The Itinerary to Explore Headwaters of the New Left’s Cultural Studies

Abstract

The 1980s was a period when the academic current for leisure studies led to the birth of the study of sports history. Japan was not a latecomer in this scholarly stream. More significantly, cultural issues were thought not the part of various phenomena in a society, but the key issues for class integration and class strife. After writing my PhD thesis on Pierce Egan, one of the earliest sport journalists influenced by the idea of early radicals in the nineteenth-century Britain, my attention turned over to the question of why the study of sport history was necessary. There was the academic impact inherited from the New Left’s belief that ‘without understanding the state of people’s culture, class issues are unable to be truly comprehended’. The Initiation of sport journalism had a similar destiny. This consequence appears to be a synchroflash between the early radicals’ concern in popular culture in the nineteenth century and the New Left’s interest in cultural studies in the twentieth century. There was an obvious reason why the radical essayists and contemporary academics had to pay attention to the ‘cultural turn’ with critical thinking in a society.     

Editorial statement

Grounded in the interdisciplinary educational work of Cultural Studies, this paper examines the pedagogical potentials of narrative and performance for the teaching of writing as a mode of public discourse. Guided to address a wide readership, students engage in critical communication aimed at linking self inquiry and narrative discourse to the contextual analysis of the social. Drawing on research findings derived from the undergraduate teaching of cultural criticism as a genre of public writing at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, we look at how educational drama mediates the work of narrative and performative acts involving the young learner-writers and contributes to the shaping of a dialogic mode of address and communication, thus articulating the process and impact of writing to the public-oriented discourse in Cultural Studies education. In light of such acts in critical discourse and imagination targeted at the potential reader, we show how the young writers' own engagement with critical thinking and communication are opened up by drama-in-education adopted in the class, and argue how, in this sense, both writing and its learning process become effective stages in the making of the kind of cultural criticism we want to help students to learn.     

English education in the Indian multi-lingual classroom

In Britain, film studies came on the agenda in the 1970s, when it served as a terrain for the formulation of a critical understanding of how cinema functioned within the broader context of industrial capitalism and the nexus between that and the reshaping of people's habits and lives. However, during that decade, a different agenda was also at work, which, from the early 1980s, began to receive support from neo‐liberal ‘free‐market’ ideologues. Over a period of 30 years, the overall direction of the inquiry into cinema, now firmly sealed into institutional networks, has become such that the critical language of ‘film theory’ has been hollowed out and the industrial agenda of British national television and cinema wrapped around it. Today, with the opening of film studies departments across Asia, the question is not whether outside Britain the language of film studies will became available for instrumentalization by the forces of an expanding Euro‐American capital, but how it will do so. This paper argues that the recovery of film from the bureaucratization of its study and its rediscovery as one of the modalities of modernization require both a framework of analysis that is fully conscious of its own historicity and critical role, and a new topography of cinema.     

Asia Pacific studies in an age of global modernity

This article argues that the end of the Cold War and the attendant globalization of capital call for a reconfiguration of areas, including the Pacific, has played a significant part in the ideological formation of globalization. The resultant formation is ‘global modernity’, representing at once the globalization and the fragmentation of capitalist modernity. The article discusses five intellectual responses to this situation in studies of Asia and the Pacific that propose new configurations to substitute for earlier area studies: civilizations, oceans, diasporas, Asianization of Asia studies, and indigenous studies. It argues that these substitutes themselves are tied in with new formations of power, and should not be taken at face value. Most important is to remain attentive to configurations from the bottom up that are products of struggles against oppression and exploitation.     

重读毛泽东《体育之研究》的科学启发

本文采用文献分析法和历史比较法,研读了毛泽东的《体育之研究》,以求反映２０世纪毛泽东对现代体育的认识和对中西体育文化的态度。     

《山海经》成书时地及作者新探

这里在前人研究成果的基础之上,从对历代学者有关《山海经》的不同看法中,就《山海经》的内容(山川、乐园、主神)、语言特点与考古资料进行了比较研究,最后得出结论:《山海经》巴蜀图语本成书于西周前期,战国初中期,华文本《山海经》由定居蜀地的楚国贵族后裔综合图语本、口头流传,再加入楚地神话以及中原、海外历史地理知识编写而成。     

文化研究语境下的文艺学身份及其重建

文化研究语境下的文艺学身份重建,存在本质主义与反本质主义两种思维方式。本质主义坚持文艺学中的元理论、科学性、经典化;反本质主义重新定义文学性、文学自主性,并在日常生活审美化的语境下反思文艺学的学科性。在重建文艺学的思路上,一派主张在文艺学内部进行调整,拉近与现实的关系,一派主张从文艺学外部重建历史化、地方化的文艺学。     

新商科理念下的高职市场营销专业人才培养策略

现代信息技术与商业深度融合改变了社会生活方式和商业模式,也对高职市场营销专业提出了挑战.新商科要求市场营销专业以行业学院为依托,将市场营销专业定位于复合性人才,以现代信息技术为基础优化课程体系,重新构建以学习为中心的教学模式和实践育人体系,为本地区输送符合新经济发展需要的具有应用能力、应变能力的复合型人才.     

Maternal history of child maltreatment and maternal depression risk in the perinatal period: A longitudinal study

Existing research is limited, with only a few studies considering each single type and multiple types of child maltreatment (CM) as well as multiple assessments of maternal depression throughout the perinatal period. The purpose of the study was to assess each type and accumulative types of CM in relation to the risk of maternal depression throughout the perinatal period. In total, 276 pregnant women were recruited from the prenatal clinic at a general hospital in China. Maternal CM history and depression risk were assessed at late pregnancy, postpartum week 1, and postpartum week 4 using the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ) and Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS). The GEE showed that physical and emotional neglect and multiple types of CM were associated with higher overall depression risk across the perinatal period. The multinomial regression models showed physical neglect and multiple types of CM predicted higher risk of both antepartum and postpartum depression. Emotional and sexual abuse and emotional neglect predicted antepartum depression risk, while none of the three types of CM predicted postpartum depression risk. Physical abuse did not predict antepartum and postpartum depression risk. The findings suggest that maternal history of child physical and emotional neglect play significant roles in perinatal depression risk with physical neglect as the most important predictor. Routine screening for maternal CM history and depression risk in prenatal clinics is needed to aid in the early detection and treatment of depression.     

Working with rules: lived democracy in school

This study focuses on an attempt by a Swedish secondary school teacher to fashion a more participatory education situation by involving his students in deciding the rules for their group work. Five group sessions were video recorded and examined using a conversation–analytic approach. The findings show a complex interplay between democratic and undemocratic elements in the interaction between the teacher and the students, as well as among the students themselves. Throughout the material, the students often reconnected to the democratic discourse of the teacher and employed it for various purposes. This also meant that the students’ work with the assignment was sometimes set aside. However, because it can be assumed that the students pick up new democratic competencies as they partake in the sessions, the teacher's participatory agenda can still be defended. The findings are discussed in relation to previous research.