2010 Annual conference of the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia

A Scholarly Affair

Byron Bay, NSW

7-9 December 2010

Go to the conference website

Making tracks to Byron Bay...
This conference will be held in Byron Bay from 7-9 December, with a pre-conference postgraduate and ECR day on 6 December. Hosted by Southern Cross University and organised through a team of Cultural Studies, Writing, Media and Visual Arts academics in the School of Arts and Social Sciences, this is the first time the annual CSAA Conference has been held at the most easterly point of Australia.

This conference focuses on the contribution that Cultural Studies makes as an interdisciplinary space for reflexive, critical and empirically based research to the project of higher education, pedagogy and social justice. Susan Giroux and Norman Denzin have recently argued that the work of the scholar is to subject structures of power, knowledge, and practice to critical scrutiny, what Paul Gilroy has referred to as principled exposure. In contrast, it is salient to recall Toni Morrison's view that 'racism is a scholarly affair.' This inherent tension about what a scholar does - and what is expected of/from them - goes to the heart and relevance of Cultural Studies scholarship. Given the present instrumentalised and corporate university environment with its dominant values of standardisation and emphasis on an audit-based culture  - there is a compelling and urgent need to re-imagine the space/place of the contemporary scholar and their role in society. In the age of Obama and Rudd, Cultural Studies, as a discipline that uniquely responds to the pull of the relevant, the imperatives of socially inclusive practices and communities of engagement, needs, as Catherine Burnheim puts it, to go 'beyond corporatism into the wilds of the knowledge economy.'
Some of the key issues which may be considered:

• new qualities of scholarly enquiry
• cultural studies scholarship in the 21st century
• discovering and sustaining ethical space in higher education
• innovative relationships between scholar and community
• sustaining healthy, creative and principled scholarship
• cultural studies as ethical foundation
• relevance scholarship (such as ecocultural studies)
• pedagogy as an affair to remember
• negotiating the audit-based culture
• scholarship on the margins
• scholarship and diversity
• disciplining innovations: TEQSA and ERA
• scholarship and its relationship to discovery
• new media, digital communication and the borderlands of scholarship
• responding to an ethics of scholarship
• socially and culturally inclusive practices
• research/writing as 'ethical intervention'
• new scholarship in listening, voice and participation
• media justice scholarship
• engaging with indigenous and majority-world scholarship
• creative and critical knowledge production
• narrating communities through creative and critical scholarship
• value of non-corporate scholarship

Please note that papers will be accepted for consideration on other topics and themes related to Cultural Studies.

Go to the conference website