ACS Board Elections 2024 – Candidates’ statements
We invite ACS Members to vote in the election of the new board for years 2024-2028. In this election cycle, members will vote for the Vice Chair of the Association, and for Board members representing their designated geographic region.
The elections will be held electronically via Webropol from 5th to 25th April. All individual members whose membership is valid for 2024 will receive personalized links via email through which they can cast their vote. The results of the elections will be announced in May.
The ACS Bylaws state that the Board has one Chair and one Vice Chair, plus regional representatives as follows:
Africa – 3 (one from Southern Africa)
Asia – 4 (one from Northeast Asia, one from Southeast Asia, and one from South Asia)
Australia and New Zealand – 2
Europe – 4 (one from Northern Europe, one from Central and Eastern Europe, and one from Western and Southern Europe)
Latin America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean – 4
North America and the English- and French-speaking Caribbean – 4
The bylaws state that the terms of service for Board members shall be staggered across two election cycles, so that each of the global regions described above except for Africa will choose half of its representatives every two years. Africa will choose 2 representatives in one election cycle (2022) and 1 representative in the other (2024). The elections for Vice Chair will be held during this election cycle.
Here are our candidates for the new Board (click on the name to view the candidate’s personal statement):
Vice Chair
Aljosa Puzar (South Korea)*
*According to the bylaws, the Chair and Vice Chair also count as representatives of their respective regions. In this case, Aljosa Puzar represents Asia during 2022-2026, having been elected in 2022 as a regional representative, and will continue in this role until 2028 if elected as Vice Chair.
Africa
Adam Haupt (South Africa)
Asia
Nishant Shah (Hong Kong)
Jian Xiao (China)
Austalia and New Zealand
Christina Lee (Australia)
Europe
Margarida Pereira Martins (Portugal)
Anindya Raychaudhuri (UK)
Latin America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean
Belén Igarzábal (Argentina)
Marcela País Andrade (Argentina)
North America and the English- and French-speaking Caribbean
Helen Leung (Canada)
Megan Wood (US)
Use your right to vote!
If you have any questions concerning the elections, please contact: info@cultstud.org
Candidates’ statements
Aljosa Puzar (South Korea)*
*standing for election as Vice Chair, currently serving as a regional representative for Asia (2022-2026)
Dear colleagues,
My name is Aljosa Puzar (Aljoša Pužar) and I am a cultural studies scholar, urban anthropologist, social critic, and writer of mixed roots, born in Yugoslavia. Defended my first Ph.D. in 2006 at the University of Rijeka with a project about the anthropological and cultural theory of in-betweenness, and my second one in 2015 at Cardiff University with a project on Korean youth. From 2002 I taught translation studies at the University of Trieste in Italy, from 2003 literary theory and cultural studies at the University of Rijeka in Croatia, and between 2006 and 2016 cultural geography, gender studies, cultural anthropology, etc. at South Korean universities (HUFS, Yonsei). Since 2017, I have been teaching cultural studies and urban anthropology at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, and (from 2019) cultural analysis at the University of Arts, Berlin (UDK). With my Asian and European partners, I am also running a small cultural trends observatory specializing in Asian cultures (EUACTO). In the past, I have contributed to various cultural studies activities, journals, and professional organizations in Croatia and South Korea. That included starting and co-writing cultural studies university programs and presiding over local cultural studies associations. I am presently working on establishing the Balkans cultural studies network and pushing for the better representation of cultural studies practitioners from post-communist East Europe and Central Asia in international cultural studies. I see myself as representing non-metropolitan people that are from nowhere in particular, people on the move, or those with multiple belongings. I am honored to have been one of the representatives of Asia on the Board of the ACS since 2016 and have agreed to be nominated as a candidate for the position of Vice Chair as I would like to keep contributing to the best of my abilities to our association’s activities also through this prolonged and challenging period of post-pandemic interruptions, postponements, and anxieties. Thank you all for your camaraderie and trust.
Academia.edu: https://uni-lj.academia.edu/AljosaPuzar
ORCID profile: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5931-7577
Adam Haupt (South Africa)
Adam Haupt is professor of Media Studies and director of the Centre for Film and Media Studies. South Africa’s National Research Foundation rates him a B2 scholar. He is co-editor of Neva Again: Hip-Hop Art, Activism and Education in Post-apartheid South Africa with Quentin Williams (UWC), Emile Jansen (Heal the Hood) and H. Samy Alim (UCLA). He co-produced an EP, #IntheKeyofB , for the book project with hip-hop artist Bradley Lodewyk (aka b-boy King Voue) and is the author of Static: Race and Representation in Post-Apartheid Music, Media and Film and Stealing Empire: P2P, Intellectual Property and Hip-Hop Subversion. For more on the book and EP, visit HSRC Press.
Prof. Haupt is Coordinating Editor of Global Hip Hop Studies with Prof. J. Griffith Rollefson (University College Cork) and co-editor of Journal of World Popular Music’s special double issue on Hip Hop Activism and Representational Politics with Quentin Williams and H. Samy Alim (5.1 and 5.2, 2018). He serves on the advisory board for the first Hip Hop Book Series by University of California Press and on the advisory board of CIPHER: Hip Hop Interpellation, which is funded by the European Research Council. He also serves on the editorial board of Drietalige Woordeboek van Kaaps (www.dwkaaps.co.za).
Nishant Shah (Hong Kong)
I am currently an Associate Professor and Program Director of Global Communications at the School of Journalism and Communication, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, where I also run the Digital Narratives Studio. I am Faculty Associate at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University, and Visiting Professor at the Radboud Institute for Culture and History, Radboud University. I serve as a knowledge partner for gender, sexuality and social justice groups Point of View, CREA, Design Beku, and Khoj Art Collaboratory in India, and with Oxfam, Feminist Internet Research Network, and The Digital Asia Hub, focused on more south-south and global collaborations.
I have a long-standing engagement in inter-disciplinary and multi-stakeholder community building, positioning cultural studies knowledge and resources towards communities of practice. I founded the Center for Internet & Society in India, was the director of the Leuphana Digital School in Germany, worked as the vice-president of ArtEZ University of the Arts in The Netherlands, and throughout all my different roles, I have been committed to expanding the scope of cultural analysis beyond critique. I have been involved with the founding of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Consortium and Summer School, and have been invested in exploring Majority World collaborations, as indicated in multiple projects like Digital Natives with a Cause? (2014), Making Change: Frameworks for digital activism (2017), and Doing Things with Stories (2020).
My own grounding is in digital cultures, where I have been inspired by the possibility of using our methodologies, frameworks, and knowledges to inform, educate, and public discourse and policy. I value and advocate for cultural studies scholars to be public intellectuals, and joining decision making practices around emerging challenges of digital technologies and platforms. I have initiated policy driven, industry oriented projects in collaborative practices, trying to shift the discourse and inform regulation and governance, through publications like ‘Small Books for Big Platforms: vol. 1 &2’ (2022), ‘Artificial Intelligence: Systems of Intentionality and Human-Centered Values’ (2023), ‘Making of Misinformed Choice: Misinformation and Election cycles in 9 Asian countries’ (forthcoming), which translate digital culture analysis towards shaping the discourse and regulation of digital technologies.
My current work is particularly invested in gender, sexuality, and social justice movements through digital narratives, in order to reframe crises and orient towards hopeful collective action. I work at building communities of practice across several disciplines and sectors in order to develop new pathways for research and learning to develop and impact beyond traditional academic boundaries. My recent books – Really Fake (2021, University of Minnesota Press) and Overload, Excess, Creep: An Internet from India (2023, INC/Leftword Books), are both indicative of my commitments to position the disciplinary wealth and approaches of Cultural Studies beyond critique. As the South-Asia representative, I would hope to build bridges between research and practice, and explore and build opportunities, especially for emerging scholars, to house and direct their research beyond academic settings.
Institutional page: https://www.com.cuhk.edu.hk/peoples/shah-nishant/
Jian Xiao (China)
I am Jian Xiao (Ph.D. Loughborough University), the associate professor at Zhejiang University, China. Since 2023, I have served as ACS board member and joined the VLS team for helping the lecture organisation. Apart from this, I have also become the editorial board for Platform & Society and served as reviewer for many international journals.
I am an established researcher in the fields of media and cultural studies, and have published widely in journals that include European Journal of Cultural Studies, Space and Culture, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Journal of Urban Affairs, Information, Communication and Society, International Journal of Communication, Chinese Journal of Communication, etc. I have also published a monograph Punk Culture in Contemporary China with Palgrave MacMillan and Image-City-History: The Transformation and Reinvention of Shenzhen since 1891. Specifically, my work focuses on power and the relationship between the mainstream and the edge by looking at the construction of cultural and digital platforms in the context of globalisation and de-westernisation, as well as the construction process of creative culture system in small cities and rural areas in China. Generally speaking, I take online and offline ethnography as a method to study the platform construction and cultural production processes.
Within a changing world as the quantitative market economy and network technology deepen, the deeper the sense of powerlessness that surrounds people, the more a society needs to develop self-understanding. In the face of such a reality, the more carefully and clearly we observe and record, the more deeply we can analyse people’s way of life. More importantly, what kind of cultural studies should be based on the “culture” of record and analysis? Here, the methods of cultural studies need to be re-examined and its scope needs to be further widened. More importantly, particularly in these difficult times of growing divisions, cultural studies can be as unifying force both among scholars and in terms of understanding culture and the contradictory forces driving both divisiveness and cosmopolitanism ,neoliberalism, populism, nationalism etc as embedded in popular culture. Thus, I hope to be a representative of Asia, and add creative input in terms of developing cultural studies according to its changing social contexts. This thought has further developed following my participation in the 2018 Crossroads conference in Shanghai. Integrating China into the wider cultural studies community, the conference has become a platform for the interactions between Asia and the non-Asian contexts. Based on this previous success, I hope, the collaboration can be more vibrant, not only in the form of the official conference, but also through encouraging and supporting new directions in scholarship to enhance the discipline’s standing via its detailed insights into the status of society, and via workshops or talks as well as appropriate virtual collaborations to further exchange.
Christina Lee (Australia)
I am an Associate Professor in English and Cultural Studies at Curtin University in Western Australia, specialising in cultural and film studies. As a researcher and educator for over two decades, and in my roles as Reviews Editor and Editorial Board Member for Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies and Conference Convenor of Curtin University’s annual English and Literature Conferences, I have been a committed exponent of the transformative power of cultural studies to deepen understanding and engagement with the world.
My interdisciplinary research draws predominantly on cultural studies, screen studies, memory studies, tourism studies and cultural geography, and I have published 6 books and numerous chapters and journal articles in these fields. In recent years, my projects have revolved around two main subject areas: affective landscapes, spaces and memory; and representations of girlhood and womanhood in cinema and television. Recent co-edited books include Living with Precariousness (I.B. Tauris, 2023) and Screen Tourism and Affective Landscapes: The Real, the Virtual, and the Cinematic (Routledge, 2023).
I believe that the continued vitality and sustainability of cultural studies as a discipline relies on practices of generosity and knowledge-sharing. This is one of the reasons I have spent much of my academic career mentoring and training Early Career Researchers and postgraduate students to build their competency in teaching and research, as well as ways to cultivate collegiality. This has included creating opportunities for ECRs to publish their research and to this end I have devised research and publishing seminars and workshops for colleagues and postgraduates to provide practical advice; for example, developing book proposals for publishers (something academics are expected to do, but for which they often do not receive ‘how-to’ training for). I believe that by sharing our experiences and supporting each other to achieve, we strengthen our discipline.
I am committed to advancing the ACS’s agenda of promoting a worldwide community of cultural studies practitioners. If elected to the ACS Board, I would identify opportunities to increase interdisciplinary and transnational dialogue and collaboration in a range of media, support the development and participation of ECRs and postgraduates in the discipline, and I would bring my extensive conference organisation experience to the ACS Crossroads Conference series.
University Profile: https://staffportal.curtin.edu.au/staff/profile/view/christina-lee-e499ce74/
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9039-2516
Margarida Pereira Martins (Portugal)
Margarida Pereira Martins holds a PhD in English Literature and Culture from the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Lisbon (2016) with a thesis on Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai and an alternative perspective on history through their fiction. She is assistant professor at the Department of Humanities, Universidade Aberta, the Portuguese distance learning university, and a researcher at ULICES (University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies) as co-PI of the research group “Other Literatures and Cultures in English” and of the Representations of Home research project. She has also been an Associate Editor at Anglo Saxonica https://revista-anglo-saxonica.org/about/editorialteam since 2019.
Her research interests mainly focus on understanding cultural identity and the value of agency through the analysis of postcolonial and diasporic anglophone literatures. She has presentes and written about anglophone authors from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Kenya, Nigeria and the Caribbean such as Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai, Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri, Samrat Upadhyay, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, Edwidge Danticat, Kamila Shamsie and others. Through an interdisciplinary approach to her analysis of the novel, Margarida uses postcolonial, decolonial, cultural studies, social anthropology and literary theory to study the stories that shape culture and cultural identity and contribute to a new understanding of historical narratives.
Margarida co-edited with Paula Horta, the Special Issue of the Journal of Literary Studies Representations of Home: Conflict and/or (Be)longing: Thinking with Stories and Images https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rjls20/36/1?nav=tocList published in 2020 and is currently working on a second issue, following the 2023 International conference held at the University of Lisbon last year, which will be published in 2025 in English Studies.
Her first contact with the Association for Cultural Studies was as a member of the organising committee for the Crossroads in Cultural Studies 2020 Lisbon conference, which due to the pandemic, was postponed to 2022 (online). Since the initial meetings and preparation for the conference, selection of abstracts and organsation of the papers into panels, to the actual event in November 22, Margarida grew familiar with ACS, some of its members, and its role in the global projection of Cultural Studies in its various dimensions. Margarida is focused on the extension of cultural studies to different fields of learning, teaching and researching in Portuguese academia and in local communities. Her interest in developing new strands of research at the University where she teaches and with her research group is in line with the aims of ACS of building a worldwide network for the promotion of cultural studies.
Margarida has experience and enjoys collaborative work, is hardworking and always willing to take on new challenges and to develop new networks of work in the interest of a more inclusive and plural understanding of what cultural studies is and its value in and beyond academia.
ORCID ID: 0000-0002-3534-6787
Ciência Vitae: 2410-1D26-11B3
UAb staff: https://paginapessoal.uab.pt/mpmartins
Anindya Raychaudhuri (UK)
I would like to put myself forward as a candidate for regional representative for Europe. I am a Senior Lecturer in the School of English at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, UK and have been an active researcher in various aspects of cultural studies for more than a decade. I am the author of two monographs – Homemaking: Radical Nostalgia and the Construction of a South Asian Diaspora (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018) and Narrating South Asian Partition: Oral History, Literature, Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2019). Across my work, I am committed to interdisciplinary methods – from literary and textual studies, film studies, ethnography and oral history. My research interests include critical theory and Marxism, postcolonial studies, and memory studies. My current work has taken me to medical humanities – I am working on a cultural history of vertigo that combines ethnography, history of medicine and literary and film analysis. I am attracted to the breadth of work that the ACS represents, and if elected, I would like to contribute towards maintaining and extending this ethos of rigorous interdisciplinarity in research and teaching.
Apart from this, I have two main strands of experience that I believe would be of value to ACS. Firstly, I bring a strong track record of public engagement. In 2016, I was named one of ten BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinkers, and I have since gone on to present BBC programmes on multiple cultural studies-related topics. I am also an experienced podcaster – between 2016 and 2020, I co-hosted, with Dr Hannah Fitzpatrick, a podcast called State of the Theory. We used our research in critical theory and cultural studies to bring an alternative view on popular culture and politics. We produced over 90 episodes representing more than 100 hours of content which have cumulatively been listened to over 35,000 times in more than 50 countries. If elected, I would like to contribute towards ACS assuming a stronger pedagogical role in supporting graduate students and early career researchers as they develop public engagement profiles.
I am also deeply committed to, and experienced in EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion). I am the EDI-lead at the Scottish Graduate School of Arts and Humanities, and in this role, I design and implement EDI policy, and develop and deliver EDI mentoring and training. I have seen first-hand how graduate students and early career researchers continue to face structural barriers that continue to prevent entry for so many people. These barriers also continue to disincentivize research that is non-canonical and methodologically risky. If elected, this is something that I would like to prioritise – doing what we can to ensure that our discipline can be as diverse and accessible as possible.
Ever since my first Crossroads in Paris 2012, I have been involved closely with the ACS, and the energy and commitment of colleagues has been personally and professionally inspiring. If elected, I look forward to continuing the wonderful work done by the Board.
Institutional Profile: https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/english/people/ar220/
State of the Theory: https://soundcloud.com/stateofthetheorypodcast
ORCID profile: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5174-4382
Belén Igarzábal (Argentina)
My name is Belén Igarzábal. I am a culture and gender researcher. I have a degree in Psychology, followed by a Master’s in Journalism and Doctoral Studies in Social Sciences. For the last 20 years, I have been teaching on culture and communication topics, specializing in the intersection between the culture field and the perspective of rights, gender, and diversity. In this path, my studies were greatly influenced by Cultural Studies, both Anglo-Saxon and Latin American.
I am director of the Culture and Communication Area at FLACSO Argentina where I lead the postgraduate “Cultural Development and Communication”.
I have also taught as a guest lecturer at national and international universities and organizations. I have participated in meetings organized by UNESCO, UCGL, CLACSO, and Women’s Cultural Associations. And collaborated as consultant for UNESCO, OEI, IDB, AECID and PNUD for national, regional and international initiatives. I worked in different projects related to the 2005 Convention where I became part of the List of Experts in 2024.
I was part of the research group “Decolonial Epistemologies, Territorialities, and Culture” with researchers from 7 countries in America.
I have published various works related to culture and gender. In the book “From Culture to Feminism” (RGB Editions, 2020), with Marcela Pais Andrade we brought together 40 cultural experiences from women and LGBTQ+ from an intersectional perspective. I have also worked in content curation and production in the audiovisual industry, and developed methodologies and indicators for improving diversity and gender inclusion. In my doctoral thesis, I was able to link my previous studies and delve into the analysis of cultural processes from a gender and diversity perspective. My research work was about the relationship between transgender audiences and audiovisual content. To this end, I developed a qualitative study of in-depth interviews and an analysis of cultural representations in audiovisual media, from an intersectional approach, which is essential in my region.
My areas of work and interest are closely related to the work of the Association for Cultural Studies. It would be an honor to be part of this space and share the work with such prestigious academics from different continents.
Website: https://www.flacso.org.ar/docentes/igarzabal-maria-belen/
Marcela País Andrade (Argentina)
Marcela (Maky) País Andrade is an academic at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she has been teaching since 2009. Additionally, she serves as an Independent researcher for the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET).
Throughout her academic career, she has conducted research and taught courses on youth, cultural policy, and cultural management. However, her recent focus has been on the intersection of gender and public policies.
Some of her notable works include “DE LA CULTURA AL FEMINISMO” (2021), “Perspectiva de géneros: experiencias interdisciplinarias de intervención/investigación” (2018), and “Identidades culturales en y desde las fronteras: Un enfoque de género a la(s) políticas y a la(s) práctica(s) culturales juveniles” (2016). She has also supervised numerous theses at the PhD, Masters, and undergraduate levels.
Maky is actively involved in networking her research interests with colleagues in Argentina, Latin America, and Spain. She has organized panels and symposiums for various academic associations in the region and has been a member of the ACS since 2010, when she first attended the Crossroads conference in Hong Kong. She is committed to promoting and strengthening Cultural Studies in Latin America, particularly in the Spanish-speaking scientific community, and hopes to continue contributing to the understanding of Latin American affairs within the ACS board.
Helen Leung (Canada)
The first time I participated at an ACS Crossroads conference was at Istanbul Bilgi University in 2006. It was an exhilarating and inspiring experience, one which was invaluable for a young scholar still finding her way in the academic world. My experience at Crossroads opened my eyes not only to new intellectual perspectives and ways to “do” Cultural Studies but, even more importantly, to configurations of research networks and communities of colleagues which I likely would not have encountered elsewhere. Since then, I have come to treasure the friendship that began all those years ago and the many research collaborations that have continued in subsequent Crossroads gatherings in cities like Hong Kong, Paris, Sydney, and Shanghai.
I am currently a Professor in Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University
and in Canada with a research focus on queer screen culture and LGBTQ activism. I also co-direct the Institute for Transpacific Cultural Research, which aims to promote the Vancouver region as a hub for developing collaborative opportunities amongst cultural researchers across the Asia Pacific regions.
Academics in Canada face distinctive challenges and enjoy opportunities that I believe make us good representatives of the region. Working in a relatively small academic community that is located on the margin of a neighbouring U.S. academic culture that is dominant and self-sufficiently insular, scholars in Canada are comparatively more worldly, outward-looking, and adept at building institutional and intellectual connections beyond our immediate location. At the same time, the “two solitudes” of Canada’s English- and French-speaking academic worlds present a considerable challenge — one shared by many other multi-lingual regions represented in ACS — that demands skillful navigation across different linguistic communities and academic cultures. Additionally, my own academic location in the Pacific Northwest brings regional networks and expertise in Indigenous Studies, Asian Diaspora Studies, Transpacific Studies, and Environmental Studies which offer productive intersections with Cultural Studies. My administrative and program-building experience in Gender Studies, which is a disciplinary formation that shares many parallels with the intellectual and institutional trajectory of Cultural Studies, could make positive contributions to the ACS Board. I am keen to learn from as well as share my skill sets and experience with other Board members.
Finally, my interest in serving on the Board stems from a wish to give back to an organization to which I am indebted for decades of research and network opportunities, not to mention the camaraderie and collegiality that have so enriched my work and my life. I would love to be able to help create similar resources and opportunities for new generations of scholars and students.
Website: www.sfu.ca/~hhl
Megan M. Wood (USA)
I am delighted by the opportunity to parlay my membership in the Association for Cultural Studies into a position of service as a potential new board member. Between my first ACS conference in Shanghai as a graduate student in 2018, reuniting virtually with colleagues and friends during the Covid-era conference, and my experience delivering one of the many vibrant research talks hosted by the ACS Virtual Lecture Series, I’ve come to know the ACS as a unique and irreplaceable scholarly community. To this position, I’d bring both a strong commitment to the practice and pedagogy of cultural studies and a deep appreciation for the vast amounts of labor and care that go into ensuring that an organization like ACS can represent for others what it does for me.
I hold a PhD in Communication with a specialization in Cultural Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. My research, focused broadly on examining the relays between popular and political cultures from my vantage point in the U.S., has been published in journals including Cultural Studies, Journal of Cultural Economy, Lateral, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, and in edited collections such as Feminist Surveillance Studies (Duke University Press) and Cultural Studies in the Classroom and Beyond (Palgrave Macmillan). I write and speak regularly on the histories and responsibilities of the practice of cultural studies, introduce new scholars to the practice of cultural studies in the courses I teach, and am actively conspiring with others to build better spaces for enabling the kinds of transdisciplinary, collaborative work required for effectively facing the difficulties of our political present. For more information along these lines, my CV is available here.
My previous and current leadership experience has prepared me to contribute ably to both existing and new ACS endeavors. For the past several years, for example, I have served simultaneously as an editor at the Journal of Cultural Economy and as an executive board member of the U.S.-based Cultural Studies Association. Elected for two consecutive terms as CSA programming chair, I was responsible for crafting thematic CFPs, managing a team of volunteer reviewers, inaugurating new and creative conference submission formats, and helping create and maintain a robust infrastructure for hosting a fully hybrid conference attuned to a variety of accessibility needs. Additionally, I supported as a priority the creation and maintenance of digital communication channels (e.g., Slack, Discord) to enable scholarly working groups, senior and junior scholars, and geographically distant and institutionally diverse cultural studies practitioners to more easily and regularly connect with one another.
If elected to the ACS board, I am confident in my ability to listen for and act on behalf of the needs of the Association’s members, and look forward to working with current ACS leaders to continue strengthening both the Association and the project of cultural studies more broadly.