East Asian pop culture and the trajectory of Asian consumption

This article focuses on Chua Beng Huat’s work on the East Asian pop culture that became more prominent in East and Southeast Asia from the 1990s, when the circulation of multilingual and multi-format pop culture started to exceed linguistic, ethnic and national boundaries. It argues that Chua’s work indicates that the pop-cultural production and innovation that support the globalisation and regionalisation processes in East Asia need not be national in origin but can hail from different national origins – and this despite the existing political realities of the region and its history of political fractures. Chua Beng Huat cautions, though, that the national popular can also be marshalled to defeat the border-crossing potential of an inter-Asian pop culture. What is the “Asia” imagined or being represented in such cultural production? Chua’s work is also distinctive in that it deals with the political and economic conditions that underpin mainstream pop consumption as a socio-cultural phenomenon, instead of examining consumption as identity politics. The article concludes by noting the significance that Chua as an institutional builder has played in enabling the study of East Asian pop culture in the region.     

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.     

Reception of Stuart Hall in the Korean intellectual field

After Stuart Hall’s death in 2014, Korean newspapers ran detailed obituaries praising him as an influential British intellectual figure. The broad media attention appears to be unusual, given that he maintained a relatively unknown presence in the Korean cultural fields compared with other theorists. This work examines how and in which context Hall’s writings have been cited, or not cited, and emphasized in the Korean cultural studies. The incorporation of Hall’s writings into the resources of the academic field entangled him in scholarly rituals of parochial citations and applications, resulting in the fragmentation and de-contextualization of Hall’s overall problem. The selective focus on and occasional absence of certain aspects among his intellectual and political legacies may demonstrate how imported British cultural studies have, or not yet, been indigenized and localized in Korean cultural and political contexts.     

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.     

基于组织学习的图书馆组织结构创新

传统图书馆组织结构存在层次过多、条块分割、系统阻塞等弊端,不利于组织学习,必须进行组织结构创新.文章提出基于组织学习的图书馆组织结构创新的原则和方法.     

文化研究视域中的教学设计研究

文化研究整合了后现代主义、女性主义、后殖民主义等不同的“声音”。从文化研究视域审视教学设计,其重要目的在于跨越批判到行动。本文在追踪国外相关研究的基础上,从概念内涵和对教学设计的实践意义两大方面,对教学设计中的文化研究进行了概要分析,并以女性主义、审美经验论为例展开了相关阐释与论述。     

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.     

We make the road by walking together: New teachers and the collaborative and context-specific appropriation of shared social justice-oriented practices and concepts

This study examined the work of a collaborative group of six new United States-based social studies teachers from the same social justice-oriented teacher education program (SJOTEP). Shared practices and concepts introduced previously in the SJOTEP were developed and appropriated to their classrooms and schools in consideration of the local context, through the collaborative problem-solving process of the group. It is argued that SJOTEPs and TEPs committed to issues of diversity, democracy, inclusion, and/or equity should be collaboration-based, teach a coherent and consistent social justice-focused curriculum, and provide post-graduation collaborative support and research it.