Academic

by Megan Turner    |   Issue 3 (2014), Plenaries, Presidential Plenaries, Universities in Question

ABSTRACT     Cultural studies should be a deliberate site of sustained and sustainable struggle.

Cultural studies should be a deliberate site of sustained and sustainable struggle. At a time when our institutions—public and private alike—are increasingly co-opted by corporate interests and neoliberal regimes of power, resistance is not enough. We must go beyond critiquing what exists and imagine and enact new forms of knowledge production and intellectual community that directly challenge the exclusionary binaries through which the university defines itself.
Distinctions between student and professor, academic and non-academic, theory and practice, knowledge-producer and knowledge-consumer—these binaries foreclose possibilities for opening up potentially liberatory educational spaces, for engaging with community-based knowledges and for hacking futures beyond the privatizing logic of the neoliberal state.

So let it be known:

Cultural studies refuses to privilege research that is apolitical, ahistorical, elitist, immaterial, heteronormative, homonormative, generally normative, ostensibly objective, or otherwise invested in the idea of “pure knowledge” (whatever that means). Rather than trying to speak for those on the margins, cultural studies provides a space of intellectual collaboration and genuine dialogue with those communities that have been systematically denied access to the university—working class, queer and differently-abled communities, and communities of color. Instead of defining the “academic” in opposition to the “real world,” cultural studies recognizes that academic work must respond to the “real world” and provide concrete tools for negotiating and understanding the uneven formations of power underlying its structural inequalities.

So let it be known:

Cultural studies is an epistemology of struggle. Knowledge is inseparable from the material and ideological conditions from which it emerges, but those conditions, in turn, are shaped and reinforced by the research produced within the university. By providing critical tools for mapping out existing formations of power, cultural studies speaks to the needs and experiences of our communities. Far from abstract, theory provides a concrete means of resistance and possibility.

So let it be known:

Cultural studies is a weapon for identifying and tearing down institutional formations of power that are racist, elitist, ablest, patriarchal, and homophobic in nature. So I call upon everybody in this room to take up knowledge production as a site of struggle intimately tied to the struggles being waged in the streets and in the workplace, in agricultural fields and in prison cells. Our work begins right here, right now, in spaces like this. Another university is possible.

A video of the 2013 Presidential Plenary is available at https://archive.org/details/CSA13Plenary.
[This article was originally published at http://lateral.culturalstudiesassociation.org/issue3/universities-in-question/turner. A PDF the original version has been archived at https://archive.org/details/Lateral3.]

Author Information

Megan Turner

\Megan Turner is a doctoral candidate in Literature at the University of California, San Diego, where she is writing her dissertation, entitled Sex on Fire: Queering Anarchist Futures in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century US Culture. Exploring the textual strategies used by anarchist groups to mobilize readers and create political communities, Megan approaches counter-hegemonic representation as a practice of literary hacking a means of learning to read and strategically redeploy semiotic, discursive and genre-based codes to create textual spaces that meet the needs of marginalized communities. In particular, her work highlights the imbrication of queer and anarchist politics by engaging with desire and pleasure as central nodes through which state power is both administered and contested. A former HASTAC Scholar and California Humanities Fellow, Megan has served on the CSA Executive Committee and is a current member of the Lateral Design Collective.\