Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies 

About: Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies is an academic journal published by SAGE Publishing. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Autoethnography & Narrative. It has an ISSN identifier of 1532-7086. Over the lifetime, 1063 publications have been published receiving 13804 citations. The journal is also known as: Cultural studies, critical methodologies.

Manifesto for Ethnography

Abstract: This is an open manifesto welcoming readers, writers, and researchers Do not think of this manifesto as “a law,” a set of rules to be followed, a collection of recipes to be applied, a system to be adopted In no sense is our aim to construct a grand, systematic, waterproof, “ready-made” theory/methodology counterposed to other scholastic “ready-mades” Instead, we hope that this manifesto will be read as enabling and “sensitizing,” theoretically and methodologically, approaches to lived culture, worldly experiences, and practical sense making That is, we hope this manifesto is “put to work” in helping to produce a wide range of ethnographies, thereby being developed, refined, and criticized without ever being locked up as a given system of thought What is ethnography for us? Most important, it is a family of methods involving direct and sustained social contact with agents and of richly writing up the encounter, respecting, recording, representing at least partly in its own terms the irreducibility of human experience Ethnography is the disciplined and deliberate witness-cum-recording of human events As arguably the first ethnographer Herodotus (1987) said in arguably the first ethnography, The History, “so far it is my eyes, my judgement, and my searching that speaks these words to you” (p 171) “This-ness” and “lived-out-ness” are essential to the ethnographic account: a unique sense of embodied existence and consciousness captured, for instance, in the last line of Gerald Manley Hopkins’s poem “As Kingfishers”: “What I do is me: for that I came” The social body is the site of this experience engaging “a corporeal knowledge that provides a practical comprehension of the world quite different from the act of conscious decoding that is normally designated by the idea of comprehension” (Bourdieu, 1999, p 135) The understanding and representation of experience are then quite central, both empirically and theoretically As William James (1978) said, “Experience, as we know, has ways of boiling over [italics added], and making us correct our

The Wonder of Data

Abstract: The article considers the productive capacity for wonder that resides and radiates in data, or rather in the entangled relation of data-and-researcher. Wonder is not necessarily a safe, comforting, or uncomplicatedly positive affect. It shades into curiosity, horror, fascination, disgust, and monstrosity. But the price paid for the ruin caused—to epistemic certainty or the comforts of a well-wrought coding scheme—is, after Massumi (2002, p. 19), the privilege of a headache. Not the answer to a question, but the astute crafting of a problem and a challenge: what next?

Challenging Neoliberalism's New World Order: The Promise of Critical Pedagogy:

Abstract: Although critical pedagogy has a long and diverse tradition in the United States, its innumerable variations reflect both a shared belief in education as a moral and political practice and a recognition that its value should be judged in terms of how it prepares students to engage in a common struggle for deepening the possibilities of autonomy, critical thought, and a substantive democracy. We believe that critical pedagogy at the current historical moment faces a crisis of enormous proportions. It is a crisis grounded in the now commonsense belief that education should be divorced from politics and that politics should be removed from the imperatives of democracy. At the center of this crisis is a tension between democratic values and market values, between dialogic engagement and rigid authoritarianism. Faith in social amelioration and a sustainable future appears to be in short supply as neoliberal capitalism performs the dual task of using education to train workers for service sector jobs and produce lifelong consumers. At the same time, neoliberalism feeds a growing authoritarianism steeped in religious fundamentalism and jingoistic patriotism encouraging intolerance and hate as it punishes critical thought, especially if it is at odds with the reactionary religious and political agenda pushed by the Bush administration. Increasingly, education appears useful to those who hold power, and issues concerning how public and higher education might contribute to the quality of democratic public life are either ignored or dismissed. Moral outrage and creative energy seem utterly limited in the political sphere, just as any collective struggle to preserve education as a basis for creating critical citizens is rendered defunct within the corporate drive for efficiency, a logic that has inspired bankrupt reform initiatives such as standardization, high-stakes testing, rigid accountability schemes, and privatization. Cornel West (2004) recently argued that we need to analyze those dark forces shutting down democracy but “we also need to be very clear about the vision that lures us toward hope and the sources of that vision” (p. 18). In what follows, we want to recapture the vital role that critical pedagogy might play as

New Empiricisms and New Materialisms Conditions for New Inquiry

Abstract: This article, which introduces this special issue on new empiricisms and new materialisms, focuses on two of the many conditions that enable this new work: first, an ethical imperative to rethink t...

The (Im)Possibilities of Writing the Self-Writing: French Poststructural Theory and Autoethnography

Abstract: Poststructural theories problematize taken-for-granted humanist notions of the subject as capable of self-knowledge and self-articulation while simultaneously providing a rationale for incorporatin...