It is in the nature of collections such as these that they are very much driven by what can be seen in the rear view mirror. These essays respond to my work in varied ways, some of them personally touching, but all of them interesting, insightful and greatly appreciated. Almost inevitably, they provoke some nostalgia for a period when Australian cultural studies was very much on the rise internationally: the first half of the 1990s, when the idea that there might be culturally specific formations of cultural studies had some novelty in the field, and when Australia was among the most distinctive of these local formations. Not everyone in cultural studies at the time, of course, took such a positive view of the Australian contribution. I remember one British review of my edited collection of Australian cultural and media studies, Nation, Culture, Text (Turner Citation1993) dismissing my ‘triumphalist account’ of Australian cultural studies in the introductory essay with what could only be described as a sneer. Looking back now, I would concede that this was indeed a triumphalist history – or as Toby Miller might more generously describe it, an exercise in ‘gentle nationalism’. In my defence, I would also argue that it spoke of a time when cultural studies in Australia was indeed vibrant, when it was punching well above its weight in the international field of cultural studies, and when it had something distinctive to say. How likely is it, I wonder, that anyone would be tempted to write a similar account of the state of Australian cultural studies in the present conjuncture? With all this nostalgia in play, implicitly seeing that period as a golden age – a transitory or fleeting moment, as Toby describes it – is it the case that we are agreeing that Australian cultural studies is now in decline? In this short afterword, I want to present my personal view on the current condition of cultural studies in Australia; I might also start out by looking at the rear view mirror, but I hope, in the end, to focus on the road ahead.
The institutional configurations within which Australian cultural studies prospered during the 1990s and early 2000s have changed significantly over the last decade – as they have in most places where neoliberal higher education policies have begun to bite. Support for the humanities and social sciences within the higher education sector in Australia has become much more uncertain; the whole sector has become more instrumentally focused upon a professional training agenda; and the behaviour of the conservative government, which was elected in 2013, has clearly emboldened those members of the commentariat who might once have been slightly more restrained in their attacks on academic disciplines with a critical political agenda. After almost a decade of relative quiet on this front, academics in cultural and media studies are once again subject to moral panics in the media about the influence of what (still!) gets labelled as ‘postmodernism’ in our universities (‘Postmodernism! Run! Run for your lives!’). So, the operational environment within our universities is a little more hostile now than it was a decade ago.
That said, this comes after a period in which cultural studies prospered more than most disciplines in the humanities and social sciences; it had no trouble attracting students and it became one of the most successful research fields. Furthermore, most of what I would point to as significant shifts in the condition of cultural studies in Australia today are as much the product of development within the field, as of changes in the policy or institutional environment. The key shifts I have in mind include the declining institutional presence of undergraduate teaching programmes in cultural studies, an interdisciplinary reframing of the cultural studies research agenda around ‘cultural research’, and a geopolitical reorientation of the Australian cultural studies view of the world as it turns away from its initial focus on the UK or Europe, and from the subsequent engagement with the USA, in order to now face more directly towards Asia.
There are fewer freestanding cultural studies teaching programmes in Australia now. As the system has become increasingly market-driven, humanities and social science faculties have become increasingly frantic in their search for degree labels that will attract the interest of high school graduates and their parents. By and large, those offering what look like the best prospects for employment have risen to the top. While there has never been a strong distinction between media and cultural studies in Australia, it is probably the case that media studies has begun to edge out cultural studies as the de facto disciplinary core for programmes in journalism and in media production programmes such as multimedia or television. New degree programmes in creative industries, new media studies, digital media and internet studies have appeared and have been relatively successful in representing themselves as skills-based programmes tailored to the employment market. Cultural studies has lost some of its fashionable cachet among undergraduates to these new programmes; the lure of digital media is an important factor here, but also the expansion of the higher education system over the last decade has resulted in patterns of student choices that appear to be more pragmatic and instrumentalist. That said, there are still large and highly successful undergraduate and graduate programmes in cultural studies that seem entirely secure within their institution and within the student market.
In research, cultural studies has maintained its high standing; it came in as one of the top five disciplines across the whole sector in the last national research assessment exercise, and it continues to secure high levels of funding for cultural studies research projects and fellowships. However, the research field of cultural studies in Australia has also changed significantly over this last decade. There has been the fragmentation I have addressed elsewhere (Turner Citation2011), with the surge of interest in digital media and the creative industries moving into some of the space formerly occupied by cultural studies. A more positive development, from my point of view, is the take-up of the label ‘cultural research’ which has effectively operated as a means of extending the purchase of cultural studies approaches. That label was initially attached to a government-funded, interdisciplinary research network that I convened between 2004 and 2011. (I should point out that I am not claiming the impact of this network as a personal achievement – it had 75 members, including most of those led Australian cultural studies at the time, and most who lead it now.) The ARC Cultural Research Network brought together researchers from a range of disciplines – including cultural geography, cultural anthropology, cultural history, and cultural studies – that shared an interest in culture as their central problematic. While it was cultural studies that provided the shared language which enabled conversations to occur, the network did not attempt to fold all these approaches back into cultural studies. Rather, it set a varied and broadly based interdisciplinary agenda of topics and methodologies for cultural studies-informed research. Through its development of this agenda, cultural studies, for many who work in the humanities and the social sciences now, has played an enabling interdisciplinary role – bringing people and approaches together around common interests and objectives. The result, perhaps, is a slight dilution of the cultural studies project, but this is balanced, in my view, against the benefits that come from the extension of its purchase and its intellectual reach – something I experienced personally myself in my collaboration with Anna Cristina Pertierra (Pertierra and Turner Citation2013). While this development has occurred, cultural studies’ hard-won reputation as a leading field of research and enquiry has remained intact, and along the way, the amount of collaborative cross-disciplinary research in the broad field of cultural and media studies has expanded dramatically.
What is most interesting about this latter development, is where it is occurring. While there has been a lot of cultural research on Australian subjects, involving collaboration in particular between cultural geographers, cultural historians and cultural studies researchers, the last decade has seen an increasing engagement with researchers in Asia. An example would be the forthcoming book, Telemodernities, on lifestyle television and modernity in Asia, written by Tania Lewis, Fran Martin and Wanning Sun – who have records of collaborative work in India, Taiwan and China, respectively. Teams of researchers based in Australia connecting with researchers in Asia, which is turning into a powerhouse of cultural studies activity, are becoming relatively common. Stuart Cunningham's research centre at QUT was one of the earliest proponents of this sort of organized intellectual exchange through, in particular, the efforts of Michael Keane. Also, there has been the significant ripple effect from Meaghan Morris's 12 years as professor of cultural studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. Meaghan's work there brought quite a number of Australians, including myself, into much more direct and productive engagement with Asian cultural studies researchers than had occurred before. In my case, it was my involvement with Meaghan's staff and students which led to the development of an Asian strand in a large television project I led over 2006–2011 and which has resulted in two books published in collaboration with Jinna Tay (Turner and Tay Citation2009, Tay and Turner Citation2015). Australian cultural studies, in general, now seems more interested in engaging with, and researching in, Asia than Europe or the USA. That is a major change for a field which was initially, overwhelmingly, oriented towards French critical theory or British cultural studies and was dutifully observant of, if not entirely convinced about, American cultural studies (‘not political enough’ was the standard complaint). Mind you, as a warning to the limits of generalizations, Tony Bennett's contribution to this collection makes a distinctive argument for the revisiting of a major tradition of American anthropology as we revise the prehistories of cultural studies. That said, the diverse national and regional contexts in Asia that have fed into the InterAsia project are emerging as exciting testing grounds for the application of cultural studies ideas, raising new challenges for theory and for research. Australian cultural studies seems to be embracing those challenges enthusiastically.
On the downside of this, it may well be true, as Frances Bonner argues in her essay in this issue, that the increased commitment to engaging with international researchers has tended to leave some important Australian issues unexamined. That tension has been around for quite some time, as a direct consequence of Australian-based researchers achieving some international prominence and shifting their attention towards international or transnational debates. It is also the case that the motivations Toby Miller describes as cultural nationalism have declined in relevance for Australian cultural studies; I doubt whether many of the current generation of early career researchers would orient their work in that way with anything like the intensity that I did. Perhaps it is simply no longer necessary, and that battle has been won: contemporary Australian cultural studies seems uncomplicatedly confident of its status, and disinterested in imagining itself as a colonial formation. Nonetheless, vestiges of the cultural nationalist impulse survive in what has now become a standard, indeed possibly constitutive, ethico-political orientation for the field in Australia – the routine insistence on the specificity of its location, and on the strategic centrality of historicizing and properly contextualizing cultural studies research wherever it occurs.
If this, then, is what Australian cultural studies has become, its future as a field of research – particularly, in its engagement with Asia – looks at least as exciting, and certainly as distinctive, as what has gone before. On the one hand, Meaghan Morris's wonderful contribution to this collection demonstrates that there are still rich and effective ways of performing the located-ness of Australian cultural studies and, on the other hand, there is a new generation of rising stars who are highly active in international debates – particularly around new media, digital media and mobile media. Australian researchers have become more regular presences in the big international conferences as a consequence of their success in securing funding, and as a result of the development of a small number of research centres in the field which take the dissemination of their research extremely seriously. The institutional stability of cultural studies teaching programmes and research centres is less secure as it is much more dependent not only upon government policy and funding settings, but also upon the politics of funding within individual institutions. As John Byron's essay in this volume indicates, the task of maintaining the gains made within a changing policy environment is not for the faint-hearted, while the task of managing the politics of a cultural studies’ presence within particular institutions involves some skills that cultural studies cannot be guaranteed to provide. Melissa Gregg makes the point, in her essay, that finding ways to build successful units within these institutions, even once funding has been secured, is also a daunting task involving not only academic, but also management, skills. There remains a great deal of potential, however, in cultural studies as a teaching programme in the present conjuncture. Some danger, I admit, lies in what has become a worrying trend towards the casualization of the academic workforce across the sector in Australia, and particularly in the humanities disciplines. If that trend continues or, worse, accelerates, it will suck the life out of our field of study, but the problem is becoming more widely recognized as one that needs to be addressed. In terms of the content and approach of our teaching programmes, as I have argued in What's Become of Cultural Studies? (Turner Citation2012), there is a lot that can be done to return the teaching of cultural studies in undergraduate programmes to the levels of excitement it generated initially – in Australia, and elsewhere. If that challenge is taken up, and if universities do provide genuine and continuing employment opportunities for this next generation of cultural studies teachers and scholars, there is reason to expect more from the undergraduate teaching programmes in cultural studies in Australia.
Let me conclude by thanking all of the contributors to this special issue for their generosity, for the quality of their contributions, and for their friendship over what is, in some cases, a great many years. I also would like to thank the stellar quartet of my former CCCS colleagues: Gerard Goggin, who conceived the project, and Anna Cristina Pertierra, Mark Andrejevic and Melissa Gregg, who shared the editorial tasks in bringing the idea to fruition. It is a wonderful thing you have given me. And, finally, let me thank another of my old friends, Larry Grossberg, for devoting an issue of this great journal to this purpose; I am truly grateful.
Notes on Contributor
Graeme Turner is Emeritus Professor in Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland. His most recent publications include (with Anna Pertierra) Locating Television (2013), and he is currently working on a book for Routledge called Reinventing the Media.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
References
- Pertierra, A.C. & Turner, G. (2013) Locating Television: Zones of Consumption, London, Routledge.
- Tay, J. & Turner, G. eds. (2015) Television Histories in Asia, London, Routledge.
- Turner, G. ed. (1993) Nation, Culture, Text: Australian Cultural and Media Studies, London, Routledge.
- Turner, G. (2011) ‘Surrendering the space: convergence culture, cultural studies and the curriculum’, Cultural Studies, vol. 25, no. 4–5, pp. 685–699.
- Turner, G. (2012) What’s Become of Cultural Studies, London, Sage.
- Turner, G. & Tay, J. eds. (2009) Television Studies after TV: Understanding Television in the Post-broadcast Era, London and New York, NY, Routledge.