In the Name of Cultural Studies

Lately, as I was pondering over the extent to which Cultural Studies had grown in the last two decades as a scholarly field and alternative educational programme, I asked: What are the pedagogic challenges and institutional changes confronting it as an academic formation? In what ways has Cultural Studies contributed to the re-shaping of a community of critical intellectuals and thinkers? Instead of trying to discuss the condition of reproduction of Cultural Studies in Asia, I would here draw attention more generally to the sustenance of this practice of scholarship in the academic institution as a critical project. In view of the historical, cultural-political challenges now facing Hong Kong, where i still teach, I pose the subject of dissent as an issue to those hoping to inhabit cultural studies as a community of engaged scholars. Whereas Cultural Studies used to offer in multiple forms of critique that had clustered around the articulation of 'dissent' as its intellectual core and scholarly discipline, the production of local cultural discourse broadly speaking did mark some of the controversies and crises people experiences in recent years. As we speak, in what ways has the making and un-making of cultural amid discourses of locality and localism appealed to the younger generations and enabled the transfiguration of public values and power dynamics across borders?