Symposium: Media and Cultural Studies @ NTU: 21 years - the past, the present, the future

On Friday 8 February 2013, this year's annual Media and Cultural Studies Symposium takes place. This year's theme celebrates the 21st birthday of media and cultural studies at Nottingham Trent University by exploring the past, the present and the future of media and cultural studies.

While Nottingham Trent University has a long been associated with media, cultural and communication studies (a Communication Studies degree was first established here in the early 1980s), the annual Media & Cultural Studies symposium this year marks the 21^st birthday of the establishment of MCS as a Joint Honours subject in the institution. This was followed four years later (in 1996) by the setting up of a Media & Cultural Studies degree (now the BA in Media). Much has happened in the intervening years, both within the discipline, and within the higher education sector more broadly, both in the UK and beyond. The purpose of the symposium is to reflect on the changes, and continuities, within this period. What can we say about theoretical developments, pedagogical initiatives, new topics of enquiry and/or disappearing fields of study? The symposium will look to consider the history of Media & Cultural Studies, the contours of current debates and challenges, and the problems, issues and potentially new directions of the future.    

    

Some speakers are drawn from past  NTU staff and graduates who are now teaching at other UK universities. These include Professor Roger Bromley (University of Nottingham), Estella Tincknell (University of West of England), Donna Peberdy (Southampton Solent University) and Bob Jeffery (Sheffield Hallam University).However, we're really pleased to welcome Alexander Dhoest (University of Antwerp) who is also joining us as a speaker at the event alongside NTU staff Ben Taylor and Georgia Stone.

The day long event takes place on Clifton campus and is free of charge. To find out more about how to attend, please contact Dr Ben Taylor.

'The "Asian" Problem'

Dr Hongwei Bao participated in the ‘Quo Vadis Cultural Studies?’ Research Symposium and Public Roundtable organised by the University of Potsdam and Humboldt University in Berlin on November 2. He gave a talk titled ‘The “Asian Problem”: on the Radicalisation of Cultural Studies’. 

In the talk, he addressed the widely-observed phenomenon in UK universities that, with the neoliberalisation of higher education and the institutionalisation of Media and Cultural Studies, many Asian students have entered UK universities to study higher degrees in Media and Cultural Studies. This has provided an excellent opportunity to experiment on the internationalisation, or rather, the ‘translation’ of Cultural Studies in the transnational and cross-cultural context. However, teachers and administrators in British Media and Cultural Studies have not yet fully understood the educational and cultural backgrounds of these Asian students. Nor has it fully met the Asian students’ demands, needs and difficulties. This has led to increasing misunderstandings on the part of both teachers and students, and, furthermore, a heightened pessimism about the future of internationalising Media and Cultural Studies. In this process, the ‘Asian student’ has been constructed as a ‘problem’ for Media and Cultural Studies; it is seen as a subject that is deficient in linguistic and intercultural communication competence and incapable of critical thinking, thus unfit for pursuing the commonly-conceived linguistically-challenging and theoretically-sophisticated subject of Media and Cultural Studies. Furthermore, the discourse of ‘Asian pragmatism’ also circulates widely based on the observation of many Asian students take more career-oriented and practical-skill-intensive Creative Industry and Media Practice subjects. As Media and Cultural Studies celebrate its anti-hegemonic and egalitarian ideals, it has also created biases, hierarchies and epistemic violence itself when encountered with the racialised and cultural Other. Thus teaching Cultural Studies to an international audience with diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds can be seen as a de-colonising and anti-hegemonic political project: it is to critically reflect on the privilege and the Anglocentrism of the British Media and Cultural Studies on the one hand, and to open up the horizons and parameters of Media and Cultural Studies so as to better address issues and problems in the transnational and crosscultural context, on the Other.