1/26 Discussion Questions

 1) I, like many of my peers by the looks of the posts before me, was struck by Giroux et al.'s arguments surrounding Cultural Studies and the constraints placed on knowledge production by the academy and disciplines within it. I was particularly interested in their discussion surrounding "interdisciplinary" programs within the academy, such as American Studies or Gender/Women's Studies. They note that, although these departments were constructed because of the "sense that the most important issues were being lost in the cracks between the rigid boundaries of the disciplines," they tend to either be radical and resisting of these disciplines, which discredits them in the academy, or they tend to lose their radical edge in order to become more successful and "legitimate" within the academy. I think these are still concerns for people who study within these interdisciplinary programs, and so my question is if this paradox can be remedied, and if it can be, how do we go about doing so? Is the only answer to move this work outside of the academy, like Giroux et al. call for at the end of their piece?

2) Hall's article on the two paradigms of cultural studies was also illuminating for me, as it really helped me understand the fundamental differences between the culturalist and structuralist positions in cultural studies. One question I have from this reading is based on the notion of "experience." I am trying to work through my own understanding of experience (which I had always seen as a sort of "ground," much like the culturalist paradigm), but through Hall's explanation of experience as the effect of cultural categories, I think I actually quite lean the other way. My question, then, is how do we understand experience and its relationship to culture? Is it the "ground" where consciousness and social conditions intersect, or can experience really only come as an effect of living through already constructed categories and classifications?