Canadian Association of Cultural Studies
Its only about two years old, but the Canadian Association of Cultural Studies held quite the conference at McMaster in Hamilton last week - Culturepoles: City Spaces, Urban Politics & Metropolitan Theory with FutureCities concurrent events and ongoing panels at the Art Gallery of Hamilton (scroll down to “adult programs”). We can’t attend …we… want… webcasts…
And hey! they’re - we’re - online “culturalstudies.ca” even if the papers and abstracts aren’t posted like the Edinburgh “Visual Knowledges” conference managed to do. OK, I agree that the latter had the stronger papers but i’m blown away by the energy and originality at “Mac” and that scent of more to come.
The demographc of cultural studies is changing - now its a few greying 50 year olds and lots of young, untenured faculty in language and communications departments. Fantastic range of papers and excellent to see that various embodiments are well represented as well as texts. Wonderful to see young departments with 600+majors in this area. Laurier, McGill, Concordia, York (prob. the gradmother of them all), Dalhousie, St. Mary’s, Universite de Montreal, I can’t count them all.
Why is cultural studies - as in space and culture important? In its interdisciplinary, and even wreckless, boundary-crashing “trans-” disciplinarity it represents the future of the humanities and liberal arts. Taking on the politically engaged style of 20th century intellectuals, and learning from the social sciences critical understanding of the social construction of facts (note I didn’t say all of reality) produced a new field which does much more that (re-)articulates the traditions of cultures and is responsible to a historical corpus (a kind of conserving approach). Its academic practice is out of the ivory tower and into the town, reflecting on everyday life in the hear and now. That makes the corpus of “great books” relevant and allows historical insights to come alive and mix into the soil of lived places.