this respect are, of course, de rigueur, but one only needs to point at the pioneering work of Stephen Gudeman since the 1980s to dispute th...

This paper is an ethnography of the articulation of ethnicity in the politics of blackness in Colombia. Based. on the author's fieldwork in the southern Pacific region over the last 10 years, the paper briefly describe the ethnicization of blackness in Colombia and shows how this process implies a particular articulation of memories and identities in the politics of representation of alterity. The ethnicization of blackness involves a specific ‘imagined. (black) community’ both within and beyond the nation. The specificity of this imagined. black community is anchored. in the objectification of memory, culture, nature and identity. Therefore, it is argued. that the ethnicization of blackness is not a new euphemism for race, but that to understand the particular inscriptions of blackness as an ethnic group one has to problematize the ‘racial closure’ assumed. by most scholars in the study of blackness.

This essay is concerned. with one of the most mundane, routine, yet significant practices of modern society: the inquiry. Approaching the inquiry as, simultaneously, a mechanism for the evaluation and adjudication of truth, and as a method of information collection and compilation, the paper argues that the inquiry is a key apparatus for the production of a regime of truth governed. by the liberal notion of ‘impartiality’. In making this argument, the paper provides a detailed. case study of the numerous colonial inquiries into the nineteenth-century migration of indentured. Indian labour: It outlines how, as a method of information collection and compilation, these inquiries formed. a discursive field defining the parameters of the debates on indenture. In addition, it demonstrates how, as an apparatus for the production of truth, the continual appearance of the inquiry served. to shore up the notion of ‘impartial’ truth, thereby enabling the system of indenture for almost a century. The resonances betwe...

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 dichotomou...

The paper begins with a theoretical-political positioning regarding globaliz­ation, as a multidimensional phenomenon, loaded with power relations with unequal and ambivalent impacts producing dramatic exclusions but, at the same time, opening possibilities for profound changes in the gender order and in social subjectivities. The effects of globalization on social movements have also been multiple and ambivalent, producing fragmentation and particularization but at the same impelling new ways of articulation, more flexible and inclusive, as well as mobilizations at a global level oriented to ‘dispute’ its hegemonic contents and struggle for an alternative globalization. In the second part, the paper analyses the new dynamics of intervention of feminist movements that follow from this new reality. The Social World Forum is a privileged space for this analysis, due to the convergence of new tendencies and new ways of existence of feminisms, expressing the new conflicts and challenges faced by feminisms in t...

This paper assesses, on the basis of key arguments from Pierre Bourdieu's work, how and why a consensus about the positive effects of globalization and liberalization could have established itself as a dominant discourse across Indian social space. Describing the discourse that validates globalization and economic liberalization as a particular worldview, which he terms ‘neoliberalism’, Bourdieu describes how neoliberalism establishes itself as a doxa - an unquestionable orthodoxy that operates as if it were the objective truth - across social space in its entirety, from the practices and perceptions of individuals to the practices and perceptions of the state and social groups. The full import of Bourdieu's arguments about neoliberalism, however, can only be grasped with reference to Bourdieu's theory of the state, and with reference to key concepts, such as doxa, habitus, field and capital. This paper, accordingly, seeks to fulfil two related objectives: to explicate Bourdieu's theory of the state and h...

This paper discusses some theoretical approaches to the question of how culture, technologies and the social interact. These considerations result from the author' research in the genesis of digital cultures in the 1980s. The paper begins by outlining the author' research project, and then continues with a discussion of some of the most influential approaches in the cultural studies of technology.This article then presents a small sample of the author' analysis, which combines narratological and discourse analytical methods with practice-oriented cultural theories, such as those of Pierre Bourdieu, Regis Debray and Bruno Latour.

Advertising has long been recognized as an important cultural force by media and cultural studies scholars. Graphic design, despite its comparable ubiquity, has rarely been the subject of this kind of critique. Where these activities have been discussed, the emphasis has been overwhelmingly on their textual manifestations (graphics, ads, commercials) and, occasionally, on their reception. In the interest of working towards a fuller account of the overall circulation and reproduction of an increasingly commercial contemporary culture, then, this paper turns to the generative source of these ephemeral artefacts and, in particular, professional graphic design practice. By paying especial attention to the framing of current debates about accountability and social responsibility within this profession, this paper seeks to explore the constraining and enabling effects of commercial practice. Advertising and design are readily distinguishable from other economic institutions because of their declared expertise i...

Using the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Sara Thornton, the paper investigates the problems of ‘writing as a fan’ through an analysis of cult movie fandom. It starts out from a critique of Jeff Sconce's work which claims that he fails to question the subcultural ideology through which fan cultures produce a sense of identity through their supposed difference from the ‘mainstream’. It then moves on to an analysis of fan writing on the ‘cult movie’, which examines not only the complex and contradictory strategies through which these writings produce a sense of subcultural identity, but also the extent to which these writings seek to construct identities through the construction of an inauthentic Other. The next section examines both exhibition practices and intellectual trends to illustrate the ways in which cult movie fandom emerged not as a reaction against the market or the academy,but rather through their historical development. Finally,the paper looks at the role of mass, niche and micro media within the ...

This paper analyses the political construction of different types of tourists present in Hungary during the period of state socialism. After the 1956 revolution was crushed, Communist leadership sought to find new ways of legitimizing its power. One of the major legitimizing factors was raising standards of living. Another was the opening of the borders that is, allowing Hungarian citizens limited possibilities for travelling abroad. This concession was rather unique within the Communist Bloc, and it was not without its own dangers from the power holders' point of view. Citizens had to be guarded, controlled and supervized, not only to come back to Hungary,but also to think and feel properly in foreign countries. This paper demonstrates the efforts of the Communist Press, to bring into being construction of the ideal enlightened Tourist who is interested in art, museums and ‘social human values’. This ideal Tourist is set against with the Speculators, whose only concern is goods, especially Western goods,...

This paper examines the formation of modernity in three colonialist epics of Hong Kong and the recent historical and fictional works that aim to rewrite the history of the ‘local’. Adopting a challenge-response structure, the paper argues that the colonialist epics construct a monolithic discourse of modernity-as-progress via the amnesia of conflicts, tensions, and processes of domination and negotiation in the rural and everyday space of colonial Hong Kong. It is stressed that to piece together the above anomalies is not an attempt to restore a pre-given ‘native’ to but rather an endeavour to examine how the ‘local’ as divergent historical agents shaped and has been shaped by the political, social, and economic environment of Hong Kong and the larger world outside. This can be called a model of dialectics composed of an internal dialectic and a dialectic of articulation. In this regard, with the benefit of the rapprochement of history and anthropology and a non-linear view of history, this paper is a his...

In this commentary I address some of the key ideas presented in Kolar-Panov's paper titled 'Video as the diasporic imagination of selfhood: a case study of the Croatians in Australia' which was published in Cultural Studies 10: 2, 1996. My own research, conducted during the same period, on the same group of migrants and in the same country, found very little evidence to support some of the assertions made in the paper. I therefore challenge the author's main assumptions about the impact of video technology on the formation of diaspora identities and address some of the theoretical issues behind the notion that video technology is the first widespread postmodern communication medium. I highlight the intrinsic similarities between telecast and video technologies and show how Kolar-Panov's argument tends to slide into both technological and social determinism.

This paper explores the possibility of a feminist understanding of the concept of home. It begins with an analysis of the way in which a number of feminist scholars utilize a concept of home that retains the gendered dichotomies characteristic of modernism. The writings of feminists as diverse as Betty Friedan and Teresa de Lauretis are examined to indicate the pervasiveness of this tendency. The paper then goes on to argue that an historical investigation of women's experience of modernity provides a way of rethinking the concept of home and its place in the modern world. It discusses the different meanings given to one particular image of the home in Australia in the first decade after the Second World War. This material demonstrates the historical and contested nature of our understandings of both home and modernity. But more importantly, it points to an understanding among women, and in some of the discourses through which they were addressed in the popular press at this time, of home as an a...

This paper attempts to develop a critical transnationalist perspective in cultural studies from the localized cultural and political context of contemporary ‘Australia’. It takes the Australian nation-state's current geo-economic and geo-political preoccupation with a so-called ‘push into Asia’ as a starting point for a questioning of dominant discourses of international relations and the place of ‘Australia’ within it. In particular, the paper aims to deconstruct the binary divide between ‘Asia’ and ‘the West’ which still informs official discourses of the ‘Asianization’ of Australia. In order to do this, it is suggested that the world must be conceived as a set of interconnected and interdependent, but distinctive modernities, signalling both the success and the failure of the universalizing European project of modernity through colonial expansion. From this historical perspective, ‘Asia’ and ‘Australia’ no longer appear as absolute binary opposites, as they can both be seen as historical produ...

Popular music has moved to the centre of economic life, suggesting a shift in the political economy of advanced societies. The transition has been marked by a concomitant shift in the centrality of popular music in social life, assisted by new technologies. More importantly, the changes have been brought about by the reorganization of record company ownership and activity since the 1980s. This paper suggests that cultural studies could apply aspects of the research and analysis methods developed in institutional economics, to a study of the relationship between cultural and economic formations. Institutional economics, especially as proposed by Thorstein Veblen, provides a pragmatic critique for cultural industries in an era of globalization and rising corporate power. In this paper I have used institutional economics to illustrate how the shift in the organization of popular music has taken place within the corporate economy. The use of popular music as a feature of the corporate economy has inv...

Drawing from D.A. Miller's work on The novel and the police (1988) in Victorian fiction, this paper looks at narrative strategies through which the same-sex underworld is portrayed, policed and con...

This paper engages with the study of the aesthetic as an embodied form and offers a critique of the study of value and commodification that emerges in the global spatial imagination. I explore the ...

This paper uses a multiple colonialisms approach to study cultural production in India and argue that coloniality is not a casteless structure of violence. In discursive and planning rhetoric, ‘creativity is in India’s DNA.’ This discourse incites the poor to harness and develop their tangible and intangible cultural heritage in order to feed themselves. Foregrounding anti-caste, Dalit scholarship in conversation with extant formulations of decolonial aesthetics focuses urgent attention on the fact that caste domination and violence structure inter-state political systems of development planning and post/colonial state discourses of heritage that claim to feed the caste-oppressed poor with their own creativity. This article attends to the political histories and critiques of Indigenous Chhara performance artists because their expressive cultures foreground anti-caste struggles against simultaneous state erasure and capture of Indigenous creativity. Against planning’s compensatory solution of eatin...

This paper studies the role of emotions in creating spectacular revolt situations. We underline the travelling competence of sentiments and their power in crafting trans-local moments of embodied r...