CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland
The University Now (And Its Related Institutions of
Interpretation)
Organiser: Richard C. Cante
Michael, John (The University of
Rochester, USA) ACADEMIC AUTHORITY AND POPULAR PREJUDICE: MISUNDERSTANDING THE
WAR ON TERROR AS A CLASH OF CULTURES
In the aftermath of September 11th's horrendous attacks, media pundits on the
right and the left have attempted to represent the motives and goals of the
U.S.'s attackers as stemming from a global war of cultures especially between
Islam or Islamic fundamentalists and the West. Seductively clear and
unambiguous, this construction of current events pits religious tyranny against
secular democracy, the enlightened West--especially the U. S.--against
mullah-ridden Moslems. Those who would advance this distorted view of recent
history and of contemporary tragedies frequently support their arguments by
uncritical references to work by academic intellectual, especially such
controversial figures as Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis. In mediatizing
these figures, however, those who cite them neglect--through ignorance or
design--to consider the critical reception of their work within the academy
itself. The result is that questionable academic opinions circulate beyond the
university as established fact, a dangerous deployment of academic prestige and
authority in the public sphere. In my remarks I would like to analyze this
phenomenon and discuss its troubling implications for academic intellectuals,
public policy, and the status of expertise in the public sphere.
Smith, Paul (University of Sussex,
United Kingdom) THE UNIVERSITY, NEW TECHNOLOGIES AND 'SYMBOLIC WORKERS
In the 1990s the US university, as well as universities in Europe, found itself
positioned as the potential training ground for a new breed of 'symbolic
workers'--essentially, people who would be the labour pool for the much-vaunted
'information society.' This new interpellation of the university made
exceptionally explicit the university's chronic role in forming the appropriate
labour power for capitalism's latest crisis. Most interesting, though, about
this moment was the way it called on the university's existing character and
practice by wanting to draw on the university's 'expertise' in 'symbolic' work.
At the same time, this new moment also demanded huge investment in new
technologies and new media on the part of the university. With some comparative
emphasis (USA--UK), this paper will look at how that double demand has been
responded to in the last ten years, asking what general cultural effects those
responses have entailed, and asking what changes to the everyday practice of
academic life might have ensued.
Orchard, Vivienne (University of
Southhampton) THE CONFLICT OF THE FACULTIES REVISITED, OR THE STAKES OF
'Interdisciplinarity' has become a managerial mantra for the future functioning
of the modern 'multiversity'. Once the
radical demand of student groups in Paris in 68 attacking the stagnation and
technocratic imperatives of university education, it is increasingly evoked to
designate all 'forward-looking' innovatory strategies. Where previously it
was the watchword of disciplinary radicals, it now risks becoming a vacuous
exhortation on the part of the bureaucratic superstructure of the university,
the alibi of rationalisation and downsizing for the humanities. This paper will
return to the celebrated theoretical interventions of Derrida and Lyotard of
twenty years ago, and the more recent work of Bill Readings on the
'posthistorical' university, to repose the question of disciplinarity as
institution of interpretation, and to question the radical potential of
interdisciplinarity. The emergence of the genre of self-conscious
disciplinary history, as different disciplinary areas within the humanities and
social sciences have staged their own reception and accommodation of academic
postmodernism, will be interrogatedi in order to question the simultaneous
immobility of disciplinary structures within the university and their effects on
knowledge, and the invocation of interdisciplinarity as the category of the
future, by both radicals and conservatives. What are the politics of
interdisciplinarity today, and what is its real possibility as an intellectual
and institutional strategy?
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