Robert George Garbutt

A Scholarly Affair: Activating Cultural Studies

The articles in this special issue, ‘‘A Scholarly Affair: Activating Cultural Studies,’’ take their name from the title of the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia 2010 Conference. Each article was a response to that theme, which aimed to focus on the potential that cultural studies affords as an interdisciplinary space for reflexive, critical, and empirically based research on education, pedagogy, and social justice. As Susan Giroux (2010) and Norman Denzin (2009) have recently argued, the work of the scholar is to subject structures of power, knowledge, and practice to critical scrutiny, work that Paul Gilroy (2000, 115) has referred to as ‘‘principled exposure.’’ The work of the scholar is especially charged in an ethical sense, and particularly salient and sobering when recalling Toni Morrison’s important insight that ‘‘racism is a scholarly affair’’ (Australian Broadcasting Corporation 1998). The inherent tension about what a scholar does—and what is expected of and from them in the modern university—goes to the heart and relevance of cultural studies scholarship. Given the present instrumentalized and corporate university environment with its dominant values of standardization and emphasis on an audit-based culture, there is a compelling and urgent need to re-imagine the space and place of the contemporary scholar and their role in society. In the age of Barack Obama and Julia Gillard (Australia’s first female Prime Minister), cultural studies is a discipline that can uniquely respond to the pull of the relevant (which is the basis of the humanities), the imperatives of socially inclusive practices, and communities of engagement. In doing so it needs, as Catherine Burnheim (2008, 121) puts it, to go ‘‘beyond corporatism into the wilds of the knowledge economy.’’ In this sense, cultural studies pedagogy and cultural studies scholarship are well placed in the ‘‘knowledge economy’’ because they question authority and power wherever knowledge is being produced. Cultural studies, therefore, offers a scholarship of pedagogy that is activated by ethical imperatives and concerns. Each of the authors in this special issue of The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies responds to this set of concerns by turning their critical The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 34:3–7, 2012 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1071-4413 print=1556-3022 online DOI: 10.1080/10714413.2012.643723

Rear-view mirror: vision, time, modernity and the Anthropocene*

Abstract The rear-view mirror is a metaphoric favourite in popular culture. This exploratory essay positions the rear-view mirror as, predominantly, a quintessentially modern device for reimagining the past and its relationship to the present and future. Combined with that icon of modern economies, the motorcar, it gives a sense of a paved journey towards the future while from the driver’s seat allowing a framed, receding view of the past. With distance that past can be critically held: ‘it now makes sense’. This sensemaking relies upon a spatial rendering of time that makes past, present and future concrete. However, this dominant metaphor of the rear-view mirror in popular culture is supplemented by less certain uses: it can also evoke the uncanny; bring spectres from the past into the present; or heighten our enmeshment with structural power. This essay explores this terrain of the rear-view mirror in examples from radio, song, music video and film, and then questions the efficacy of the metaphor in the anthropocene. The rear-view mirror, then, is an entry point for considering our engagement with the past, present and future, and how and where is our gaze directed and for whom.

A scholarly affair: activating cultural studies in the wilds of the knowledge economy

This paper reflects on the conceptual framework of the CSAA 2010 conference, which was focused on the theme of ‘a scholarly affair.’ The argument posed is that cultural studies scholars have an ongoing concern for the difficulties, complexities, challenges, limitations as well as critical, creative and clarifying possibilities bound up in the very institutional and everyday contexts of knowledge and cultural production in which they live, work and play. An overview is given of how contributions in this special section of Continuum investigate diverse sites, theories, issues and methodologies that respond to this concern.