Cary Nelson

Bio: Cary Nelson is an academic researcher from University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. The author has contributed to research in topics: Higher education & Poetry. The author has an hindex of 26, co-authored 104 publications receiving 5828 citations. Previous affiliations of Cary Nelson include Eastern Illinois University.

Higher Education Under Fire: Politics, Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities

Abstract: The contributors to this collection explore why--and how--higher education in America under attack.

Race and the education of desire

Abstract: Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality has been one of the most influential books of the last two decades. It has had an enormous impact on cultural studies and work across many disciplines on gender, sexuality, and the body. Bringing a new set of questions to this key work, Ann Laura Stoler examines volume one of History of Sexuality in an unexplored light. She asks why there has been such a muted engagement with this work among students of colonialism for whom issues of sexuality and power are so essential. Why is the colonial context absent from Foucault's history of a European sexual discourse that for him defined the bourgeois self? In Race and the Education of Desire, Stoler challenges Foucault's tunnel vision of the West and his marginalization of empire. She also argues that this first volume of History of Sexuality contains a suggestive if not studied treatment of race. Drawing on Foucault's little-known 1976 College de France lectures, Stoler addresses his treatment of the relationship between biopower, bourgeois sexuality, and what he identified as "racisms of the state." In this critical and historically grounded analysis based on cultural theory and her own extensive research in Dutch and French colonial archives, Stoler suggests how Foucault's insights have in the past constrained-and in the future may help shape-the ways we trace the genealogies of race. Race and the Education of Desire will revise current notions of the connections between European and colonial historiography and between the European bourgeois order and the colonial treatment of sexuality. Arguing that a history of European nineteenth-century sexuality must also be a history of race, it will change the way we think about Foucault.

Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital

Abstract: Focusing on youth cultures that revolve around dance clubs and raves in Great Britain and the U.S., Sarah Thornton highlights the values of authenticity and hipness and explores the complex hierarchies that emerge within the domain of popular culture. She portrays club cultures as "taste cultures" brought together by micro-media like flyers and listings, transformed into self-conscious "subcultures" by such niche media as the music and style press, and sometimes recast as "movements" with the aid of such mass media as tabloid newspaper front pages. She also traces changes in the recording medium from a marginal entertainment in the 50s to the clubs and raves of the 90s. Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Thornton coins the term "subcultural capital" to make sense of distinctions made by "cool" youth, noting particularly their disparagement of the "mainstream" against which they measure their alternative cultural worth. Well supported with case studies, readable, and innovative, Club Cultures will become a key text in cultural and media studies and in the sociology of culture.

Using Community-Based Participatory Research to Address Health Disparities

Abstract: Community-based participatory research (CBPR) has emerged in the past decades as an alternative research paradigm, which integrates education and social action to improve health and reduce health disparities. More than a set of research methods, CBPR is an orientation to research that focuses on relationships between academic and community partners, with principles of colearning, mutual benefit, and long-term commitment and incorporates community theories, participation, and practices into the research efforts. As CBPR matures, tensions have become recognized that challenge the mutuality of the research relationship, including issues of power, privilege, participation, community consent, racial and/or ethnic discrimination, and the role of research in social change. This article focuses on these challenges as a dynamic and ever-changing context of the researcher-community relationship, provides examples of these paradoxes from work in tribal communities, discusses the evidence that CBPR reduces disparities, and recommends transforming the culture of academia to strengthen collaborative research relationships.

Confession, catharsis, or cure? Rethinking the uses of reflexivity as methodological power in qualitative research

Abstract: Reflexivity is commonly used in qualitative research and has been posited and accepted as a method qualitative researchers can and should use to legitimize, validate, and question research practices and representations. This paper closely examines the role of reflexivity as a methodological tool as it intersects with debates and questions surrounding representation and legitimization in qualitative research, within modernist and postmodernist ideologies, and pays close attention to how reflexivity is being defined and used in present-day research. Specifically, the author identifies and discusses the problematics of four common trends in present-day uses of reflexivity: reflexivity as recognition of self, reflexivity as recognition of other, reflexivity as truth, and reflexivity as transcendence. The author argues for a move away from comfortable uses of reflexivity to what she terms uncomfortable reflexive practices and provides an overview of the work of three authors who practice reflexivities of disco...