Comparative Cultural Research: Hong Kong/Western Sydney Exchanges: Learning to experience culture : an exercise in research

The UWS-Lingnan Cultural Research Workshop was subtitled “An exercise in research and collaboration.” The object of much cultural studies research today includes quite inevitably an aspect or instance of “our” contemporary culture, granted that it could be seriously based on historical considerations and problematics. In practice, the concern I might have with an aspect of my culture (certainly in turn a dimension of our culture) could well have started with the need on one’s part to learn about the others, whose experiences constitute so crucially what is regarded in the end as our “common culture”. It is not surprising, therefore, to realize that taking up the exercise one would indeed have to begin with oneself, in accordance with the principle of reflexivity informing all works in Cultural Studies. Specifically our exercise at the Workshop seemed to have started with such a methodological question: “How do I learn about and understand the others as a category of the “unknown”– perhaps even the “unknowable” – supposedly posited as the object and purpose of my investigation, even though I would very much want to pin down that which I am to study as a clear target of research.”