Handel Kashope Wright

From Mental Game to Cultural Praxis: A Cultural Studies Model's Implications for the Future of Sport Psychology

This paper explores the implications of a cultural studies as praxis heuristic “model” for transforming sport psychology. It provides a brief introduction to both cultural studies and sport psychology and discusses a cultural studies intersection with sport studies and sport psychology. Cultural studies, it asserts, provides one of several interrelated trajectories for future work in sport psychology. Issues such as sociocultural identity/identifi cation, agency, equity and justice, and interdisciplinarity—that are marginal if not completely eschewed in traditional sport psychology—are explicitly engaged as central concerns. Taken up through the cultural studies model, sport psychology evolves from an individual focused, quantitative, “apolitical” single discipline into a multiple identifi cation focused, difference sensitive, qualitative friendly and social justice based interdisciplinary praxis.

Cultural studies as praxis: (making) an autobiographical case

This autobiographical essay ‘takes cultural studies personally’, drawing on experience, identity and the personal to indicate how and why the author is proponent of and is working on developing a model of cultural studies as social justice praxis despite the constraints academia in general and of the university as an institution in particular. The paper travels roughly from the author’s student and teacher days in Sierra Leone through his graduate student days in Canada to his current role as university teacher in the USA. He selectively concentrates on his experience as a teacher of literature (and African multi-role utilitarianism), education and cultural studies (using one of his cultural studies courses and students’ questions about the utility of cultural studies as example), his shifting and overlapping racial/ethnic identities (African/black) and the politics of identity, and his thoughts on the place of theory in cultural studies and a black approach to theory (black ambivalent elaboration) as contributory factors. While this account acts in its own way as an argument for conceptualizing cultural studies as praxis, the primary focus is more modestly on my own autobiographical account as a specific case. In fact, an autobiographical approach is employed precisely to be specific and in the attempt to avoid the pitfalls of overgeneralization and the authority of authenticity.

Editorial: Notes on the (Im)Possibility of Articulating Continental African Identity

Esu, do not undo me, Do not falsify the words of my mouth, Do not misguide the movements of my feet, You who translates yesterdays words Into novel utterances, Do not undo me, I bear you sacrifice. (Traditional Oriki Esu, quoted in Gates, 1988, p. 3)

Are we (t)here yet? Qualitative research in education’s profuse and contested present

This essay addresses the topic of the state of qualitative research in education by asserting that qualitative research in education is in quite a state. Drawing heavily on Denzin and Lincoln’s periodization of qualitative research as a guide, it outlines the various competing developments from within and outside that are vying to characterize the current moment and illustrates the difficulty of pinpointing the moment. Arguing for a conception of overlapping moments rather than a neat historical progression, the essay posits that the current period is simultaneously one of overt politicization, epistemological and paradigmatic proliferation, post‐posts (post‐postmodernism, post‐poststructuralism, post‐experimentation) and a new post (postcolonialism), as well as a new or renewed paradigm war. The conclusion drawn is that the current/next moment in qualitative research in education is one of methodological contestation, one that demands either complicity with or resistance to the government‐sanctioned resurgence of the hegemony of positivism.

Cultural Studies and Education: From Birmingham Origin to Glocal Presence

The relationship between cultural studies and the traditional humanities and social science disciplines is a perennial problematic of the field of cultural studies. Wariness bordering on hostility characterized the traditional disciplines’ (especially sociology and literature) reception of the inception of institutionalized cultural studies as an initially interdisciplinary, and soon strongly anti-disciplinary project at Birmingham University, England in the early 1960s. Since then, though its status has evolved, cultural studies has continued to wrestle with the issue of disciplinarity, scrambling to embrace any label (e.g., post-discipline, antidiscipline, etc.) rather than acknowledge that it may have indeed become a discipline (Maton 2002; Maton and Wright 2002a). The fact is that cultural studies has evolved, somewhat ironically, from being anti-disciplinary to becoming something of a discipline itself, albeit a ‘‘reluctant discipline’’ (Bennett 1998) or even a ‘‘hidden discipline’’ (McEwan 2002). The identification of cultural studies as a discipline does not in itself resolve the question of disciplinarity since what is important for cultural studies is not so much whether or not it is a discipline. As Alasuutari (1995, 15) has asserted, for cultural studies ‘‘what is important is the [ongoing] The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 26:73–89, 2004 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Inc. ISSN: 1071-4413 print DOI: 10.1080/10714410490480359

Qualitative researchers on paradigm proliferation in educational research: a question‐and‐answer session as multi‐voiced text

This unconventional essay is the (slightly modified) transcript of the question‐and‐answer period of an AERA conference session on the topic of paradigm proliferation. Through responses to the discussant’s prepared questions and audience members’ comments and questions, each panelist extends and defends the ideas put forward in her or his paper and responds to the issues raised from the perspectives of the other panelists that go against the grain of their own positions. The result is a dialogical, multi‐voiced text involving three panelists, a discussant and members of the audience. The text provides a vicarious glimpse into one instance of a group’s dynamic engagement of the topic of paradigm proliferation.

Does Hlebowitsh Improve on Curriculum History? Reading a Rereading for Its Political Purpose and Implications

This article is an invited response to Peter Hlebowitsh’s stimulating revisionist article, “Generational Ideas in Curriculum: A Historical Triangulation.” In my response, I resist the seductively simple “veracity approach” of checking the facts, scrutinizing and evaluating each of the author’s arguments with the goal of declaring Hlebowitsh truthful and right (and the rest of the curriculum theory field wrong and in need or correction), or vice versa. Instead, without eschewing veracity completely, I attempt to address the related and somewhat larger issues of the purpose and significance of Hlebowitsh’s text. In other words, I concentrate on the politics of the text and attempt to answer questions such as the following: What are the politics of the author? What is the context of this exercise in historical revision (in terms of the author’s work and in terms of the backdrop of the politics of curriculum theorizing)? Is the revision meant to expand and multiply interpretations of curriculum history, or

Cultural studies and critical literacies

This article introduces a special issue on the topic of ‘Cultural Studies and Critical Literacies’. The collection of articles is related to the central theme of the inaugural Summer Institute of the Association for Cultural Studies: to explore the implications of studying literacy by combining perspectives from cultural studies and (critical) literacy studies. Furthermore, with this issue we want to map current trends in cultural studies by sharing and extending some of the discussions that took place at the Institute with the larger cultural studies community. In this introductory article, we will start by revisiting some of the work done at the intersection of literacy studies and cultural studies to set the scene for our collection of articles that focuses on different contemporary ‘uses’ of literacy.

Editorial Statement: African Cultural Studies

In many of the impressive cultural analyses emanating from South Africa and reaching us in foreign political skies, there is an implicit assumption that the founding moment of cultural studies in South Africa is the same as that which founded British Cultural Studies . . . . What is even more astonishing, is the assumption that cultural studies in South Africa is merely the continuation of English cultural studies on a different historical plane.

Stuart Hall’s relevance for the study of African blackness

In this article I draw on Stuart Hall’s extensive writing on blackness generally, touch on the few instances of him directly addressing Africa and continental African blackness and on what Gayatri Spivak rightly sees as the missed articulation of Africa(ns) and the postcolonial cultural studies project in Hall’s work in order to undertake, à la Hall’s essay on Gramsci’s relevance for the study of race and ethnicity, a brief exercise on Hall’s relevance for the study of continental African blackness. The premise of my arguments is that Hall’s insistence on the importance of both difference and complexity should give us pause about the neat dualism of hybrid, evolving diasporic blackness and originary fixed continental blackness on the one hand and the assumptions of a spatio-temporally seamless homogeneous blackness from the continent to the far reaches of the diaspora on the other. Africa in general, and African blackness in particular, I argue, are in fact rather complex and this ought to be taken up more seriously and rigorously in conceptualizations of blackness and the field of cultural studies. Continued failure to do so, I conclude, has potentially serious consequences for the politics of representation and beyond.