Changing Times, Shifting Contexts: Variations on cultural politics and 'the turn to culture'

Abstract

Members of the Cultural Studies Working Group at Massey University pioneered the development of cultural studies in Aotearoa/New Zealand in the early 1980s. In 2002 the University of Canterbury will offer the first undergraduate degree in Cultural Studies in this country. Roy Shuker’s social history of the cultural studies journal Sites is springboard for reflection on this new initiative and develops his argument that the project of cultural studies shifts across time and is shaped by different institutional contexts. It concludes with attention to the politics of pursuing interdisciplinarity in the context of management interests in ‘disciplining’ academics by disrupting ‘departmentalized’ academic institutions.