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Week 2 Questions

1. In her rebuttal of the “culturally conservative journal,” Butler seems to insist that radical thought can only be articulated in non-ordinary language. I am keen to understand how such an argument will shift if the critique is to come from people who didn’t have generational access to academic knowledge. Can academia sustain gatekeeping and delegitimize work that is more accessible (hooks “Theory as a Liberatory Practice”)? What courtesy will be afforded to such critiques?

2. The essay, “The Need for Cultural Studies” by Henry Giroux et al makes a case against academic disciplines within Social Sciences and Humanities and instead reminds the reader about the role of the resisting intellectual.  Is such a positionality crucial to research, especially if researchers are to be seen as agents, rather than effects of academia? Are these positions contingent on place and identity (Hall 236)? Should “differences in position” be separated from the “informing identity”? (Brunsdon 283)

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