Cultural Studies in the Classroom and Beyond

Critical Pedagogies and Classroom Strategies

Jaafar Aksikas, Sean Johnson Andrews, Donald Hedrick, Jaafar Aksikas, Sean Johnson Andrews, Donald Hedrick

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030253936
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This edited volume seeks to combine and highlight the theoretical and practical aspects of teaching by exploring and reflecting on the ways in which Cultural Studies is taught and practiced at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, in the US and internationally. Contributors create a space where connections among Cultural Studies practitioners across generations and locations are formed. Because the alliances built by Cultural Studies practitioners in the U.S. and the global north are deeply shaped by the global south/Third World perspectives, this book extends an invitation to teachers and practitioners in and outside of the US, including those who may offer a transnational perspective on teaching and practicing Cultural Studies.This volume promises to be a trailblazing collection of first-rate essays by leading and emerging figures in the field of Cultural Studies.

Part IPedagogy and Teaching in Cultural Studies: Critical Groundings

© The Author(s) 2019

J. Aksikas et al. (eds.)Cultural Studies in the Classroom and Beyondhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25393-6_2

Begin Abstract

What Did You Learn in School Today? Cultural Studies as Pedagogy

Lawrence Grossberg¹

(1)

University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

Lawrence Grossberg

Email: [email protected]

I am deeply grateful to many of my students who have lovingly forced me to think about my own pedagogy. Most recently, I have to acknowledge how much I have learned from Andrew Davis and Megan M. Wood, whose commitment and intellectual rigor have pushed me further. I want to thank Paul Gilroy for generously sharing his forthcoming essay on Stuart Hall and for many conversations, and Heather Menefee for bringing John Trudell’s piece to my attention. I also want to thank Ted Striphas, Jaafar Aksikas, and John Pickles for invaluable criticisms. Finally, I owe a debt I can never repay to Henry Giroux, whose political passion and insight have always made me think about the pedagogy of politics and the politics of pedagogy.

End Abstract

I have devoted my adult life to teaching, more particularly to teaching cultural studies. As much as my passion for cultural studies involves a faith that better ideas, better knowledge, and better stories matter, that they are invaluable to any political project for social change, it also involves a deeply felt recognition that cultural studies is, at its heart, a pedagogical project.

I have always known that teaching is central to cultural studies, not only in the narrow sense of the institutional practices of the classroom, but in the broad sense of pedagogy as using the resources of thinking to change the ways people (including ourselves) understand and act in the world. The heart and soul of cultural studies have always been defined by the ways pedagogies enable us to articulate thinking and socio-political change—in classrooms, the arts, popular cultures, and mass media,¹ in all sorts of conversations, intimate, institutional, and public, and in whatever media are available and promising to us. If the very possibilities of cultural studies have always to be understood conjuncturally, then the conjunctural demands for pedagogy, and moreover, for particular practices of pedagogy, have to be answered, even if always within the limits of the conjuncture. These questions of pedagogy—and education—have to be embraced as an inescapable part of the effort to construct cultural studies in the present moment, but again, the very question of pedagogy—and my own response to it—has to be understood conjuncturally.²

The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS)—my own introduction to cultural studies—was built on a foundation of teaching, in a variety of forms and practices. As has often been remarked, each of the three major founding figures of British cultural studies—Williams, Hoggart, and Hall—began their careers in extra-mural and adult education (although Hall also taught at a secondary modern school). Hall’s first book, The Popular Arts, co-authored with Paddy Whannel³—was written primarily for school teachers. Williams wrote extensively about how his experiences in adult education pushed him into questions of popular culture and communication on the one hand, and into the broader questions of what was to become cultural studies on the other. Hoggart and Hall have similarly acknowledged the profound impact of their pedagogical roots and routes.

CCCS was devoted to teaching. I remember Stuart Hall often talking about the Centre’s responsibly to teachers, especially to colleges (as opposed to universities) and to what were then called polytechnics, and some of the material they produced and seminars they organized were directed to teachers in such institutions. Many of those studying/working at the Centre were themselves teachers at such institutions. The Centre maintained the interest and commitment to education throughout its history, and published a number of books directly addressing it: Learning to Labor (1977), Unpopular Education (1981), and Education Limited (1991).

But it went much deeper than that. I think for Stuart Hall, being a political intellectual was intimately and inextricably linked to being a teacher in the broadest sense possible. This link between scholarship and teaching, thinking and pedagogy, is one of the things that makes cultural studies uniquely powerful and appealing. It was the passion generated by the belief that both could be effectively made to matter if and only if they were inseparable that made an extraordinary impression on me (and that inaugurated my own passion for teaching, however often I think I fail) and on the audiences of early cultural studies events (in the US).⁴ And, I have to admit, it was just this unique relation that I had the great fortune to experience in a number of amazing teachers—Jarold Ramsey, Loren Baritz, and Hayden White (none of whom quite knew that I would later understand them as reaching for cultural studies) in my undergraduate years, and Stuart Hall and James W. Carey as my graduate mentors.⁵

The everyday life of the Centre was in fact deeply and intimately involved with teaching as it tried to create new practices for graduate education—new kinds of seminars, new kinds of collective experiences, new forms of institutional practices. The Centre was also involved in some undergraduate teaching early on, where it similarly reached for new possibilities. All these experiments sought to enable, even to invent, new relations between ‘teachers’ and ‘students,’ new forms of authority, new syntheses of rigor and passion, new ways of distributing and acknowledging expertise while still respecting the broad political commitments (because there were a lot of very real and very passionate disagreements as well) that often bound people together. These experiments were usually compromises—among those present in the Centre, and dependent on what the Centre could get away with behind the back of the administration as it were—that satisfied no one completely, but the more important question was: Did they move the work of the Centre forward? Later they tried to extend this experimental attitude to pedagogy into a taught M.A. program and even a more formal undergraduate program. These extensions brought greater administrative scrutiny, limiting what they could do even more, but they never gave up the effort, even long after Hall left, even after the Centre had become a department (and gone through numerous transformations), until it was finally—arbitrarily? politically?—closed in 2002.

I want in my comments here to talk about cultural studies as a pedagogical project and pedagogy as the practice of a particular sort of conversation, one that is always multiple, complex, fluid, and ongoing, but also one that seeks not consensus but a dissensual ‘unity-in-difference,’ one that seeks a better understanding of what’s going on and better stories of how we get out of this place, elucidating the possibilities of forging forms of strategic cooperation aiming to move toward something more humane. But let me be very clear here that I am trying to rearticulate the very concept of conversation into the present conjuncture, and the present political crises. By conversation, I do not mean to assume a process of rational, deliberative, or persuasive relations (although I do not exclude them as tactical efforts) but a more tortuous process of engagement by which we attempt to move people and to move with them, into new forms of community, new forms of political movements. It is a conversation simultaneously intellectual and political (although these are never equivalent or simply corresponding), discursive and embodied, a conversation into which we enter and attempt to contribute something that will move it along, however slightly, and a conversation that will (hopefully) continue beyond us in ways we could not have predicted.

Such a pedagogy need not appear exclusively under the sign of cultural studies, as if it belonged to cultural studies. I think such pedagogies are actively championed by some formations within feminist, anti-racist, antipatriarchal and anti-heterosexist, post- and de-colonialist, environmentalist, et cetera thinking, but such political commitments do not guarantee the kind of pedagogy I am here articulating as and to cultural studies. After elaborating such a pedagogy, I will address its possibilities in the college classroom and the public arena. I will conclude with some thoughts on the state of pedagogy in the current conjuncture.

Cultural Studies as Pedagogy

This is not the place for me to elaborate, once again, my argument that the specificity of cultural studies begins with commitments to complexity, contingency, and contextuality.⁶ I want instead to talk about how such commitments might change the ways we think about pedagogy. And I want to begin by displacing the relation of cultural studies and politics in order to more carefully articulate them. First, although the desire for cultural studies is driven by political concerns in the first instance, and the ‘success’ of cultural studies is partly measured by its ability to open up new possibilities for struggling against the dominant tides of history and power and imagining possible futures, cultural studies has no guaranteed politics attached to it. It is too easy and too common to assume that the politics of cultural studies is guaranteed to follow certain ‘progressive’ values and visions. But if cultural studies is both an intellectual and an educative/pedagogical project, if it in fact recognizes that these are inseparable insofar as they are pedagogical, if it is built on a particular understanding of the nature of political struggle and possibility, such assumed guarantees are unwarranted—and conservative articulations of cultural studies are more than simply possible. This is because the pedagogy of cultural studies is defined by its intellectual project and commitments, albeit always deeply colored by its particular political choices. That being said, my own take-up of cultural studies is shaped by my own oppositional politics and by my own progressive commitments in the present conjuncture.

Second, to the extent that cultural studies is always articulated by and to politics, its politics is always conjunctural and pragmatic; it is not interested in attaching itself to some absolutist vision of the ‘correct’ and ‘pure’ politics. It has become all too easy and all too common to think that teaching cultural studies means educating students to a proper political experience/interpretation/judgment of the world, so that, in the end, teaching cultural studies comes to mean teaching social justice and the critique of capitalism. A cultural studies pedagogy will talk about how such structures and practices of inequality, injustice, et cetera characterize our realities, but that is only the beginning. Cultural studies is committed to being part of political and social change, but only through the mediation of the production of the best knowledge possible, of creating better maps that might open up alternative strategies leading to better futures, and better stories that might speak to people in ways that win them, however slowly and however compromised, to different political positions. That is to say, part of the uniqueness of cultural studies is that it does not presume to have a pre-constituted constituency; rather, it recognizes that politics works precisely by assembling new political constituencies. The differentiation between maps and stories is a tactical and unstable one. Maps tell stories, and stories provide maps. Maps provide the backstories as it were, vital information if we are to understand where we are and how we got here as the foundation for the strategic stories we imagine and tell. But this means, at the very least, finding a way out of the distinction between knowing and sharing/showing, between research and education, for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Cultural Studies, Teaching and Critical Pedagogy: An Introduction
• Part I. Pedagogy and Teaching in Cultural Studies: Critical Groundings
• Part II. Cultural Studies Pedagogies in Practice: In the Classroom and Beyond
• Part III. Cultural Studies Pedagogies in Context: Some Case Studies
• Back Matter