Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies current issue

Introduction: The Evidence of Experience, Cultural Studies, and Personal(ized) Scholarship

Warren, J. T., Berry, K. — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:56:28 PDT

Cultural Studies and the Politics of Representation: Experience {leftrightarrow} Subjectivity {leftrightarrow} Research

Berry, K., Warren, J. T. — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:56:28 PDT

This essay examines Joan W. Scott’s (1991) essay "The Evidence of Experience" in light of cultural studies scholarship that uses personal, experiential evidence, and/or innovative/critical methodologies. The authors argue that the situated, (inter)subjective, and complex nature of this inquiry conscientiously has brought to life Scott’s call for historicizing experience, rather than blindly using it as foundational, and enthusiastically continues doing so to date. In this way, these critical methods already seek to problematize and complicate experience, even as it is used to talk toward and/ or against cultural norms.

Crimes Against Experience

Jones, S. H. — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:56:28 PDT

Scott proposes that literary approaches offer us one way to read how identities are discursively constituted and understood as and of experience. She encourages us to read for and write how histories (personal, political, and social) are constructed and constructive. This article focuses on how difference, knowledge production, and witnessing produce identities as "not something that was always already there simply waiting to be expressed, not something that will always exist in the form it was given." In particular, the author considers her experience as a mother alongside Julia Kristeva’s essay "Stabat Mater," which contrasts Catholic understandings of motherhood and femininity with her own experience of maternity, and Minne Bruce Pratt’s poetry collection Crime Against Nature, which confronts the loss of Pratt’s children following her coming out as a lesbian.

Mothers, Faggots, and Witnessing (Un)Contestable Experience

Adams, T. E. — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:56:28 PDT

In this essay, I make two suggestions about personal experience represented in writing. First, I suggest that this experience can be contested when the conditions and the representation of experience are critiqued rather than the experience itself. Second, I suggest that personal experience represented in writing, for example, an autoethnography, can also be "uncontestable" (Scott, 1991, p. 777). An autoethnography is not a disembodied text. A body, a subject, a vulnerable body and subject, is intertwined with and constituted by this text. As such, it becomes difficult to disentangle an autoethnographic representation from its corresponding, constituted-via-this-representation body and subject, thus making a critique of the text a critique of the life.

Reflecting on the Experience of Injury at Virginia Tech

Brower, J. — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:56:28 PDT

In the aftermath of the killing at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007, a vast amount of media coverage has been dedicated to the personal accounts of those affected by the disaster. Guided by the presumption that a subject’s account of what he or she observes and feels faithfully reflects reality, the uncritical elevation of experience naturalizes accounts of injury produced by the event itself. Framed by Joan W. Scott’s examination of the evidence of experience, I consider how foundational treatments of experience are used to narrate the disaster, effectively leading to its dehistoricization. In response, I propose a reading of the event that considers the question, "What does it means to be injured?" as a starting point for historicizing experience.

Beyond Experience

Pollock, D. — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:56:28 PDT

In response to the essays by Brower, Adams, and Jones in this volume, this essay argues against the ocular-empiricism of eyewitness by which sight authenticates experience and experience authenticates the seeing-self. The logics that tie experiential fundamentalism to identity politics are inherently faulty and potentially regressive. They lock the "I" in a representational chain connecting that‘s what I saw; that‘s what happened; that‘s how things are; that‘s my/the story; that‘s who I am. Following Scott, the essay favors a critical/creative approach that immerses "experience" in political intervention and self-making.

Unspeakable Transgressions: Indigenous Epistemologies, Ethics, and Decolonizing Academy/Inquiry

Moreira, C. — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:56:28 PDT

What does happen, when "history" and "heritage" is nowhere to be found or claimed and granted? Drawing in his own mestiço heritage, the author tells the story of Geraldo in relation to his own one. Who was Geraldo? The intention is to challenge categories of knowledge that also relay in "knowledges" and social constructions, created by mechanisms of colonization even when they are created for the empowerment of the oppressed in many circumstances. The author offers visceral knowledge of growing up as and working with the poor in Brazil, to advance decolonizing discourse that may lead to more inclusive notions of social justice questioning the uncontrolled desire to categorize and control the Other. Through a layered text with a blurred aesthetic format, which mixes life stories and academic scholarship, the author asks: Can these borders, legacies, and injustices be transgressed? Can my body be transgressive as a form of scholarship?

Checking the Box: A Journey Through My Hybrid Identity

Ceisel, C. M. — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:56:29 PDT

"Checking the Box: A Journey Through My Hybrid Identity" is a performance piece, examining the social construction of ethnic identity and the sociopolitical processes that are brought to bear on self-definition and group identification. Deploying autoethnography, this multivocal text explores the historical conditions and political and economic exigencies that have shaped my experience of hybridity—as a multiethnic individual, negotiating my identity in contemporary U.S. society. I map my journey, through competing discourses, histories, and media-generated memories, arriving back at the beginning. Ultimately, the piece seeks to highlight the strategic logic employed by those caught "between" dominant representations and capture the experience of navigating that terrain.

Democracy's Nemesis: The Rise of the Corporate University

Giroux, H. A. — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:56:29 PDT

This essay focuses on how higher education has been reshaped under the influence of a market rationality, however devalued recently, that continues to license out the university as a storefront, reconfigure governance on the model of a discredited business model, reduce faculty to contract labor, and position students largely as customers. Against the increasing corporatization of higher education, the essay calls for reclaiming education as crucial to the project of democratization, educating students to be willing and able to engage the relationship between equality and social justice as fundamental to public life, and provide the conditions for educators to connect their teaching to broader social issues.