Analysis of Cultural studies

Introduction:

The contemporary crisis of cultural studies As the first decade of the new century on, cultural studies has become an established global presence in the intellectual landscape of the humanities &the social science. At the same times, what it stand for, & what its futures might be has remained decidedly contentious. Since its emergence cultural studies has repeatedly been the subjects of intense controversy. In the media it has often been the subject of vitriolic attacks, often based on sheer ignorance, willful misconceptions or rejections of the serious of its intellectual projects. For example the project of taking popular cultures seriously as a site of struggle over identity, value &powe r r rrs one of the most versatile area of study’s within cultural studies has always been the subjects of facile dismissal from critic arguing either on behalf of notional high cultures &from the standpoint of a more purely radical culture of resistance. Within the academy cultural studies has had countless opponent  &adversaries, especially among those who feel threatened by a real or imagined cultural studies take over of there own disciplinary territory be it literary studied anthropology &history. From these point of views cultural studies is often seen as menace to rigorous scholarships &disciplines so much so as Jan Batten recently remark that cultural studies bash is a fashion pastime nowadays. 1 That is the view from outsides. Inside the field itself &I count myself in &there have been no less frequent quarrel about the states of cultural studies. the cultural studies community has always had  anxious sense of identity’s with a large degrees of self doubts &predilection to introspective navel &gazing or should cultural studies be a discipline.

The challenge of (inter)disciplinarily

 The 1 challenge pertains to the very success of cultural studies. since the 1970s, in driving the research agenda for the humanities  &social science, &in setting  train transformation within a whole range of conventional discipline which have now taken up cultural question within their own area of activity. Discipline such as histories, sociologies, human geography’s, international relation, English, educations, architectures, psychologies, philosophies, economic, politic &so have all undergone a so call cultural turn while anthropologies, traditionally the disciplines which claimed to own culture as iti s distinct objects, has been thoroughly influence by cultural studies the arising. Cultural analysis are now an extremely widespread &distributed intellectual Endeavour as Johnson et all have recently observed, that cultural studies itself is now no longer in a pioneering situation when it come to cultural analysis. 22 This is now a very competitive marketplaces indeed & one of the challenge for cultural studies scholar today, in my view, is to give up their self perception as being at the vanguard of cultural research &start actively to learns from & engage with the accumulated wisdom of other discipline each of which has its own enabling concept, methodological strategies, theoretical histories & empirical horizon which can inform & enrich our research in fresh & innovative way. Another way of putting this is to said that the issues of disciplinarily is a major challenge for cultural studies. Cultural studies peoples like to describe themselves as intrinsically interdisciplinary as somehow beyond the disciplines foe example transdisciplinary or even ant disciplinary but there is lot of conceit & self delusion in this kind of self description &As a discursive formations, cultural studies, no matter how multidisciplinary its origin has over times institutionalized itself as a disciplines of sports, complete with its own founding father, canonical text, peculiar mode of questioning & reasoning, style of writing &d instinct object & value preferences for example popular rather than high culture hybridist rather than purity  heterogeneity rather than homogeneity  the marginal rather than the mainstream the news rather than the old &new, not to mention its own journal on references & professional associations. This is not at all a bads things after all as Michael Warner argues disciplinarily allows peoples to develop a line of thinking cumulatively without starting at each moments from the zero points of maximum accessibility.

Towards an engaged cultural research

 At the University of We stern Sydney (UWS), where I was appointed as Professor of Cultural Studies in 1996, community engagement is promote as a key aspect of organizational identity & culture, consistent with the University value of relevance & responsibility to our communities Strategic plan & missions statement are rhetorical text design to project a preferred corporate image to the outside worlds but they also serve to steer internal priorities & policies, & they circumscribe the institutional condition of possibility for avowed rely progressive intellectual project such as cultural studies. It is in this context that what we r have tried to do at the Centre for Cultural Research (CCR) at UWS should be seen. In light of the University’s visions to be an engaged university it was imperative for us if cultural studies scholarship. we r to gain institutional recognition & support within the University too invent ourselves research centre that is centrally involved in community engagement. What has emerge is our focus on a pragmatic contexts specifics approach to cultural research & scholarship which aims to generate productive compromises negotiations between the institutional arrangement we r find ourselves in & our intellectual & disciplinary commitment. This institutional war of position is political works, much of it tedious indeed, involving the juggling of the complex & sometime contradictory requirement emanating from the facts that UWS is a new and old university with an embryonic research cultures & located within a highly charge region of Australia as we all as senior management’ expectation that we r would be a flagship for the university by doing both cutting edge international scholarship & regionally relevant community engagement that we r would bring huge amount of external incomes & last but not least’s, build up an attractive intellectual environment for a diverse groups of academic, research staff & postgraduate students.

Beyond the academy

This bring me to the second challenge for cultural studies. Question from the outside is not limited to those raised by colleague from other academic discipline, but extend to what is generally call society at large. This reminds us of Johnson remark that prioritizing agendas from outside the academy is a distinctive feature of cultural studies &it brings up the controversial issue of accountability. It is true that the increasing demands or academic to be accountable these day come mostly from the government the university bureaucracy & it is more often than not an instrument of controls, regulations, & resource management. as Bill Reading remarked in his oft quoted books The University in Ruins, accountability is conflated with accounting a quantifying, bean counting appraisal of good practices that underlie the audit regime. 29 Howe r we r are critiquing the latter as a crude, mechanistic & content less approach to accountability one that does not take account of the distinctive, open end nature of academic researches does not mean that the issues of accountability itself should be put aside, Whether we r r like it or not, academics & especially cultural studies &, more broadly, humanities academics do have a reputation in society at large as producing useless knowledge’s & even if we r r are driven in our moral outrage, to rally in defense of our cherished academic freedom it still behooves us to think seriously & honestly about why what we r r do matter We r r do have to address what David Marquee &calls the thorny problem of how to reconcile accountability with autonomy for example the sensitive issue of jargon one of the easiest & most common target of attack by hostile journalists. Humanities scholar, including many cultural studies academics, routinely dismiss the attack on academic jargon by pointing to their right to use a specialized language like any other professional scientist, engineer, lawyer, whose discourses r, also often impenetrable to outsiders. Jargon, in other words, is the mark of a profession autonomy. This is a valid point academia is a professions whose professionalism has to be protect & like any other professional world the world of academia & more specifically, of particular academic discipline is a semi private world, partly constituted precisely by its specialized language. As Warner put it, ‘expert knowledge is in an important way no public its authority is external to publics discussions It can be challenge only by other expert not within the discourse of the public itself.

Conclusion:-

 We r down this path for reason that we r economic in the first instance. As a research centre we r had to earn external income &  the Australian context there r grant to be gained for collaborative researches with external partner such as from the Australian Research Council Linkage Project scheme. Here, this was a great moments of turning necessity into opportunities but the opportunities in my views has not been just economical but also importantly, intellectual & political. In particular, this kind of works prompts new way of doing worldly intellectual works & exploring different inflection of the politic of knowledge in academic cultural research. In this sense the turn toward community engagement can be seen not just as a pragmatic compromise or merely a reaction to neoliberal government policies but also as a turn to some of the keys aspiration of cultural studies in the first places. This work redefines academic practice as decidedly social practices, involving actual relation with a broad range of professional & other social agent with very different interest & expertise. This socially cosmopolitan modality of cultural research, as Meaghan Morris in this problem calls it, represent a critical departure from the predominantly individualist, ivory towed rd err practice that has come to dominate cultural studies scholarships despite its routine rhetoric of political commitment. Collaborating with others intellectual strangers who have very different professional background & concern fundamentally alters the positions & practice of the academic scholars. She/he no longer has the luxuries of pursuing, linearly, his &her own interest so or curiosity, but has to step into an inter discursive contacts zones, where divergent knowledge r put into sometime uneasy interaction with each others. To make the collaboration works, a common ground has to be founds that of necessity involve gave & take of idea paradigms & approached. For example in many project we r have been face with the external partner request that survey research be included in the projects because the aura of objectivity associated with quantitative knowledge still loom large in the complex operation of institutional & governmental politic. The necessary compromise & the way in which they are argued for  & arrived at require moving beyond our intellectual comfort zones having to communicate & engage with interlocutor who, tangibly, have huge amount of intellectual capital themselves.