124

SESSIONS J Thursday 11:15–12:45

J1 Framing Critical Youth Studies Chair: Handel Kashope Wright, University of British Columbia, Canada Discussant: Ana Cruz, St. Louis Community College-Meramec, United States

Concepts, Deleuze and Guattari (1994) argue, are never insular and detached but always connect us to other concepts. A concept then is not a “brick” but part of a “tool box.” Following Deleuze (1970), we are taking a “pragmatic approach” on this panel on critical youth studies because, in the words of Massumi (1994, p. 8), our goal is “the invention of concepts that do not add up to a system of belief or an architecture of propositions that you either enter or you don’t, but instead pack a potential in the way a crowbar in a willing hand envelops an energy of prying.” Our aim is to create “an architecture of propositions” that frames critical youth studies, one that is not anxious about the question, “is this youth studies?” but, perhaps more significantly asks, “how and why are we conducting youth studies and what do we do with it?”

Youth as Critical Cultural Theorists Awad Ibrahim, University of Ottawa, Canada

This paper explores Hip-Hop in four corners of the globe. First, I am arguing that the Arab Spring Revolution started with a Hip-Hop song. Second, I am arguing that Hip-Hop single handedly brought the question of race and racialization at the center of public discourse in Brazil. In Japan, I am contending, the Japanese language was introduced to rhymes, which it did not have, thanks to Hip-Hop. In Hong Kong, the Cantonese language was allied with working class and a taboo to speak, but thanks to Hip-Hop, it is now a mainstream language and accepted by most people in Hong Kong. Out of these four cases, I am concluding that youth have become cultural theorists. They are no longer waiting for the academy or political class to make up its minds. They are ‘grammaticalizing’ and theorizing their own lives and thus pushing the boundaries of social phenomena they help create.

Toward the Production of “New Youth, New Times, Liquid Communities” Handel Kashope Wright, University of British Columbia, Canada

This paper introduces a conceptual frame for addressing and contextualizing youth. It eschews “the Stanley Hall hangover”, namely, the single discipline based, common sense concept of developmental life stages (with youth as not quite adult) and other taken-for-

125

granted premises such as nationalism as primary identity; the solidity of place (neighborhood, school, nation) as site of belonging and discrete disciplines as conceptual framework for youth studies. Instead, the paper introduces and employs the cultural studies informed triple pronged concept, “new youth, new times, liquid communities.” Drawing on Bauman’s notion of liquidity and Lipovetsky’s assertion that the present post-postmodernist times of hypermodernity are marked by the reassertion of modernity, the paper outlines what is new and what persists from what is old, including what new and somewhat older theoretical/conceptual frames might contribute to youth studies and our understanding of youth and their temporal and spatial contexts.

J2 Constructing national identities Chair: Ana Gonçalves, Estoril Higher Institute for Tourism and Hotel Studies (ESHTE) and University of Lisbon, Portugal

Negotiation of Hong Kong Identity in the Post-80s Yuen Han Kok, The University of Hong Kong

Hong Kong identity has always been a complicated subject due to its colonial past and ongoing integration with China. Recently, the escalated social and cultural contentions between a group frequently called the Post-80s and the Mainland Chinese have reiterated the identity crisis in Hong Kong. The Post-80s, generally referring to people who were born after 1980, are believed to possess a set of values and worldviews that pose a challenge to the existing understanding of what constitutes Hong Kong identity. Borrowing the ideas from Karl Mannheim, this study adopts a generational perspective to capture the ripples in identity negotiations during the times of heightened social conflicts. Particularly, it examines the perception and meaning attached to the self-identification of the Post-80s generation. From there, the study suggests that there is a dynamic interaction between the generational identity of the Post-80s and their conception of Hong Kong identity.

‘Too European to be Russian, Too Russian to be European’— Tendencies of Development of Modern Ukrainian Culture Anna Kutkina, University of Helsinki, Finland

The cultural heritage of Ukraine is one of a peculiar nature. Being divided between Eastern and Western spheres of socio-political influence, Ukrainian culture amalgamates particularities of two ‘civilizations’— that of the West and the East, and presents a unique case where, defined by geography, cultural differences of a single state become a living mechanism of distinctively diverse civic action. The proposed work will focus on examination of ‘Western-Eastern’ paradigm of Ukrainian culture; in particular, an attempt to explain the origins of socio-political, economic and cultural polarities of modern Ukraine, it will address the process of formation of new socio-cultural reality and its key traits. Specifically, attention will be paid to comparison of linguistic, socio-political and national(-istic) elements that define tendencies of regional development of modern Ukrainian culture.

126

Sweet Dreams of Freedom: Free Labor, Maple Syrup, and the Remaking U.S. National Identity Deirdre Murphy, Culinary Institute of America, United States

By the mid-nineteenth century, maple syrup was a popular sweet sauce in the United States. In the years prior to the Civil War, it became doubly seductive, offering not only the promise of a rich sweetness at the table, but also a virtuous one. For abolitionists, maple syrup was a fit product for national consumption because it was free from the taint of slave labor associated with cane sugar from the Caribbean. In contrast to slave-produced sugar, it was touted as a definitively "American" sweetener made at home by independent farming families whose labor tied them to the land and to their agrarian communities in the Northeast. When maple syrup entered national debates over slavery and labor then, it did so first as an assertion of a republican vision of a small-producer class whose legitimate labor and homey tastes were the foundation of American national identity working its way out of slavery. After the Civil War though, the promise of maple syrup as a mass produced,all-purpose sweetener never panned out; instead, highly refined and sparkling white cane sugar claimed that place in the national market. In the rapidly industrializing economy of the late nineteenth century, maple syrup was no longer relevant as a rejection of slavery. Instead, and as it was marketed, it transformed into a sweetly respite from the mechanization of labor and society. Abiding as a classic component of a distinctly “American” diet, it maintained, suspended within its amber depths, the idealized and nostalgic vision of the independent citizen laborer. Away from the harsh grind of machines, its presence on the table signaled, all Americans could work comfortably to taste the sweet life.

J3 Aspects on documents and documentaries Chair: Laura Saarenmaa, University of Tampere, Finland

Documenting the past through road movie conventions Tommi Römpötti, University of Turku, Finland

The paper discusses the use of road movie conventions in the documentary Finnish Blood, Swedish Heart (2012) by Mika Ronkainen. The narrative of the film, chronicling a Finnish father and son driving together from Finland to their past in Sweden, is analyzed by focusing the role of the car and the change of objective and subjective point of views in narration, especially as pertains to questions of memory. The drive through private memories towards new kind of understanding of the past is framed by performances of vintage immigration songs of the 1970s. Reflecting on Katie Mills’ (2006) arguments on the ways road genre makes identity transformations possible and Miriam Hansen’s (2010) thoughts on vernacular modernism and transnational cinema, the paper explores the ways the road movie challenges the boundaries between local and global, documentary and fiction, and at the same time is able to reunite the generations.

Documentary Film Festivals & Community Building(s) Marlo Edwards, Okanagan College, Canada

My current research considers the social, political, and pedagogical functions of documentary film festivals. Using the Canadian Travelling World Community Film Festival as a case study, I will argue that the film festival as an event is not just about content: it’s a

127

platform/meeting space that is physical, intellectual, and creative. Building on my experience as a festival organizer, on film festival studies research by David Whiteman & Dina Iordanova, and on the work of Henry Giroux, I will specifically discuss the film festival’s function as a bridge between public and private realms. My ultimate goal in this is to better understand film festivals as a cultural practice, as well as to reflect upon the role such events might play in helping academics build coalitions that can keep our pedagogical work and our institutions grounded in the communities we inhabit.

Giving ‘Em Hell: Masculine Identity and ‘Crisis’ in the American ‘True Adventure’ Pulps of the 1950s and 1960s Bill Osgerby, London Metropolitan University, United Kingdom

This paper examines the rise of men’s “true adventure” pulp magazines in postwar America. From the 1940s to the mid-1960s, titles such as Man’s Life, Stag, Men Today, Action for Men and Rugged Men offered a cocktail of melodrama, brutality and lurid sleaze in fiction and features dealing with combat, crime-fighting, hunting, exploration and sport. The paper relates these texts to the profound shifts in gendered identities that characterised the period, and argues that the “true adventure” pulps were constituent in a broadly perceived “crisis” in American manhood. Beneath these magazines’ blustering claims to an exaggerated form of robust and virile manhood, it is argued, there lurked a sense of profound alarm that the pace and trajectory of social change was leading to a “feminization” of traditional masculine ideals; the “true adventure” pulps representing one (particularly misogynistic and racist) facet to wider social anxieties about the “dissolution” of American masculinity.

The Playboy Interview: Showcase Opportunity for Politicians Laura Saarenmaa, University of Tampere, Finland

It is a widely known joke that “Playboy magazine is read for the articles”. However, a substantial amount of political articles and interviews of politicians have indeed been published in Playboy. According to the Playboy historian Russell Miller (1984), Playboy interview was the format through which the magazine established a reputation for punchy social relevance. Through the medium of exhaustingly long question and answer session, the readers of the Playboy were introduced to political ideas and opinions of Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, Fidel Castro, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Yasser Arafat, Jimmy Hoffa, Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos, George McGovern, Jawaharlal Nehru, Lech Walesa and many others. In this paper I discuss the Playboy interview as the showcase opportunity for politicians from 1962 onwards.

J4 The Somatic and the Social: Theoretical and Methodological  Challenges I: Displays of Affect

Chair: Christoffer Kølvraa, Aarhus University, Denmark Contemporary Cultural Studies is increasingly focused on understanding the cultural and the political role of affective/contagious transmissions between bodies and the fluctuating character of social relations and networks between social actors. For this purpose many academics have turned to early sociology (e.g. Tarde and Le Bon), the rhizomatic perspectives of deleuzian philosophy and its ancestors or ANT. The challenge now seems to

128

be twofold: On the one hand to demonstrate and discuss long-term impacts of affective transmissions and mobilization – for instance firm results of empowerment and emancipation (Bacqué and Biewener 2013) or effective forms of political organization based on affective processes; on the other hand to demonstrate how the somatic body as an object of knowledge can actually be investigated by means of thorough methodologies approaches and to grasp how the body in itself can become an instrument in an inventive methodological setup.

Affect and Provocative Politics Christoffer Kølvraa, Aarhus University, Denmark

Extreme political actors (e.g. racist, fascist, anarchist, radical nationalist or religious fundamentalist) are often engaged in what might be called provocative politics; that is in producing statements whose purpose is less to state something believed to be undeniably true, and more to elicit an affective response from potential listeners. In this paper I will argue that approaching such language or performance as provocative politics significantly resets the parameters of the analysis from one concerned with meaning and representation to one which must rather focus on the dynamics of affect and contagion. The interplay between actors in political conflict therefore becomes decipherable as mutual game of challenges, rather than as a struggle for discursive hegemony.

Flight of Fantasy - Dance as affective labour Anu Laukkanen, University of Turku, Finland

In this paper, I will read closely three dance videos by Finnair’s crew members and blog texts concerning these performances in relation to the concept of affective labour. The profession of flight attendant is a classic example of affective labour, where the conscious and unconscious control of appearance and behavior is central. Affective labour is characterized by the importance of body, affectivity and performativity in working life. The Finnair dance performances seem to celebrate spontaneity and the emotional strength of human relationships that dancing can provide, but also they can be seen as a celebration of commercialized joy and spectacular multicultural togetherness. I argue, that work-related dancing is about gendered managing of bodies and affects and creating a creative, playful atmosphere of sharing to customers and employees themselves, but simultaneously dancing may hide conflicts for example between the interests of the employer and the employees.

“Affective labour” of films on climate change Brigitte Hipfl, University of Klagenfurt, Austria

In this presentation I shall approach media as „machines for generating affect“ (Steven Shaviro), thus acting as one of the key players of immaterial labour, which has become the dominant form of production in contemporary global capitalism. I am interested in the “affective labour” of two recent films on climate change, Chasing Ice (2012) and Peak (2012) that will be explored on two interrelated dimensions. Firstly, I will analyze the films as affective maps that do not just represent but perform social relations and structures of feelings. Secondly, I will discuss the attempts to get insights into the affective responses of viewers and the two movies’ potential to support or change the viewer’s sensibilities toward climate change.

129

J5 Social-Self II : Gender representation and practice Chairs: Yeran Kim, Kwangwoon University, Korea & Kyounghwa Yonnie Kim, University of Tokyo, Japan

We may be lonely but cannot be alone, because we are always and already socially connected. This is not only the case in digital networked society. The media history implies that in/dividuals are constituted and constitutive of the selves as social beings in their intra and inter communication with the social. This panel explores how, in the context of Japan – Korea, the human subject is formed and represented as a social being in the process of cultural practice of media, calling for re-building the concept of “self” as affective becoming. East Asian societies like Japan and Korea have seen dramatic social changes in which the development of social media has led to the emergence of networked individualism and new gender culture, while the traditional patriarchal order of gender-division is still strong in society. A variety of ordinary people’s media practices such as the production, distribution and consumption of diverse analogue and digital communication technologies in their everyday lives suggest the significant transformation of Japanese and Korean societies in terms of class, labour and consumption, and gender relations. Wide-ranging cases are presented from the most up-to-date social media practices to historical investigation on already-disappeared media activism. In particular, we aim for the historicization of East Asian media culture, especially Japan and Korea, in the context of the social restructuring of the private/public spheres and political shift in the global emergence of post-modern/post-capitalist/post-industrialism.

Re-definition of Gendered Tastes and Masculine Social Self among Middle-Aged Korean Males Yung-Ho Im, Pusan National University, Republic of Korea

Global economic crisis in recent decades has led to wide-raning premature retirement among mid-career workers in numerous Asian countries. Korea represents one of the traditional 'workaholic' societies where workers, especially males, are socially expected to devote themselves to their careers often at the expense of private life. That generation of Korean males has rarely developed either experience of or managing skills for leisure time: They often have difficulty in finding ways to kill their 'free' time. Furthermore, due to a loss of career-based social connection, the majority of Korean males attempts to adapt to alternative life styles and relations, such as watching television dramas, especially melodrama, with their female family members. In effect, they come to develop a taste for feminine' genres in their television watching, which they have rarely done before. The male audience for melodrama, a typical women's genre according a popular criterion, represents an interesting case for the study of social self. The newly acquired 'feminine' taste apparently undermines the notion of masculine identity among Korean males, who have been accustomed to the predominantly patriarchal Asian culture. Thus, this paper examines how and in what context they accept and defend their 'feminine' preference. In-depth interviews were conducted with seven middle-aged males. While they acknowledge and enjoy their feminine taste, they tend to legitimize and re-contextualize it in ways that may not contradict the common perception of masculinity in their male communities. Consequently, they often demonstrate seemingly contradictory attitudes oscillating between enjoying it and distancing themselves from their pleasure of viewing. Yet, their acknowledgement of feminization hardly extends to an acceptance of being labeled 'feminine' men among Korean male colleagues. They attempt to keep their distance to emotional engagement in television viewing, either through emotional self-censorship or under-valuation of the taste for the genre itself. Finally, they hardly develop their taste for the

130

genre to a sort of active post-viewing practices of fandom. The results have considerable implications for understanding how the melodrama-viewing males keep traversing the boundaries of gender-specific genres, and consequently help re-constitute the traditional notion of masculinity as a part of social self.

The pursuit of happiness or relative deprivation - talks and emotions on South Korean lifestyle blogs Ji-Young Park, Seoul National University, Republic of Korea

Luxury goods, or vacations in an extravagant resort are no longer the privileges of the rich. Anyone can visit lifestyle blogs to take the pleasure of indulging in images of food, clothing and gadgets on display. Especially, what they call, “luxury blogs” has become a new way for women to peep and learn about the more lavish lives than their own. In South Korea, “luxury blogs”, which display luxurious consumption and leisure have garnered the attention especially from women internet users. They frequently read the blogs and share their feelings on the luxurious lifestyles on display with other users. What are the pleasures of looking at others’ way of lives, especially those that they cannot afford in their real lives? Why can’t they stop reading the “luxury blogs”, even when they feel relatively depraved? How do they manage the discrepancy between the extravagantly represented lifestyles and their own? This paper traces internet talks among frequent women visitors of “luxury blogs” to delve into various feelings they get and share. It analyzes discourses on “luxury blogs” circulating in South Korean internet bulletin boards for women, in order to examine their responses to experienced material differences. After looking into how they interpret the experiences of reading the blogs and further express specific emotions, this study aims to find out the emotional effects of social media representations of lifestyles. Furthermore, it intends to reveal how the mediated experiences of the others’ happiness affect how the women construct and refashion themselves as gendered, classed and (non) emotional subjects.

J6 Populism as movement and rhetoric I: Intersectional  approaches

Chair: Tuija Saresma, University of Jyväskylä, Finland Discussant: Urpo Kovala, University of Jyväskylä, Finland

Rapid social change, multicultural challenges, social inequality, and the way different kinds of threat are disseminated by the media for public imagination, have given rise to populist protests and appeals to cultural values usually combining anti-elite and anti-immigrant nationalism with nationally and locally bounded demands of social justice. Populism as a gendered issue is approached here intersectionally, as issues of gender are often intertwined with issues of ethnicity, class, nation, and religion. This is especially pertinent in connection with a phenomenon such as populism, which in its own makeup brings together very different kinds of grievance and resistance, and also constructs its “other” in such intersecting ways. Intersectionality as an approach can draw attention to the ways that “non-gender” issues within a populist movement or rhetoric affect the construction of gender in oppressive or empowering ways – or as “abusive empowerment”, as the case may be. On the other hand, different views of gender can be questioned as to their role in the construction of some other dimension in populist discourse. Inherent in populist discourse is

131

a tension between equality (strongly felt common issues of any kind) and hierarchy (core issues and leaders), and in this (im)balance gender tends to function as a potent but suppressed issue which an intersectional approach may bring into view.

Economic rationality in the rhetoric of Finnish anti-immigration activism Katariina Mäkinen, University of Helsinki, Finland

Neoliberal reasoning is based on both economic (efficiency) and ethical (self-responsibility) claims (Ong 2006). In this presentation, I detect neoliberal reasoning in the Finnish anti-immigration debate that takes place online and makes use of populist rhetoric. I look at how this debate combines claims of economic rationality to racialized and gendered ethical arguments in a way that fosters both neoliberalism and nationalism. Furthermore, it is my intention to demonstrate how the logic of economic rationality functions in two contradictory ways in the anti-immigration debate: it can enforce white border guard masculinities (Keskinen 2013) and yet it can also lead to fractures in the imagined togetherness of the discussants.

Intersectional representations of Islam in Finnish online discussions on immigration Tuuli Lähdesmäki, University of Jyväskylä, Finland & Tuija Saresma, University of Jyväskylä, Finland

Public discussion on immigration, especially that of its active critics, has recently centered around Islam. Our paper focuses on the representations of Islam in the populist discourse in Finland. We investigate how the populist discourse produces adversarial groups of 'us' and 'others' and analyze the rhetorical means used in demonizing the 'other'. Intersectionality as the critical recognition of hierarchically organized and constantly negotiated identity categories, such as gender, ethnicity, sexuality, social class, and religion, is our key methodological concept in analyzing the complexity of the meaning-making processes in populist discourse. As our case we analyze a talk show 'Islam-ilta' (TV2, 29 October 2013) and the vivid discussion that followed in several blogs and online discussion fora. The analysis will show that it is not only religion, but a broad and changing variety of intersectional differences that are used in juxtaposing 'us' and 'others' and in questioning the need for intercultural encounters.

J7 Politics of participation Chair: Irem Inceoglu, Kadir Has University, Turkey

'Politics' under (de)construction? – Young people negotiating 'the political' in mediatized everyday lives Merle-Marie Kruse, University of Bremen, Germany

This paper reflects on young people’s negotiations of 'the political' in contemporary media cultures, drawing on concepts from mediatization theory, current theorizing of 'the political' as well as theories of media practices and subjectivation. The analytical framework

132

developed from these concepts (a) re-articulates the notion of 'the political' by challenging dichotomies such as 'public vs. private, 'politics vs. Culture', and 'information vs. Entertainment', and (b) considers the whole spectrum of young people’s media practices instead of limiting the inquiry to a single medium. The main focus of this paper is to discuss the challenges and benefits of such a framework by referring to qualitative research among 14 to 17 year-olds in Northern Germany. First results underscore the multifaceted ways in which young people construct and relate to 'the political' in their mediatized everyday lives, thus contributing a more differentiated view to present debate on young people’s disenchantment with 'politics'.

Spatial aspects of citizen participation Katja Mäkinen, University of Jyväskylä, Finland

Citizenship has always had links with place, starting from the citizens in an ancient Greek polis voting on the agora. Due to multilevel and complex governance and many other international and sub-national transformation processes, it is not clear any more, what and where ‘the agora’ is. Due to changing contexts of citizenship, participation – a central dimension of citizenship - can be attached to various territorial and administrational layers. Citizens may act in many different frames, and public spheres can be formed around different issues, without following municipal or state borders. In this paper, I am interested in how the participants of the projects funded by the EU- programmes experience participation. The focus is on the connections between place and agency. How does place define, delimit and enable activity and forming of agency? How is power used via spatial aspects and various kinds of demarcations?

Social media and minority language learning Joost de Bruin, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

The social media website eduFrysk integrates material from television, magazines, newspapers and books to form an interactive environment which can be used by people who want to learn Frisian, a minority language spoken in the Dutch province of Fryslân. This presentation will report on a project carried out in cooperation with eduFrysk which evaluates how social media platforms can be used to support languages under threat. Users of eduFrysk were asked to fill out a survey, write blog entries and engage in group discussions about their journeys in learning about Frisian language and culture. This project aims to contribute to the emerging literature on minority language media studies, which generally acknowledges the value of indigenous media for revitalising languages but does not always analyse how this process works at the level of the audience.

133

J8 Plays and places Chair: Giacomo Bottà, University of Helsinki, Finland

Taiwanese Women on the Move: Not Just Fun and Play on Game-Based Electronic Book Chih-Ping Chen, Yuan Ze University, Taiwan

Females prefer traditional games such as non-mental rotation games; on the contrast, males prefer mental rotation games. However, the development of the e-book industry integrated with the digital gaming industry has the potential to present media drama, entertainment, and education market; as well as create new values in contemporary Taiwan. In this age when new and old values intersect and cross, women stand at an overall structural special point. This article attempts to look at cultural confrontation and the impact of new technology has on women’s fun and play. The data was obtained from fieldwork involving 25 females and 25 males in Taiwan. Different types of game-based electronic books attracting women’s fun and play have emerged. Traditional Taiwanese culture influences women’s thoughts and behaviors, and the extent to which patriarchal power intervenes in women’s fun and play vary considerably in this research.

Playing in Ruins: Encounters with ruined cities in video games Emma Fraser, University of Manchester, United Kingdom

This paper utilises approaches from cultural studies, human geography, and media sociology to read representations of the city in video games as spatial texts with a clear relationship to both real and imagined places. This textual space is explored through the image of ruin, with a focus on spaces of decay and the use of ruin-motifs in games such as Fallout, S.T.A.L.K.E.R (series), and Hellgate. As interactive representations of ruin, these spaces – though restricted by the bounds of the ‘ludic space’ in which the game takes place – offer radical experiences of urban environments, and alternative visions of city space. The element of play in such games bears a relationship to resistant urban practices such as urban exploration or the work of Guy Debord and the Situationists – a mode of play which in many ways resembles the unstructured rambling of the gamer who explores the ruined landscape of a city, laid open for investigation.

Building A Past to Create a Future: Washington Irving, Tales of the Alhambra, and a Romantic Republican Vision Beth Forrest, Culinary Institute of America, United States

Umberto Eco, in “Travels in Hyperreality,” traces the American obsession of reconstructing and displaying the past through architecture, which vary from authentic to fake, for purposes either educational or for amusement. America’s premier historian and popular author of the early 19th century, Washington Irving, displays his version of an idealized past through his book, Tales of the Alhambra. Irving’s literary structure of recounting his personal experience of living within the walls of the Alhambra, punctuated with myths and fables set in the same location, served as an example of a romantic, pre-industrial utopia yet also warned of dire consequences if tyranny, corruption and greed were allowed to go unchecked. By recreating and presenting the history of a fallen empire, Irving simultaneously celebrates the nostalgia of a romantic “other” and promotes ideals of republican virtue, to a country whose past had not yet been fully constructed.

134

J9 From the People, For the People, By the People: Disciplinary  politics of Cultural Studies and the Ethnographic Turn

Chair: Juan Tarancon, University of Zaragoza, Spain Discussant: Mikko Lehtonen, Univeristy of Tampere, Finland

Most people would agree that there is something insufferably presumptuous about the attempt of introducing the notion of yet another “turn” in the intellectual project of cultural studies, seen as an ongoing vacillation between something as complicated as a vast and heterogeneous academic field and something so deceivingly simple as the idea of “better knowledge that changes the world.” Haven’t we had enough “turns” already, always and uniquely related to the Parisian fades and fashions, to our, allegedly, quite exquisite theoretical tastes? And to invoke a turn based on the simple and humble group of methods, conventionally considered to be a flagship of some other fields and disciplines, such as cultural anthropology, seems like an unwanted reduction for the project of cultural studies which enjoys the permeability in regards to many possible methodologies and boosting its proud detachment from the pettiness of their rules and requirements. Still, and exactly in order to defend the promise of the title, this panel, organized in two sessions (Positionalities and Voices), will seek to better understand the role of ethnography in contemporary cultural studies and to engage in theorizing it in “progressive” terms. The goal here is to re-visit those research projects within cultural studies that use oral history interviews, participant observation, focus group research, collaborative art practice, and other similar methods, but also, more importantly, to re-invoke the self-imposed task of bettering the world, i.e. “the politics” of Cultural Studies and its, we think, inherent dependency on what is still the ethical promise of the ethnographic encounter, of the extramural intervention and of the progressive subversion. The relevant debates about ethnography in the intellectual project of cultural studies, the project that for decades now obsessively debates its own political and methodological choices, still seem to be exceptionally rare, and occur maybe once in a decade, a fact that remind us how the relative paucity of Cultural Studies as a project still replicate those same hierarchies of centre/periphery that project itself, with autopoietic impetus and pride, has been trying to undermine. Our discussions will try to engage with ethical and political trouble of the methodological stasis, with dangers of the enforced neoliberal post-academic “movement,” and will try to think what is exactly at stake for Cultural Studies practitioners choosing to/not to incorporate ethnographic approaches in their research. Could it be that at stake is the very “better knowledge” production, both visceral and rational, that can happen only and exclusively in the contested and difficult spaces between the departmental offices and the streets/homes, between academic and non-academic forms of relational life-in-culture? In order to imagine new ways to think “political” in cultural studies, and to think it ethnographically, organizers and participants of the panel work with both representational and non-representational research agendas, with both ethnographic texts and affects, to understand articulations of life and the specific potentialities for change – the mutuality and added intensities at work.

The Treasure Out There: Piratical Cultural Studies and the Ethnographic Externality Aljosa Puzar, Yonsei University, Republic of Korea

Following on from the old and valuable agenda of the “theoretically informed ethnography” and the traditions of performative ethnography and auto-ethnography, the presentation will

135

discuss the personal question of what would be the ethically and politically viable ethnographic method for the white and male feminist scholar, coming from the non-metropolitan realms of European “South,” and studying the South Korean gendered figurations. The purpose of such presentation is to try to exemplify the mutually beneficial connection of the affect-based, Deleuzean and generally post-representationalist theoretical turns with the possible turn-towards-ethnography in cultural studies, a connection that necessarily assumes various new forms of being political and offers new action-based outlets for the cultural studies research practice. The interstitial space of ethnographic affection and synchronicity that can be analytically perceived as a methodological and ethical transgression is defended here as the productive piracy of new cultural studies.

“I don’t want to be anonymous”: Agency, Memory and the Imbalances of Power in Ethnographic Cultural Studies Anindya Raychaudhuri, University of St Andrews, United Kingdom

This paper comes out of a project on the cultural memories of the 1947 Indian/Pakistani partition, as part of which I conducted extensive ethnographic/oral history interviews in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and the United Kingdom. Based on the experience of conducting over 120 in-depth interviews, this paper will examine both the individual relationship between ethnographer and participant, and the institutional approaches to ethnography (ethical approval, data protection etc.) using a cultural studies informed analysis of the power dynamic inherent in the collection, analysis and dissemination of ethnographic material. “Doing” ethnographic cultural studies, I argue, requires not just a re-examination of the ways in which we include marginalized voices, but also a critical look at the ways in which the centre of academia serves to perpetuate marginalization through the ways in which the peripheral is appropriated.