Abstract
To identify a set of defining traits and goals of the cultural studies field is the task of this intervention. It begins by investigating how leading actors in this field today define it: the Association for Cultural Studies and the journals Cultural Studies, the European Journal of Cultural Studies, the International Journal of Cultural Studies, and Inter-Asian Cultural Studies. Three main tropes are identified: diversity, contextualization and critique. Each of them has partly succeeded but other aims remain unfulfilled. Two central tasks are formulated. First, cultural studies needs a reinforced critical reflexivity to explain what it is and why it is needed as a driving force for interactive diversity, contextualizing meaning making and communicative critique. Second, the field needs to be on high alert, stepping forward and responding fast and loud to the current totalitarian threats against sustainable and resilient academic knowledge production.
Keywords
What is cultural studies?
What and where is cultural studies today? What is it becoming? What should or could it become? What is its meaning? What is at stake as we assess the ongoing development and maturation of cultural studies as field? The International Journal of Cultural Studies is soliciting provocative answers to these and related questions, from a range of scholars internationally. We will publish their responses as an ongoing series, across multiple issues.
Cultural studies is a rather elusive concept. Does it primarily belong to social sciences or the humanities? And is it a young discipline, a school of thought, an intellectual current, a political movement, a field of scholarship or an interdisciplinary interface? I belong to those who tend to prefer crossroads to broad and straight avenues. I agree with those who like the idea of a transdisciplinary field better than a new discipline, since I cherish the open diversity and communicative dialogue that the best moments of cultural studies empowered. Yet, even open borderlands may need some internal and external borders in order to be at all identifiable as either agents or arenas. The inherent capacity to cross academic borders does not imply a total lack of distinction. Many different currents and perspectives meet up in this heterogeneous field, but must it therefore be a chameleon or an empty signifier?
The field of cultural studies houses an intricate dialectic of boundaries and transgressions. Crossing borders would be meaningless and indeed impossible if no distinctions were made. The call for uniting in and through diversity combines these two aspects by acknowledging distinctions and difference, and simultaneously advocating exchanges and communication.
Is it possible today to discern a set of defining traits in this field? To find that out is a giant, almost impossible task, as cultural studies may mean so many different things in different contexts. Many rightly prefer to engage in research practice rather than get stuck in programmatic debates. Yet I think it is useful and healthy now and then to return to such foundational issues, to reflect upon what is being done, and why. To identify some aspects of this issue is the task of this intervention.
Three tropes
Having looked at a number of possible options, I became curious to see how some of the leading organizations and journals in this field today define its tasks and profile. I chose to focus on policy formulations from the Association for Cultural Studies (ACS) and the journals Cultural Studies (CS), European Journal of Cultural Studies (EJCS), International Journal of Cultural Studies (IJCS), and Inter-Asian Cultural Studies (IACS). 1 These five nodes have much in common, but also certain differences. One must bear in mind that such texts are often rather old and rarely updated, but still offer rough estimates of how these central field actors wish to define their mission. I found three main recurrent tropes.
Everybody hails the border-crossing diversity with which I here began. ACS defines cultural studies as an ‘inter- and trans-disciplinary’ hub for a ‘diversity of work by committed scholars and workers’ gathering from all ‘around the world’ to develop a ‘meaningful meeting place’ for ‘a plurality of approaches’ to forge ‘links among the diverse groups of cultural studies scholars and workers around the world’. IACS is based on ‘a transborder collective undertaking to confront Inter-Asia cultural politics’, established in ‘a unique moment for dialogue’, ‘forging political links across these sub-regions’ as well as ‘a link between critical intellectual groupings’. CS ‘understands the term “culture” inclusively’ in order to secure its ‘international and interdisciplinary’ character. IJCS is also ‘multidisciplinary in outlook’, while EJCS publishes ‘well theorized empirically grounded work from a variety of locations and disciplinary backgrounds’, specifying that ‘Discourse analysis, visual and narrative analysis, grounded theory and ethnography are among the methods of analysis that can be used.’ The latter specification implies a limitation of the field, suggesting a distinction made between cultural studies and other cultural scholarship. This is formulated in two other, interlaced tropes.
One demarcation is to emphasize the importance of contextualization. ACS speaks of cultural studies investigating ‘cultural practices and forms, and their effects, by placing them into the contexts of relations’. CS argues that work in this field ‘explores the relation between cultural practices, everyday life, material, economic, political, geographical and historical contexts’. IJCS likewise mentions ‘cultural practices, processes, texts and infrastructures’ as the target of an analysis that ‘interrogates what culture means, and what culture does, across global and local scales of power and action, diverse technologies and forms of mediation, and multiple dimensions of performance, experience and identity’. This is expressed in the form of an explicit exclusion: ‘The journal does not publish close readings of single texts; but it does consider critical, contextualised readings.’ EJCS is equally explicit, as it is ‘not interested in publishing studies of culture that focus exclusively on single objects’ because ‘the study of culture and cultural forms always needs wider contextualization to include how objects, practices or ideas are inserted in relations of power’.
The latter formulations link to a third, related trope, namely the focus on critique of dominant power relations. EJCS ‘engages in critical discussions on power relations concerning gender, class, sexual preference, ethnicity and other macro or micro sites of political struggle’, while also being ‘rooted in lived experience’. This is further specified thus: ‘The common denominator for the work published is in engagement with and a critical take on how power relations are (re)produced in everyday practices of meaning making. They might concern gender, class, race and ethnicity, sexuality, sexual preference, disability and other macro or micro sites of political struggle.’ Therefore, ‘our double focus on relations of power and processes of meaning making as the twin sides to how “culture” is produced’. In short: ‘We are interested in how meaning is constructed and in how power relations are produced.’ IACS similarly describes itself as grounded in ‘new social movements and critical cultural studies as forces of decolonisation’ that ‘have given rise to alternative modes of knowledge production’, focusing on the interface between ‘political economy, culture and politics’. This critical perspective is sometimes heightened into a demand for political action and intervention. IJCS wants to ‘revitalize cultural studies’ as ‘a critical space for theoretical and methodological innovation in global cultural research’. CS calls for ‘more open analytic, critical and political conversations’, aiming to ‘intervene in the processes by which the existing techniques, institutions and structures of power are reproduced, resisted and transformed’, by means of ‘intellectual and political experimentation, intervention and dialogue’. Finally, ACS talks about ‘the study of and intervention into the relations between cultural practices and the social relations and organization of power’ as well as the ‘agencies which enable or resist them’. In the ACS constitution, this trope is expanded into a more specific critical commitment, namely the task to defend cultural studies against various ‘challenges’ and ‘attacks on its project’, by speaking ‘in defense of cultural studies, its programs or cultural studies scholars’.
Diversity, contextualization and critique are thus three important facets of the cultural studies project as it is expressed in those five policy texts, and I have found them all in varying proportions present in many other parts of the field as well. Looking more closely at each of them, in relation to how I experience the field to have evolved in practice, some observations can be made, hinting at valuable achievements but also problematic deficits and remaining tasks.
Diversity and hybridity
If cultural studies may at all be described as a movement, it is not a political or a cultural movement, but an intellectual one. It is an interface for transgressive critical discourse and academic knowledge production, rather than a political force or an artistic avant-garde. It is an inter-discipline, acting like a meta-connector to link different disciplines and other interdisciplinary fields to discuss a multiple set of critical agendas. It has no formal or informal leaders, and hardly any shared canon, even though issues of meaning, identity and power are often identified as central topics. It has become particularly associated with its 60-plus years old British tradition, but unlike many other paradigmatic currents (from critical theory to Actor Network Theory) it has no single defining root, but rather consists of a bundle of crisscrossing routes stretching far back in time and connecting many different branches and variants in a flexible rhizomatic network with many different beginnings and trajectories possible.
Some cultural theorists demarcate a distance between themselves and their competitors and argue for their models as self-sufficient solutions to all conceivable problems. I do not believe in such reductionism. Instead, I advocate an inescapable fundamental polycentric heterology or pluralist diversity. There is no one single discipline, paradigm or theory that alone would suffice to explain everything and hence to make all other perspectives superfluous. Instead diversity must be taken seriously, against all attempts to narrow down the field. Therefore, translation and communication are absolutely necessary. Each theory can of course criticize others and find their limitations, but should also be able to acknowledge that others can just as well correctly pinpoint its own limits and therefore welcome multidimensional plurality – in academic scholarship in general as well as within the field of cultural studies.
It should by now be quite obvious that I do not belong to those who wish to reconstruct cultural studies as a unitary discipline. All disciplines are historical constructions that are often internally very heterogeneous, merely held together by a shared history and a set of institutional arrangements. Fluid interdisciplinary fields may also gradually solidify into a disciplinary status. Yet I believe cultural studies has much to gain by sticking to its self-image as a transnational ‘interface at which the concerns of different disciplines, and of other interdisciplinary knowledges, can enter into fruitful forms of dialogue’ (Bennett, 1998: 535). It is a meeting place for highly diverse forms of analytical practice ‘with different degrees of commensurability with one another, which are unlikely to add up to a single political form of mattering, and which are always tied up in variable and mobile interdisciplinary entanglements’ (Bennett, 2013: 439). Because of its many commitments (rather than in spite of them), this interface borderland field is not a united political movement, nor a distinct subculture sharing a fixed set of norms and values, nor even a paradigm or school of thought linked to a mandatory set of canonical texts, theories, methods or materials. Ien Ang (2013: 433–6) has likewise stressed that even though cultural studies may have a critical orientation, ‘it is first and foremost an academic practice’ which is ‘at its best when it acts as an integrative inter-discipline’. She therefore challenged ‘the social and cultural homogeneity of cultural studies’ which ‘perpetuates an unthinking Eurocentrism (or even more narrowly, an Anglocentrism) and inhibits a truly cosmopolitan engagement with the vast diversity of the world around us’.
This multidimensional embracing of diversity has in many ways been quite successful. It has in that respect served as a modernizing motor in the academy, dealing with contemporary issues of great complexity and offering otherwise rare opportunities for dialogue and cooperation across borders: between countries or regions as well as between subject areas, but also in its best moments successfully connecting academic research to both arts and politics in civil society. There were deeper trenches before the millennium shift, and many old petrified gaps have today been filled by vigorous cross-currents (Fornäs, 2008).
Yet, still today, this diversifying ambition is far from fulfilled, as there are several underdeveloped interfaces to be explored and nourished. First, there are many different shades of inter-, multi- and trans-disciplinarity (Fornäs, 2016), whose affordances (potentials and limitations) deserve to be more thoroughly discussed. Much cooperation between disciplines still stays on the multi-disciplinary stage where each scholar makes their thing, resulting in an additive patchwork with no dense interaction between the collaborating perspectives. Both in theory and practice, border-crossing methodologies deserve closer attention. I would welcome a broader discussion on what different modes of interdisciplinarity may and should be used for: does the cooperation between perspectives primarily serve to enable better knowledge concerning complex matters or is there also an ambition to let new, hybrid forms of meaning making emerge in the interface between the collaborating parties?
Second, quite much remains to be done in terms of inter-theoretical bricolage, struggling to bridge hampering divides, such as those between new materialism and critical hermeneutics, post-structuralism and critical theory or ethnography and textual analysis. Some old divides are stubbornly persistent, at least in the dominant streams of UK and US cultural studies. Such multiple disciplinary divides are linked to similarly poly-dimensional geopolitical divides between west and east, north and south, but also between Anglophone regions where inherited British and US American dichotomies tend to stand strong and other linguistic and cultural world regions such as Latin America, East Asia or the Nordic countries of Europe where they are at least partially dissolved in favour of more inventive hybrid borderlands of various kinds.
Such combined geopolitical and paradigmatic trenches need to be abandoned, to break up the doxa and renew critical and cultural knowledge through brave montage of creative imagination. The central value of diversity in this field thus remains an unfulfilled goal to be pursued even more radically by questioning the commonplace dichotomies that still persist.
Contextualization and culture
A second univocal keyword of these leading cultural studies gatekeepers is contextualization. This is indeed an important aspect, especially in relation to text-centred humanities disciplines such as literature, cinema studies, art history or musicology. However, stressing the importance of contextualization in contrast to text-centred formalism without simultaneously emphasizing attention to textual meaning-formations just as much is problematic. In a one-sided manner, it reduces cultural studies to its social scientific aspect and misses its humanities-derived capacity for interpretive meaning making, which makes it distinguishable from other branches of sociology or political science. The risk is simply that of neglecting culture itself as meaning-making practice, taking it too much for granted. The fear of focusing too much on single texts may throw the baby out with the bathwater if deep encounters with texts are thereby shunned. It is crucial to acknowledge the need to focus on both text and context, as it is their double interrelation with acting subjects that should be at the core of cultural studies. I therefore call for a renewed engagement with the concept of culture, and with the processes of interpretation that are the distinguishing trait of cultural research in relation to social research, or indeed the biological or natural sciences.
I have written much about the concept of culture elsewhere (in particular in Fornäs, 2017). Suffice it here to restate that the hermeneutic-semiotic concept of culture as meaning-making signifying practice deserves to be taken seriously. As meaning making, culture combines two equally essential axes: the vertical axis of imagination, whereby people virtually represent the absent, and the horizontal axis of communication linking texts, subjects and contexts to each other through networks of mediation and interaction. Apart from in the EJCS platform, such basic concepts of culture, meaning and interpretation are surprisingly absent in my sources, indicating a problematic blind spot in the centre of the field. The lack of contact with critical hermeneutics has resulted in an unfortunate loss of a key point in the legacy of Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall and Richard Johnson. While ‘soft’ versions of posthumanism have valuably supplemented interpretive strategies with a greater awareness of the dense and never-ending interplay between materiality and meaning, its most radical, ‘hard’ versions threaten to cut off a vital foundation for any cultural research responding to that name.
Cultural studies research bridges humanities and social sciences. Its focus on meaning making and texts opens the door to humanities, while its focus on practices and contexts links to the social sciences. I see this interplay as more of an opportunity than a restriction, and am therefore sceptical of formulations stating that some cultural studies journals do ‘not publish close readings of single texts’ (IJCS) or are ‘not interested in publishing studies of culture that focus exclusively on single objects’ (EJCS), even if they then add that they do ‘consider critical, contextualised readings’ (IJCS) that clarify ‘how objects, practices or ideas are inserted in relations of power’ (EJCS). Negative self-identifications are rarely productive. Work by Adorno, Benjamin, Derrida, Butler and many others have shown how fruitful a close reading of single works may actually be. It is true that they always also contextualize such readings, but such forbidding commandments can easily scare away path-breaking interpretive work, and if one-sided textualism is prohibited, why not also ban one-sided contextualism that does not care for how the world is made meaningful and thus tendentially falls outside cultural studies? In my opinion, cultural studies becomes stronger by instead opening such doors and inviting mutual curiosity, reflection and fertilization, rather than hiding behind firm walls.
Critique and intervention
A third basic value has to do with critique: the quest to investigate, illuminate and question dominant norms and power structures in culture and society, as well as in academic knowledge production itself. In the sources I refer to, criticality seems to rule, but there are also voices that question this obsession with being against. One option is to see critique as just one of several modes of reading and interpreting artistic, medial or social texts, supplemented by warmer and more dialogical or caring modes, and to warn against getting stuck in a cold and distancing hermeneutic of suspicion (Anker and Felski, 2017; Felski, 2015; Latour, 2004). Another suggestion is to use the idea of immanent critique, building on internal contradictions rather than applying normative measures from the outside, to cultivate a communicative critique that is reflexive, dialogical and dialectical (Fornäs, 2013 and 2017: 95–7). In any case, the critical element should neither be taken for granted nor abandoned. Exposing structures of power and domination is important, but it is also necessary to listen to opposing voices and seek to understand what motivates them.
In spite of some advocates of post-critique, being critical continues to be a commonplace virtue in cultural studies. Each scholar can of course be active on two fronts: doing research and engaging in political actions. But can or should the daily practice of cultural studies be a form of political activism? I side with Ang and Bennett in not conceiving of cultural studies as a political movement, but that should still not prevent anyone from making interventions in social and political matters. Striking a balance of independence and commitment is a difficult but crucial task, which at the same time also demands a combination of critical reflexivity, acknowledging scholars’ and other intellectuals’ particular class privileges with an alert determination to defend precisely those academic and artistic practices against recurrent menaces from external political, economic or cultural forces that threaten to undermine them.
Defending committed intellectual autonomy
There is therefore no contradiction in combining the defence of academic freedom with political intervention outside academia. Such defence of intellectual autonomy is today at least as urgent as it was during the age of neoliberal crusades, when New Public Management (NPM) threatened to erase this independence. At that time, Pierre Bourdieu (1996 [1992]: 340–8) urged intellectuals to ‘mobilize and create a veritable Internationale of intellectuals committed to defending the autonomy of the universes of cultural production’, struggling for ‘a corporatism of the universal’ in which intellectuals live up to a double commitment: to safeguard the specific authority and laws of the autonomous intellectual world, independent from religious, political and economic power, and at the same time efficiently engage this authority in political action. The two are not in opposition to each other: in fact, intellectuals can intervene in political struggles in the most efficient manner when this engagement is founded on the basic rules and experiences of their own relatively autonomous field practice. Bourdieu (1991: 661–9) called for a critical reflexivity to enable intellectuals to neither monopolize nor abandon their specific privileges, but to understand that reason is ‘a product of history that has to be incessantly re-produced through historical action aimed at guaranteeing the social conditions for the possibility of rational thinking’, and that they should therefore also ‘struggle for the universalization of the privileged conditions of existence which make the pursuit of the universal possible’. It is precisely on the basis of the specific procedures of their own fields that scholars and intellectuals in general can make a difference in society. Academics should not transform themselves into politicians, but make use of their resources and competencies as academics, which is a basis for their key role in defending public knowledge and open communication in the social world at large.
I can think of several such specific assets anchored in academic practices. One central such resource is linked to seminar culture, which at its best is an inspiring cradle of free speech but also respect for others, in the spirit of what Chantal Mouffe (2013) might call ‘agonistic’ politics. Another, related one is the open access norm of public discourse, accessible to every citizen. Collegial discussion and decision-making also deserves to be defended against the instrumental rationality of NPM’s centralized and vertical command structure. Peer review has its difficulties and costs, but remains important to secure sustainable academic freedom. All such resources are corruptible by formal or informal dominance structures, but they do have the capacity to contribute essential resources to democratic communication and ethical interaction in society at large. It is therefore important to defend artists’ and academic researchers’ control over their means of production, diffusion and evaluation; to counteract all forms of discrimination and any effort to increase external political control over knowledge production.
At that time, Bourdieu saw the greatest threat to intellectual autonomy in the neoliberal commercialization of intellectual practices, particularly represented by irresponsible forms of media journalism. Now, thirty years later, NPM’s attacks on academic freedom have gained additional support through a range of authoritarian movements and regimes with divergent motivations but similarly destructive effects. The continued defence against neoliberal commercialization of the specific experiences and autonomy of intellectuals must be widened to also stand up against the growing neoconservative extreme-right nationalism that threatens to erode intellectual life and shatter all that academic autonomy that, in the first place, enabled the universal claim to reason. Scholars should nourish a critical reflexivity towards our own academic values, practices and institutions, but also stand up to defend them when they are under attack. With its reflexive and critical stance, cultural studies should be in the forefront of this defence, not just of cultural studies itself but also of any other scholarship that is under stress, as well as all the humanities and indeed all academic knowledge production.
Journalists, writers, artists and musicians have all been harassed and even killed by authoritarian nationalists without any respect for the intellectual resources that underpin democracies. Not least, academics have been seriously questioned or harassed. There is an individual threat to each scholar, but also an impersonal menace towards all institutions of free and critical scholarship in principle. Two interacting levels and types of attack may be discerned: (1) trust in science is undermined by phenomena like post-truth, fact resistance and climate change denial, refusals to accept solid research results in favour of politically motivated feelings and false rumours. Anti-elitist conspiracy theories claim that academics are behind fake news. Distrust in privileged authorities targets intellectuals who are regarded as disloyal to populist nationalism. Neo-positivists attack all forms of constructionism, particularly in gender studies, which is accused of being a centre for biased propaganda in favour of equality and human rights. (B) Authoritarian movements influence totalitarian regimes to close down inconvenient programmes and departments of higher education. This has already been the fate of gender studies in several countries, not least in Central and Eastern Europe, and other disciplines or research areas, such as ethnic studies, are likewise in danger of being erased. Violent verbal and physical attacks on individual scholars complete the picture, deterring others from acting in support.
Such attacks have long been launched on cultural studies as well as on overlapping fields like feminist, gender and queer studies or postcolonial, ethnic and race studies. Disciplines and fields like sociology, anthropology, ethnology and climate research have similarly been seriously questioned in some instances. In East European countries in particular, academic freedom is undermined by a dangerous partnership between neoliberalism and nationalist authoritarianism, which limits rights and closes down unruly and critical activities of any kind, not least those associated with feminism, gender studies and postcolonial ethnic studies. The situation differs between European countries such as Poland, Hungary, Serbia, Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria, Russia and Turkey, but the general trend is for such threats to grow steadily, even in countries like Sweden, with the breakthrough of fascist-populist right-wing extremism on the European Union (EU) level. Similar pressures are thus definitely also notable in the West, as has been clear in social media troll storms as well as in the recent EU election, even though they have not (yet?) achieved majority support in public opinion. It is therefore high time to take such threats seriously and start acting.
There is in this precarious situation a need to reflect on what must be defended, how, and with which arguments, so as to be prepared and capable of acting efficiently each time a new attack is launched against academic freedom or any kind of critical thinking. There are different aspects involved in this complex process: misogyny, racism and nationalism, scapegoating and striking against weak minorities, but also a general anti-intellectual backlash, fuelled by a late-modern combination of a backlash against growing economic inequalities and a widespread devaluation of academic authority. Which distinctions need to be made, which borders defended and which crossed or transgressed? I am not convinced by how Mouffe and others have advocated a left-populist strategy, which I fear would clash with the basic values of intellectual work, with unintended consequences. But on what grounds and core values could alliances be built with other academic fields and movements? How can critical research and academic freedom be successfully defended?
All research with direct relevance for contemporary political issues sooner or later comes under attack. There is sometimes a problematic sliding between research and activism, which can fuel a reactionary backlash. It is therefore necessary to defend such scholarship from falling into two traps: the relatively smaller one of blurring the distinction between academic scholarship and activist movements, and the more dangerous one of using such tendencies to condemn or even ban a whole field of knowledge. The task of cultural studies, gender studies, ethnic studies and climate studies is to develop a deeper understanding that can explain social and cultural phenomena. This is how critical scholarship can become a key resource in contemporary political discourse without losing its character as independent knowledge production.
Two tasks
Being probably the most open and reflexive interdisciplinary clearing-house, boasting it is a critical and politically committed intellectual movement, cultural studies should take a leading role in and responsibility for such defence action. However, so far that has much too rarely been the case, with only minor exceptions. I will just add some more words on my two suggestions above.
(A) First, the cross-field of cultural studies needs a reinforced critical reflexivity to explain what it is and why it is needed as a driving force for interactive diversity, contextualizing meaning making and communicative critique. Now and then, its conceptual foundations need to be revived in renewed debates across its various forums. What does it mean and imply that this field is called ‘cultural studies’ and not ‘social studies’ or ‘critical studies’? How can plurality be combined with coherence, contextualization with textual interpretations, and sharp critique with dialogical openness? What kinds of interdisciplinary combinations are preferable, and to which purposes? There is a need to problematize and revise its own shortcomings in these respects, but also to make its unique contributions visible and to improve and refine its communicative and emancipatory practices. The gains must be made visible of applying a double focus of acting subjects interacting with texts and in contexts; of humanities and social sciences; of meaning making and materiality. Academic practices in social science and humanities scholarship must continuously be strengthened and thus made sustainable and resilient in face of continued fascist attacks. Cultural studies can contribute to the general defence of academic freedom both by its own inventive exploration of avant-garde practices and by its particular insights into meaning-making practice, interpreting textual formations, situating them in social contexts and empowering collective agential subjectivity.
(B) Second, cultural studies actors today need to join forces on high alert, responding much faster and louder than hitherto to the increasing number of cases where cultural studies itself or other research fields are in danger of being regulated by political or religious authorities, or even closed down under the pretence of protecting national values. It must be made public how totalitarian regimes make critical academic work difficult or even impossible in Poland, Hungary, Turkey, Russia and China, and how fact-refusing fundamentalist nationalists in North and Latin America and Western Europe are also demanding similar measures. International and interdisciplinary cooperation is needed to go against any further undermining of academic freedom. All collective agencies in the field of cultural studies need to speak up and contribute to existing and emerging initiatives to support colleagues in danger, irrespective of whether they are affiliated with cultural studies or rather identify with other positions. Two such examples are Scholars at Risk (www.scholarsatrisk.org) and the Council for At-Risk Academics (Cara, www.cara.ngo). Universities globally need to build joint resources for commercially and politically independent communication of humanities and social science knowledge, in cooperation rather than competition with each other, and based on collaboration between scholars and communicators. With its accumulated transdisciplinary and global experience and its high level of critical reflexivity, cultural studies has a particular responsibility to step forward and take action for sustainable and resilient academic knowledge production.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.