What's become of Australian Cultural Studies

Abstract

This article introduces the special issue of Cultural Studies commemorating and evaluating the contribution of Graeme Turner to the field. This article provides a brief introduction to Turner, his key ideas and what resources they offer for cultural studies today and into the future. In particular, we suggest that Turner's work and legacies needs are bound up with the trajectories of Australian cultural studies – and its place and circulation in international cultural studies.

Keywords:

• Graeme Turner
• Australian cultural studies
• cultural studies
• cultural research
• national
• international

Cultural studies scholars find themselves in an extremely interesting and complicated moment. Displacing its anglophone originary myths, the field of cultural studies has fast internationalized (Abbas and Erni 2005). Despite its anti-disciplinarity skew, it has proven a resilient and flexible formation in many countries. Taken as synonymous with the fatuities of postmodernism – often the byword in public discourse for the decline of the civilized humanities – cultural studies has flourished as a de facto bridge across humanities specializations. Decried for its vacuous theoretical predilections, the rise in cultural research's fortune has seen the discipline forge productive, powerful collaborations with public, private and governmental organizations, and in some countries, even figure in national research policy and priorities. Resilient, even celebratory (in an appropriately sceptical manner) in surmounting these mixed fortunes, cultural studies in the 2010s faces profound challenges and complex new opportunities – that arise from the new politics of culture, everyday life, social experience and power relations. Recurrent questions have been discussed of how, why, for what purpose, where and with whom should cultural studies be advanced? (Grossberg 2010). Cultural studies has always developed with the accompanying strains of its attendant critical self-assessment. In this, one of the leading figures, a trenchant critical intelligence and honest broker, remains Professor Graeme Turner.

Turner's work as a leading scholar of media and cultural studies is well known internationally. His clear voice and deft synthesis have made cultural studies penetrable to the undergraduate novice without ever losing the attention of his contemporaries. But what might be less well known to those who have never worked alongside Turner is that his excellence in areas beyond research and publication has been equally important to the formation of cultural studies as a distinctive discipline within Australia. As a mentor, his ideas and advice have influenced new generations of Australian scholars. As a manager, he has demonstrated ways in which this skill, usually detested by humanities academics, can actually improve the working lives of those around him. As a lobbyist, he has represented the humanities to universities and governments across Australia, with great effect.

This collection of papers aims to capture and reflect upon these broader dimensions of Turner's work and the importance of these dynamics of mentoring, management and institutionalization (Morris and Hjorth 2012, Striphas 1998), as well as specific national and regional conditions, policy and politics for the forms cultural studies takes. The anthology was inspired by an event that was held at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, in August 2012 to mark Turner's retirement. Turner retired from his official position at the University of Queensland in 2012 but remains very active as a researcher, mentor and humanities policy adviser. The commemorative event held at the University of Queensland reflected not only on Turner's substantial record as a scholar but also on the building of Australian cultural studies more generally. Turner's career, blending the ideas, politics and practices of building a new field of study, was representative of many of the qualities that make cultural studies in Australia distinctive. Building on this event, this special issue takes the opportunity of Turner's (non-)retirement to consider the legacies of his work and the project of Australian cultural studies in general – and what these now signify for cultural studies.

The four of us who initiated this project – the three of us, plus Melissa Gregg, who was influential in its early phase – met through our time at Turner's peerless Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies (with the telltale abbreviation CCCS). While the CCCS was frequently referred to as ‘Graeme's Centre’, it is a testament to Turner's approach to fostering research that he himself saw the intellectual productivity of the CCCS as resulting from collaborative mutual support among the resident scholars, while the burdens of securing funding and maintaining political goodwill on behalf of ‘his’ Centre remained his alone. Our idea was that through a critical re-evaluation of Turner's writings, teaching, policy and advocacy, this special issue could also contribute towards the much needed accounting under way of the possibilities, politics, prospects and programmes for advancing cultural studies into the coming decades. This is an endeavour which Turner catalysed with his trenchant What's Become of Cultural Studies (Turner 2012), and to which other distinguished cultural studies figures have contributed. Thus we hope that this collection of papers would serve not only to reflect upon the impact of Turner's work as an individual but also to consider how Australian cultural studies has made contributions to global discussions of media and culture – and what directions and possibilities the antipodean angle offers now.

About Graeme Turner

Born in Sydney on 2 September 1947, Turner took a BA (Hons) in literature at the University of Sydney (1965–1968), then travelled to Canada for his MA (Hons) at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, awarded in 1970. Returning to Australia, from 1971 to 1973, Turner taught at Mitchell College of Advanced Education, in Bathurst, a regional city three hours' drive from Sydney. He returned overseas to study for a Ph.D. in the School of English and American Studies, University of East Anglia, UK, which was awarded in 1977.

Back in Australia, Turner moved to Perth, Western Australia, to teach in the School of English at the Western Australian Institute of Technology, where the humanities were being shaken up by the new ideas in cultural, film and media studies. Here Turner was a key figure in various projects that proved decisive for the formation of a distinctively Australian cultural studies. During the time Turner was there, Perth was home to figures such as John Fiske (Fiske et al. 1987), with whom he collaborated on book projects, as well as other significant figures in the field such as John Hartley and Toby Miller (see Miller's contribution here – Miller 2015; on this period, see also Frow 2007 and King and Turner 2010).

Turner moved to Queensland in 1985 to take up a Senior Lectureship at the Queensland Institute of Technology (which became Queensland University of Technology). In 1989, he moved across town to the University of Queensland to take up an Associate Professorship in the Department of English, assuming a full professorship in 1994. After serving as Head of School, in 1999, with strong support from the Vice Chancellor, he established the CCCS, where post-retirement he continues as Emeritus Professor. Other important relationships with Australia-based cultural studies scholars would flourish in this period – with those in Brisbane such as Stuart Cunningham, Tony Bennett and John Frow (who also moved from Perth to Brisbane to work at the University of Queensland), and also with those circulating through Sydney, such as Meaghan Morris (see Morris 2015), Ien Ang (who also migrated from Perth to the East Coast, founding the Centre for Cultural Research at University of Western Sydney), Elspeth Probyn (after she moved from Canada to properly establish cultural studies at the University of Sydney), and many others.

Through his long, productive and canny career, Turner has contributed to a number of fields but characteristically always with cultural studies as an abiding presence and decisive base. Turner established himself as an important theorist of cinema and film studies (Turner 1988, 2002). He was a pioneer in cultural studies approaches to studying national culture, through his many publications on Australian culture, media and society (Turner 1986, 1993, 1994, Kuna and Turner 1994). A rock musician himself, Turner has made important contributions to contemporary music research (Bennett et al. 1993). Turner is a key figure in television studies, co-author and co-editor of important collections and books. Initially focusing on Australian television (Tulloch and Turner 1989, Turner and Cunningham 2000), Turner became increasingly preoccupied with how to achieve an adequate, genuinely international understanding of contemporary television in its new digital, post-broadcast ecologies (Pertierra and Turner 2013, Sinclair and Turner 2004, Tay et al. 2015; Turner and Tay 2009, 2010). Turner was one of the early movers in celebrity studies (Turner et al. 2000, Turner 2004), which has proven a rich vein of enquiry to provide a critical way into interrogating developments in media and culture such as the turn to reality television, user-generated content, digital platforms and other instances of the ‘demotic turn’ in media and culture (Turner 2010). Elsewhere over many years, Turner has maintained a critical stance and engagement with news, current affairs, talk radio and journalism (Turner 1996, 2005, Turner and Crofts 2007).

Through this wide-ranging intellectual endeavour, Turner has been a consistent mainstay of Australian cultural studies. In turn, Australian cultural studies has been an important force in the international development of cultural studies as a discipline – something represented by the career of the pioneering journal Australian Journal of Cultural Studies, which commenced and was published in Perth (from 1983 to 1987), then was expatriated from 1987 to the present day as Cultural Studies (Frow 2007, Morris 1992).

Alongside his own research on film, television and national culture, Turner established his claims to speak of cultural studies, through his widely read 1990 British Cultural Studies: An Introduction (Turner 1990). As well as providing one of the first systematic accounts of British cultural studies, one was one of the first textbooks in the discipline generally. For Turner himself, it provided an explicit way to work out his own position on, claim to, and, advice for, cultural studies, something he addressed explicitly in the famous 1990 Cultural Studies Now and in the Future conference held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (see Turner 1992a, Turner et al. 1992).

In the early 1990s, especially, there was a nominative and institutionalizing conjuncture for Australian cultural studies, marked by various important discussions of what this might constitute and do (for instance see Ang, 1992, Ang and Hartley 1992, Benterrak et al. 1984, Frow and Morris 1993, Muecke 1992). Turner was a consistent theorist of the relationship of Australian cultural studies and the generativeness and limits of its specificity, as he often put it, against the typical reluctance of gradually internationalizing cultural studies to explicitly locate its various parts (see, for instance, Turner 1992b, Grossberg 1993).

This emphasis on the need to locate cultural studies has been an important, continuing thread in Turner's work up to his latest work on international television, supported by a prestigious Australian Research Council (ARC) Federation Fellowship. The material support for Turner for undertaking large-scale empirical and theoretical work brought together in this Locating Television project was also very much provided by the CCCS.

He built the CCCS into a world-class research centre, especially through his appointment and nurturing of steady flow of talented postdoctoral researchers – something for which he became renowned (see Gregg 2015, in this volume). During this time, he employed 21 researchers on full-time positions: Mark Andrejevic, Melissa Bellanta, Gerard Goggin, Ben Goldsmith, Melissa Gregg, Ramaswami Harindranath, Anita Harris, Gay Hawkins, Sukhmani Khorana, Geert Lovink, Abigail Loxham, Carmen Luke, Mark McLelland, Adrian Mabbott Athique, Anna Pertierra, Morgan Richards, Graham St John, Jinna Tay, Anthea Taylor, Zala Volcic and Kitty van Vuuren. Most of these researchers commenced as postdoctoral fellows, and their time at CCCS proved pivotal to their flourishing as fully fledged scholars pursuing academic careers.

The CCCS was the base for a very significant initiative that leveraged Turner's expertise in mentoring, and greatly fertilized the field, especially through systematically and creatively bringing together Australia's abundance of distinguished cultural studies scholars, with the next generations. This was the Cultural Research Network (CRN; 2004–2009), a national group of top cultural researchers, funded by the ARC, that Turner initiated and led. Genuinely interdisciplinary between cultural studies and adjoining disciplines, including cultural history, cultural geography and cultural anthropology, CRN provided a matrix for stimulating, developing and theorizing a wide range of international visits and exchanges, minor and major projects, many of which have resulted in important studies, contributions to policy and practice, funded projects and major publications.

At the same time as directing CCCS, Turner took on a powerful national role as a voice for the humanities sector – eventually as an influential president of the Australian Academy of Humanities, developing national research policy (e.g. Turner 2008), directly advocating and negotiating with successive education ministers, and earning a place on the Prime Minister's Science, Innovation and Engineering Council (discussed here by Byron 2015).

These are the lineaments of Turner's work, career, style and engagements that deserve to be taken together for reassessment; not just for a Festschrift, rather for the models, concepts, strategies, practical value and resources they offer for thinking about what might become of cultural studies – the pretext of this special issue.

Circulating Australian cultural studies: Graeme Turner's legacies

The six papers that responded to this invitation, each provide a perspective on Turner's legacies and what they portend for larger questions and tendencies in national and international cultural studies.

Meaghan Morris kicks off with a reprise of her unforgettable tribute to Turner at his August 2012 Brisbane send-off. Morris situates Turner's emergence within the flows and contra-flows of cultural studies currents in Australia in the 1980s and 1990s. She characterizes his formative key contribution in this period as being able to:

‘multiply’ Australian hypotheses about national identity by combining a critique of the public uses of nationalism by business heroes pursuing private gain with a positive vision of the democratic and diversifying potential of the media and the public cultural institutions.

Morris points out that Turner continues his fascination with the national, in the subsequent period – as of now – when the national is unmade, and remade, and emphasizes his ability, as he shifts gears into policy and advocacy work, to construct new ideas for the national. Among other things, Morris evokes the remarkable investment and importance Turner accorded teaching, in his version of cultural studies, especially through the popularity, clarity and longevity of his many textbooks.

Toby Miller offers an expansive, global account of Turner's work. Like Morris, he is drawn to the centrality of the national in Turner's work which he suggestively terms ‘gentle nationalism’. Drawing from the theoretical and political traditions of the global south, especially from the ideas of Latin American intellectuals, Miller uses the concept of dependencia to stipulate the precise sense in which Turner comes from the margins – and in doing so draws our awareness, once more, to the core-periphery, colonial relations, that Australian and other forms of cultural studies straddle, take energies from, adapt and refuse. As he unfolds his account, Miller offers an especially helpful overview and characterization of the Australian higher education system, and where it fits internationally – something indispensable for situating Turner's ideas, practices and effects.

Frances Bonner takes up such concerns from a different tack, focusing on the fascinating case of celebrity studies. Here Turner's work, with hers, David Marshall, and other Australian-based scholars, such as Sean Redmond, has directly led the formation of the area of celebrity studies. She notes that Turner has been especially concerned to sheet home the more celebratory, textualist accounts of celebrity to treatments of the industry, economy, format, forms and social functions of celebrity. Bonner's assessment, however, gives pause. She suggests that one:

of the problems posed for an analysis of the state of Australian celebrity studies is that so many of its researchers, most notably Turner, Marshall and Redmond, are leading international scholars in the field. They publish internationally and speak generally about celebrity, never disavowing their location, but only occasionally mentioning matters specifically related to Australia. Even when they do, the point is rarely to talk of national concerns.

This is the fortunate fall of many Australian cultural studies scholars, especially those of us who work on areas – digital technologies and media, for instance – that translate more easily into the circuits of international, global north, academe and publishing. The issue that remains, however, is the uncertain future for work that wishes – or needs to – remain located, or repatriated, as Bonner observes in relation to celebrity studies:

In conjunction with the publishing changes which have led to fewer local monographs and more scholars publishing internationally on internationally recognisable celebrities, the existence of Australian celebrity studies cannot be regarded as secure.

For Bonner, the implications of these changes are not clear-cut, but at the least she finds that ‘integration of celebrity into a broader analysis of Australian culture that characterised the earlier period is certainly less evident’ (Bonner 2015).

With Tony Bennett, we return to the question of national in Turner's work, but reframed from the most fundamental question in cultural studies: how do we understand culture? Bennett notes the lack of considered attention given to culture as a ‘way of life’ in cultural studies, despite the common reflex among many scholars to regard this as the discipline's authorizing concept. Bennett seeks to complicate the genealogies of culture as a concept, by detailed examination of the ‘conceptual prehistories’ of cultural studies, in particular the American anthropological tradition. In contrast to Turner, and much of Australian cultural studies, borrowing and definition against Britain, Bennett considers the US example important for showing ‘the processes involved in adjusting an imported concept of culture to the task of shaping a national culture that was to be defined against the elitist credentials of European humanist culture’. Bennett argues that ‘the American history of the culture concept also speaks directly to the roles that culture has played in Australia's post-war trajectories’ (Bennett 2015).

John Byron offers a compelling account of Turner as national policy advocate, with his forceful and definitive work as President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Byron offers us important insights into the relationships among politics, policy and scholarship practice that have been a constitutive feature of various strands of Australian cultural studies, and that it turned out Turner was especially well placed to finesse. Byron provides the paper of record on this chapter in Australian cultural studies, at the apogee of the discipline's claim to represent the humanities. Byron's account is very much rooted in the Australian context, yet nicely contextualized – with many lessons and resonances for cultural studies, across different national and regional settings.

Melissa Gregg, alumna of Turner's CCCS, grasps the nettle of acknowledging, situating and theorizing his work of management. Noting the reluctance of cultural studies to abide, let alone, credit management, Gregg develops a rich account of the conceptual, strategic, affective, collaborative and bureaucratic work that goes into good cultural studies work-as-management – for which she argues Turner is a truly representative exemplar. As Gregg argues:

As a field, we are challenged by Graeme's legacy to work together to influence the terms of our own management, especially so that no one individual carries the responsibility for the field and its forward momentum … Adhoc professionals turn to each other for support to withstand the turbulent conditions of work in the knowledge industries, to find methods for succeeding in spite of them. We may not all seek to be executives, but collectively we can be effective.

Turner himself has the last word, in this issue at least. He notes the changed institutional configurations of cultural studies in Australian universities, as the peculiar neoliberal policies have sharpened up. In his view, cultural studies research has built an impressive base in Australia in the 2000s marked by productive interdisciplinary collaborations and strong international participation of leading researchers. The new locations of this research have shifted, with Asia being key, generating ‘still rich and effective ways of performing the located-ness of Australian cultural studies’. For Turner, this leaves cultural nationalism as a less likely or necessary position for orienting an intellectual position or career, even if important topics for national politics and audiences still require attention. Finally, Turner returns to teaching, where he sees cultural studies in undergraduate programme as having the opportunity to retain its earlier energy, appeal and relevance.

We are grateful to all six contributors for their excellent papers and willingness to take up the challenge of reflecting on Graeme Turner's body of work – and through this, the trajectories of cultural studies viewed via its antipodean skews. We also wish to thank the reviewers, for the difficult task of commenting on the distinctive papers that such a commemorative anthology generates. There are many issues raised by the special issue that we hope will serve as resources for wider issues and debates in cultural studies internationally. For our part, we wished to close by remarking on just two threads in this conversation.

We note the focus on questions of power relations and their critique, which remain a constant in Turner's work – a fact that continues to position him in relation to developments in the field. If the academic politics surrounding the development of Cultural Studies programmes has sometimes been figured in terms of the academic status of cultural forms, Turner has kept his eye on the underlying social issues this development was meant to serve. In the face of the academic shorthand that all too quickly figures a flipping of the binaries as politically subversive (as if the gesture of gate-crashing the ivory tower by swapping Shakespeare for The Sopranos amounted to sociopolitical empowerment), Turner has kept his eye on the underlying ‘structures of domination’ to which ‘[w]ork in cultural studies has consistently addressed itself’ (1990, p. 5) and has always been canny enough to recognize that the desire to ‘épater la bourgeoisie’ is simply another of the bourgeoisie's own diversions. The point has never been to study popular culture as if were ‘high culture’ (and thereby to tweak the sophisticates), but to recast the study of culture (mass, popular and otherwise) in ways that excavate its social and political functions: to interrogate not just the culture but the society that produced it. This understanding has underwritten both the excitement and energy Turner brought to the development of cultural studies in the Australian context and his concerns regarding subsequent developments that have laid claim to its mantle despite ‘surrendering the core political objectives of cultural studies’ (2012, p. 178). If the academic politics that once resisted the development of the field have transformed significantly, the broader political and societal concerns that cultural studies sought to address remain with us. This persistence contributes to the enduring relevance of the version of cultural studies Turner crafted (and continues to develop).

Finally, across the day's activities in August 2012 which marked Turner's official retirement and inspired this collection of papers, there was a recurring observation of Graeme Turner's working style which we believe is unusual and special even among the very esteemed colleagues with whom he shares the claim to have pioneered the field of Cultural Studies. That is that he puts into everyday practice as a colleague the values of openness, transparency, collaboration and propensity to pleasure which are often held to be valued in the abstract of cultural studies but are not always so easily manifested in the corridors and staff meetings of real-life academia. This particularly valuable quality of Turner's is perhaps best appreciated ‘from below’, by those who have worked under him as a Director and mentor. Not only has Turner always been available for consultation, advice, encouragement or the occasional critique, but also he assures junior colleagues that he finds such exchanges genuinely rewarding. It is precisely this attitude that, we hope, has modelled some future directions for new generations of cultural studies scholars both within Australia and beyond.

Notes on Contributors

Gerard Goggin is Professor of Media and Communications and ARC Future Fellow at the University of Sydney.

Anna Cristina Pertierra is Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Social Analysis at the University of Western Sydney.

Mark Andrejevic is Associate Professor in the Department of Media Studies, Pomona College.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.