The critical conscience of cultural studies

Like many whose thought and career are deeply indebted to Graeme Turner, I first encountered his work through his influential introduction to the interdisciplinary field of British cultural studies, which he described as an inherently political academic formation. The point of cultural studies in this tradition is, as he put it, “to examine the power relations that constitute this form of everyday life, and thus to reveal the configuration of interests its construction serves” (2006: 5). This formulation may sound abstract and academic, but for Graeme politics was never simply an academic exercise. His political commitments were evidenced by his tireless advocacy for the humanities as a high-profile public intellectual and media commentator, his institutional leadership, his work with the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and his participation on the Prime Minister's Science, Engineering, and Innovation Council. Throughout his storied academic career, he remained true to his understanding of cultural studies as both a political project and a critical practice.

In the academic world, Graeme has long served as the critical conscience of cultural studies. He was a touchstone and beacon for several generations of scholars inspired by what he once described as, “the admirable objective” of studying the construction of everyday life, “in order to change our lives for the better” (2006: 230). If, in the current context, such a sentiment comes across as overblown or hopelessly naïve, that is an indictment of the state of the world and the recent triumph of a disingenuous apoliticism rather than the sentiment itself. In the face of this state of affairs, Graeme, who devoted the first part of his career to establishing cultural studies as an interdisciplinary project in Australia, found himself in the latter part defending its critical legacy in the face of a “crudely vocationalist instrumentalism”(2012: 126).

It is a telling sign of Graeme's commitment to the political project of cultural studies that the research center he founded in 1999 at the University of Queensland bore the same initials as the University of Birmingham's influential Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies, but with one of the “Cs” in his Center standing for “critical.” For Graeme, that term carried a twofold meaning: it highlighted the combination of theory and practice that lay at the heart of the cultural studies project and emphasized a resulting commitment to addressing issues of structural power and its consequences. A sense of this approach comes across when he invoked Stuart Hall's criticism of a latter-day version of cultural studies for generating more analyses of The Sopranos than he (Hall) could bear to read. For Graeme the problem lay in, “mistaking an analytic method for a political purpose.” The result was an eclipse of a practical, critical project: “textual analyses of prominent television programs are being offered as ends in themselves, rather than as modes of accessing deeper structural, cultural and political tendencies” (2012: 134).

This category mistake was, for him, a symptom of a pathological version of academic professionalism that relinquishes critical engagement while privileging “productivity” for its own sake—an approach rewarded by escalating practices of meretricious metricization. However, it would be selective scapegoating to place the weight of the blame solely on the academic sector and its functionaries. The sector is under pressure from social forces that seek to reconstruct education as the handmaid of industry: a kind of apprenticeship for a one-dimensional life. As he says in his critique of the relationship between neoliberal education policy and the creative industries agenda: “Little wonder that an education system aimed with increasing singlemindedness at equipping its graduates with the capacity to make money should find that the knowledges it requires to do that are becoming more and more straightforward. Complexity, having something else ‘you want to do’, only gets in the way” (Turner, 2012: 127).

This vision of the fate of higher education speaks to the shifting social and power relations in which the academy is embedded: relations in which economic life has asserted its authority over and domination of civic life. The resulting concern is increasingly palpable against the background of high-profile examples of democratic backsliding in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere. For Graeme, higher education has a broader role to play: it has a crucial responsibility to the well-being of democracy and civic life. As he put it in Broken: Universities, Politics, and the Public Good, “a strong higher education system is fundamental to civil society. The building of knowledge and the dissemination of information is vital to the proper functioning of our democracy” (Turner, 2025: para. 1).

In this respect, Graeme's analysis springs directly from his assessment of the social relations that shape the culture of everyday life. What increasingly concerned him in his critique of higher education—and the fate of cultural studies in particular—was the broader disembedding of commercial priorities from civic life. The instrumentalization of the university was simply one more symptom of this process. As he explains in his discussion of what he described as “the demotic turn” (Turner, 2010), commercial institutions have gained an alarming degree of autonomy from democratic commitments. The drive to be the first company to develop artificial general intelligence or to achieve the highest multi-trillion-dollar valuation is unlikely to serve broader community, national, or democratic interests.

Indeed, Graeme was deeply concerned with the forms of hyper-commercialism that threaten to overwhelm democracy. These concerns take on heightened salience in an era of untethered billionaires riding the tech backlash to greater heights of economic power wielded in growing resentment against those who would hold them accountable. Consider, for example, the venture capitalist Marc Andreeson bemoaning the public call for tech accountability and responsibility as a symptom of the demise of “the deal” he once benefited from whereby tech billionaires would be revered by the media, awarded honorary degrees “from all the universities,” and invited to, “all the great parties,” regardless of how their technologies impacted society (Andreeson elaborates on his resentment, which eventually turned him from an Obama supporter to a Trump supporter, in Free Press, 2026).

The recent antics of Elon Musk and Palantir's Alex Karp, along with the revelations coming out of lawsuits against Meta and Google, reinforce Graeme's concerns about the increasing autonomy of commercial institutions from democratic commitments and civic life. The undemocratic aloofness of the tech billionaire class is highlighted by Elon Musk's assertion that, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy” (Wolf, 2025), a vice that he has done much to exempt himself from. The list goes on: Facebook's reported policy of allowing 17 “strikes” before deplatforming sex-trafficking accounts; its profiteering on the back of a flood of scam ads; Grok allowing users to create sexual deepfakes; and a general unwillingness of these companies to address the multiplying social harms of the online surveillance economy (Horwitz, 2025; Ingram, 2026; Roth, 2025). It may be tempting for characters like Andreeson to imagine that the public is simply ungrateful and fickle, but this overlooks the real pathologies of the tech sector and the failed promise to build community and revitalize democracy. The alleged communal potential of the “social graph” has given way to the return of the repressed “top-down” media model via the algorithmic distribution of viral content.

All of which drives home Graeme's key insight about what Zuboff (2015) has identified as the increasing structural independence of a commercially hypertrophied media sector. The ongoing attempt to profit on the capture of attention and entertainment at the expense of any concern with social and political consequences means that the media, “lose contact with what has variously been thought of as their fourth estate role, their function as national institutions, their centrality to the operation of the public sphere, and, effectively, their social or community responsibilities” (Turner, 2010: 166).

The growing divide between the tech industry and the public described by Graeme is exacerbated by the fantastic concentration of wealth in the hands of a few media moguls. As the author and filmmaker Noah Hawley states: “When Peter Thiel said, ‘I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,’ he wasn’t talking about your freedom. He was talking about his own. You don’t exist. When Musk took a chainsaw to the federal government as part of the inside joke he called DOGE, he did so with the air of a man who believed that nothing matters—poverty, chaos, human suffering. He was having fun” (Hawley, 2026, para. 18).

To blame the technology for these social pathologies is to forget the lessons of critical cultural studies. As James Carville might have said, “it's the social relations, stupid.” In keeping with his commitment to tracing the power relations in which cultural forms, practices, and technologies are embedded, Graeme was presciently skeptical of the democratizing promise celebrated by the champions of the digital revolution. He coined “the demotic turn” in Understanding Celebrity (2004) to distinguish between emerging forms of interactive participation and the political project of democratization. Throughout his discussion of celebrity and the demotic turn, Graeme evinced an enduring skepticism toward, “the discourse of emancipation, democratization, and liberation that has been the default position for so many media and cultural studies’ accounts of Web 2.0”—and beyond (2010: 4). This response was not born of antipathy to the technology per se. Graeme had no truck with the forced binary of technological utopianism and dystopianism. To fall on either side of this divide would be to ignore the power relations that constitute the forms of everyday life and the interests its construction serves. The question was never really “will the internet revitalize democracy,” but, rather, “how will its applications be folded into existing power relations and what will be the consequences?” It should be clear that this is by no means a recipe for ambivalence, as even a cursory engagement with Graeme's work reveals. It requires an understanding not simply of a text or artifact, but of their social and historical context and significance. As Graeme succinctly observed, it is “inadequate … to simply focus upon the determining potential of the technology, rather than upon the social, cultural, political and regulatory context within which it must operate, when making projections into the future” (2010: 135).

When, in 2012, Graeme turned his critical eye back upon the field of cultural studies to consider what it had become, he was deeply concerned by its tendency, in some quarters, to align itself with the promotional promises of media industries that were becoming increasingly untethered from social and civic concerns. There was a moment, in the heady days of the early Web, when dominant strains of the academy and the broader culture took seriously the claim of the startups that they were more socially progressive than previous industrial and financial giants; that, in short, they were the good capitalists, young, hip, and socially conscious. Those were the days of the “deal” cherished by Andresson, when you could be both commercially rapacious and celebrated in the academy, the press, and the public mind. They were the days when Google proudly embraced the “Don’t Be Evil” motto (admittedly, a low bar). Graeme was prescient in his concern that the enthusiastic reception of the “good” tech capitalists was overblown, despite the fact that cultural studies provided the conceptual toolbox to analyze the potential shortcomings of their promises. He discerned in this reception a recapitulation of the broader tendency toward reframing higher education as an adjunct to commercial industry. He memorably described the result as, “an unnecessarily comprehensive form of surrender” (2012, 82). Not long after this, Google famously dropped the “Don’t Be Evil” slogan in an overdue symbolic gesture.

If Graeme discerned signs of surrender elsewhere in the field, he never succumbed. He remained the go-to figure for those inspired by the political project at the heart of cultural studies. His Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland provided a haven for wide-ranging interdisciplinary cultural studies research, inspired by the critical legacy of the Birmingham School and Graeme's own work. He worked hard to make the Center a space that protected those fortunate enough to visit or work there during his leadership from the instrumental tendencies that so concerned him in the higher education sector. His Center remained true to the Birmingham Center's project, “of bringing a wide range of disciplinary approaches and intellectual traditions to bear on a critical reading of recent developments in contemporary capitalist societies and the cultural forms of late modernity” (Gray et al., 2007: xi).

The Center's commitment to interdisciplinarity served the practical function of critical cultural studies: to help elucidate cultural connections across seemingly disparate realms of thought and practice. In keeping with this wide-angle view of the relationship between theory and practice, culture and society, the atmosphere at the Center came as close to an ideal version of engaged academic life as any of us are likely to experience. At the same time, it modeled what engaged cultural research could be. Regular work-in-progress sessions brought together researchers in disciplines ranging across film studies, history, anthropology, and media studies. The Center hosted a range of public events featuring local and international research and creative work, building academic and professional networks and reaching out into the university community and beyond.

In the midst of it all, Graeme combined his consistently active research program with a seemingly superhuman level of academic and public engagement. While running the Center and the ARC Cultural Research Network, lobbying for the humanities, and providing ongoing public commentary on higher education, he also mentored generations of cultural and media studies scholars. As anyone who has spent time working in these areas knows, it is hard to find a colleague whose career has not been in some way enriched by their encounter with Graeme. The stunning thing is that he made it look easy and graceful—always leavened with an incisive sense of humor. It was like watching someone operating at a skill level far ahead of the pace of the game.

Graeme's critical approach, focused as it was on cultural logics and their trajectories, also outpaced his moment. His work on the demotic turn anticipated the tech backlash and set the stage for consideration of the recent resuscitation of the perennial promise of enhanced creativity and empowerment via new technology. As we confront the current barrage of technological futurism, Graeme's legacy provides a crucial warning to avoid treating the promise of AI separately from the power relations in which it is embedded. This is not to neglect the technology's unique affordances, but rather to consider the uses to which they will be put under conditions shaped by economic and regulatory processes. It was relatively easy to predict, for example, that Sam Altman would back away from his reticence about ads in ChatGPT. The private companies developing the technology are under intense pressure to turn the technology to commercial ends, and in the near term this means advancing the interactive surveillance economy. The promise of so-called agentic AI is to make sense of—and put to use—the huge stockpiles of data amassed by both corporate entities and the state, but to do so for commercial ends, whether this means creating products for the military and security apparatuses or for managing commercial industrial processes and targeting consumers.

One of the abiding misconceptions of critical theoretical approaches is that they are reductively and perversely negative, that their unique goal is to storm on people's parades in a fit of cranky pessimism. The rejoinder to such a stereotype is that it serves as a defensive gesture against the prospect that things could be better—a Panglossian admonition not to try to improve upon the conditions of the “best of all possible worlds.” This image has nothing at all to do with Graeme's critical project, which is shot through with hope, albeit anchored in a pragmatic realism. There is no way to make sense of Graeme's dedication, his ongoing passion for the potential of cultural studies and of higher education more generally, than to read it through the lens of a passionate sense of possibility: that understanding the world, pathologies and all, is the royal road to improving it.

To suggest that, for those influenced by his work, Graeme Turner modeled the critical conscience of cultural studies is to highlight these key themes in his approach: the relation of theory to meaningful practice; an abiding concern with the power relations that shape everyday life; the intellectual, ethical-moral, and civic role of higher education; and, above all, a contribution to the public good. Graeme's contributions are monumental and remain an inspiration to those who share his version of cultural studies and its commitments. There is much work still to do, but we are all better off—and profoundly grateful—for having been fortunate enough to share the place with him for a while.