Paradoxes of public connection

Public lecture delivered at the Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney, April 2004

Thanks very much to Ien Ang for inviting me to speak and to be based at the Centre for Cultural Research this autumn. It's great to be here - and it's exciting to hear the range of work on cultural transformation and cultural complexity going on here - also of course to be involved in our Master Class which runs up to the weekend. I hope that my comments tonight will be a productive contribution to the important work at the Centre.

My title tonight - Paradoxes of Public Connection - signals a deep problem - concerning the foundations, or possible foundations, of democratic politics, and media's role in sustaining them. This is one area, I think, where cultural research, and particularly research across a range of disciplines and interdisciplinary positions that has been informed by the 'cultural turn' (in that loose phrase), but rather by the specific challenges of the best thinking under the banner of 'cultural studies' - where such work can make an important, if until now largely neglected, contribution.

I'll be discussing my own current research later on, which is just one of a range of possible approaches to these issues, but before that I want sketch a wider context. Before I close, I'll offer also some reflections on how, more generally, we might understand the contribution of critical cultural research to addressing the paradoxes and challenges of public connection today.
The Philosophical Background
My starting-point is a question which is relatively familiar even if the form which it takes in Australia, where formal participation in the political process (voting) is compulsory, is necessarily rather particular. I mean the crisis of engagement in democratic politics, or at least the particular forms of politics which are legitimated and institutionally underwritten, the formal party system. This topic has been hotly debated by policymakers and academics across decades and continents. This concern about engagement with - inevitably linked to the legitimacy of - the political process is the policy background to the research project I'll describe later on. But before I turn to that more specifically, I want to look at the guidance which writing in political philosophy and social sciences might provide for thinking about this crisis. Here a helpful reference point even today - and, as Michael Warner has argued, in spite of its apparent conservatism - is Hannah Arendt's concept of the public realm. Her concept is quite distinctive. Arendt writes that: 'being seen and being heard by others derive their significance from the fact that everybody sees and hears from a different position. This is the meaning of public life.' (1958:57, added emphasis)

Here we can not only find a precedent for contemporary debates on difference and multiculturalism, but also see a parallel much earlier to Raymond Williams' ideas, recalled what he says in Culture and Society: 'wherever we have started from, we need to listen to others who have started from a different position' (1958:320). This link to Williams will be important later on, as we'll see.

But Arendt in her book The Human Condition emphasises that for various reasons the public realm has in modernity been lost, perhaps irrevocably. And here there is a link to a much wider sense of crisis across many versions of political theory. Jacques Derrida has provided, perhaps, the most vivid image for this crisis. In Politics of Friendship he writes of how 'the resonant echo of all the great [political] discourse' now issues, increasingly, in 'mad and impossible pleas, almost speechless warnings'. These warnings, he says, turn endlessly, 'like searchlights without a coast, they sweep across a dark sky, shut down or disappear at regular intervals and harbour the invisible in their very light'. For Derrida, the problem is a crisis in the nature of value itself and in its place he offers a meditation on friendship. But whether or not the crisis is as general as Derrida argues, we still need to find some concrete connection back to the issue of the public world. Unfortunately Derrida offers no suggestions as to how specifically we might do this.

There is where Chantal Mouffe's book The Democratic Paradox is useful, at least at first sight, because it takes on the task of rethinking the basis of democratic politics from the anti-foundationalist perspective Derrida's work demands. Even if we suspect all foundations and points of origin, democratic politics still requires, as Mouffe argues drawing on Wittgenstein, some shared 'form of life', a sufficient level of shared beliefs and practices that allows us to 'broaden the range of our commitments to others, to build a more inclusive community'. However, then, we stretch and re-work our concept of 'politics', there must be some meshing between the places were we live, work and are governed and our allegiances so some shared space or world. There must be some linkage that might provide the matter of politics.

But how can we characterise that linkage? Mouffe (2000) writes of 'a common symbolic space', but noting more about how that space might be created or sustained. This gap in her argument symptomatic of much writing in political science and political theory. One of the rare philosophers prepared to move beyond abstractions, and give some specific sense of what a regrounding of democratic politics might involve, is Paul Ricoeur (1995). What blocks, he argues, a more open exchange of narrative across difference is the rigidity of collective identity. How might that rigidity be broken down? One way is through what Ricoeur calls a 'translation ethos' (or 'language of hospitality'), that is, an openness to each other's narrative languages. Another is the 'exchange of memories', that offer conflicting accounts of the same event. We need, Ricoeur implies, institutions and spaces where across differences of collective identity, we can exchange narratives of past experience that, through their exchange facilitate shared narratives of the future. Hardly new issues in Australia, of course, even if it remains welcome that a European philosopher is descending into specifics. How then can we relate to these tantalising suggestions to the question of public connection? Here we might hope to call on work in the social sciences.

Public Connection to the Social Sciences

But here we are largely disappointed. There has within a broadly social science perspective been a long tradition of researching the 'civic culture' that surrounds, or is believed to surround, the formal political process (as in Almond and Verba's (1963) classic work The Civic Culture). But there have been powerful critiques of that work for its neglect of fundamental exclusions that shape people's relationships to that process: exclusions of gender - as the Australian philosopher Carole Pateman (1989) argued - exclusions of class, as the US sociologist David Croteau (1995) has demonstrated in detail. And Almond and Verba's work seems ill-equipped to deal with new questions about the decentring of politics, the loss of trust in, and respect for, hierarchical forms of politics...Is there any recent empirical work that revisits the underlying question of civic culture but in a more open and qualitatively rich way?

We look in vain for example to the fast-growing literature on citizenship studies whose value, for all its richness, may lie in the nakedness of the questions it asks, rather than any answers. To quote two of its leading exponents: 'what does it mean to belong to society...?' (Nick Steveson, 2002), 'what counts as community and solidarity' (Anthony Elliot, 2002)?

However one real step forward is the Swedish media scholar Peter Dahlgren's (2003) essay 'Reconfiguring Civic Culture'. In this essay Dahlgren sidesteps problematic assumptions that political engagement must take one standardised form (the formal political process), and asks instead what are the 'minimal shared commitments to the visions and procedures of democracy' which democratic politics of any sort requires? Dahlgren's answer is not simple - for he asks: what is the complex things which must be in place for civic culture to work?

Unfortunately, I don't have time to go into details of is multi-dimensional model of civic culture, but the reason it stands out is because it foregrounds how democratic politics is based not just on a particular 'attitude' citizens must adopt but on the presence of many interlocking processes: a sense of 'affinity' with a public world, shared flows of information, spaces and times for civic talk, shared civic practices. Nonetheless Dahlgren's essay remains a theoretical model. So we have to ask: what is the most useful approach for investigating how people do all these things (if they do), how do they make sense of, reflect upon, the connections between those various processes, how does the lived experience of 'civic culture' (or its absence) emerge in people's own accounts of the themselves? Which raises the different question of how people's opportunities to give an account of themselves are constrained or enabled.

It is here, I believe, that the strand of cultural studies work on the complexities of the individual voice, the complex stake of individuals in wider cultural formations, for example Elspeth Probyn's (1993) work, is especially useful. And it is here above all that Raymond Williams (who I mentioned in passing before) is the missing term, the missing theorist. Why? Because his early work (particularly Culture and Society and The Long Revolution) emerged precisely as a challenge to what he saw as a democratic crisis in post-world War II Britain and precisely as an insistence on the exchange of narratives (in Ricoeur's terms), on listening to other from different positions...and an insistence too on the deconstruction (not that Williams used that word of course) of the reified language of much public discourse (in his case, the devalued language of 'mass culture' critiques). I will return at the end to why Williams remains (even if subject to various transformations) a useful reference- point for our research today.

What I am suggesting, let me emphasise, is the opposite of a nostalgic return to an earlier 'Master' of cultural research: first, because it is the scepticism, the critical edge the inclusive democratic vision, of Williams that I'm concerned with (which inevitably must be articulated differently now in different circumstances); and, second, because as Handel Wright has pointed out, 'cultural studies' is not a linear narrative with a single point of origin, but rather a huge current fed by many sources from many parts of the world.

Some Paradoxes

Nostalgia would also blind us to the need to address a number paradoxes concerning public connection, which, if not always new or unnoticed, certainly take an acute form today:

the paradox (which challenges some diagnoses of the public sphere) that the crisis of democratic politics (if that is the right word) involves not so much a loss of meaning but rather a saturation of meaning...not so much a series of disconnected individuals, but rather a multiply connected individuals whose difficulty is not isolation in any simple sense, but rather how to find, across the various narrative streams in which they are situated, a common connection which is public and shared with others...the paradox summed up by Oscar Gandy (2002: 450) with nightmarish clarity when he suggests that we are approaching a situation where 'individuals may actually feel better about knowing less and less about the world around them'.
A version of that paradox was expressed back in the 1930s by John Dewey when he wrote of the problem not of the absence of a public, but rather the existence of 'too much public', 'a public too diffused...and too intricate in composition' for it to 'find and identify itself; (1946: 137, 125).
We see specific application of the same paradox in the combination of, on the one hand, a huge multiplication of media flows within and across the expanding range of significant media (and hence an exponential growth in individuals' possible paths of connection to a public world) - and on the other hand, fragmentation, the challenge of sustaining across those countless trajectories some public connection that we can assume is shared between us.
The French sociologist Alain Touraine in his book Can We Live Together? paints and even grander version of this paradox, a paradox of both globalisation and individualism. He writes, rather drastically, that (2000: 5-6) 'we are on the one hand world citizens who have neither responsibilities right nor duties, and on the other, defenders of a private space private space that has been flooded by waves of world culture. Both individuals and groups [he writes] are therefore less and less defined by the social relations which until now defined the field of sociology whose goal was to explain behaviour in terms of the social relations in which actors were involved'. A paradox here, then, not only for public engagement, but also for sociological explanation.
Touraine's paradox is too facile perhaps, but even if we step outside it (arguing that on a daily basis we do find ways of connecting our globalised allegiances to our local practice), there remains a further paradox in the wake of two decades of post-structuralist debate: how can we reconcile our tendency towards scepticism and anti-foundationalism with the need to go on thinking, indeed to rethink, the basis of democratic engagement? This is the task Chantal Mouffe takes on, as I mentioned, but her solution remains abstract and theoretical, separate from the fine grain of everyday practice.

How to move beyond these paradoxes? No of course by a further theoretical solution, but rather, I suggest, by shifting to a different register: which means renewing our attention to the issue of communication. There are, after all, some striking similarities between otherwise very different formulations of the theoretical challenge facing older visions of democracy. Whether we take Alain Touraine's argument (2000: 14) that we need 'to replace the old idea of democracy, defined as participation in the general will, with the new idea of institutions that safeguard the freedom of the Subject and permit communication between the Subjects'...or whether we take Jean-Luc Nancy's evocation of 'the inoperative community': inoperative in the sense that it is sustained through the absence, not the presence, of the rhetorical operations o which conventional notions of 'community' depend. 'Community', Nancy writes, 'is the unworking of work that is social, economic, technical and institutional.' On the face of it this is rather too paradoxical to be helpful, but fortunately be glosses it is terms which make clear its links to communication:

'"Political" [Nancy writes] would mean a community ordering itself to the unworking of its communication, or destined to this unworking: community consciously undergoing the experience it is sharing...undergoing in whatever manner, the experience of community as communication' (1991: 40-41).

What Nancy here (echoing Dewey) reminds us of is that in attempting to think beyond the crisis of democratic politics we are not required to assume that 'politics' as we imagine it should necessarily bear a close relation to current institutional forms, which may precisely, along with inequalities and asymmetries on which they are based, need to be rethought, reworked. But whether we follow Touraine or Nancy or any of the other theorists of the democratic crisis that I mentioned, we are left, as I suggested before, without any answer to what these new forms of communication, these new communicative institutions, might be? On what principles can they ever be imagined? At this point I want to turn to the particular approach to researching public connection that I'm currently developing in my own work, but hold onto that link between the crisis in democratic politics and the issue of communication.

The Public Connection Project

I want to talk about a project which I described in outline when I was last here in December 2002 - which had just then got funding. I'm working on this project with my colleagues Sonia Livingtone and Tim Markham at LSE. We're just coming to end of our first six months so now I can give some idea of how we're putting into practice the questions and methodological choices I outlined back then. This project, which focuses on what we call 'public connection', aims to grasp (in much greater detail than possible through surveys alone) the range of ways in which people are orientated, or not, to a public world and whether or not media consumption is important in sustaining these orientations.

The project is funded by the UK's ESRC/AHRB under their Cultures of Consumption programme and its full title is 'Media Consumption and the Future of Public Connection'. It's a 30 month project, we're six months in, as I said: so at most I can share with you the issues we are dealing with, not any results. The background, as I said earlier, is widespread concern at policy level with the future of democratic politics: declining voter turn-in (in countries where voting is not compulsory), declining allegiance to formal political parties, declining interest in the formal political process. There are, I must stress, different, more positive, readings of all this (for example Simon Tarrow) in terms of a shift of focus of politics away from institutions and networks, away from parties and towards single-issue campaigns. But there remains an interesting question which serves to frame our research: what will be the basis of political legitimacy if politicians' usual working assumption that when they speak the majority of the population is potentially paying attention ceases to be a plausible assumption?

I'm not a political scientist, of course, but I have been intrigued for three years or more about the media's role in sustaining or not the level of shared attention necessary for democratic politics. Because it is not only politics that might be changing; we are all familiar also with parallel concerns about the decline in an older media world where prime time television could be assumed to be prime-time, to provide a primary focus for national attention. This of course is a long-term shift, linked to the multiplication of outlets within media and multiplication of media themselves. How this shift plays out in conditions of cultural diversity (as obviously the case of Australia and less the UK) is itself of course a complex question - as the Centre's Living Diversity report for SBS showed (Centre for Cultural Research, 2002). But the hunch underlying our research is that, as media and cultural analysts, we have a major opportunity: to try to grasp the possible interactions between these two large-scale processes in which the social centrality of both formal politics and broadcast media are (possibly) being eroded over time.

Let's move onto the Public Connection project in more detail. So what is our empirical research strategy? I can explain this most directly by saying that we are concerned to investigate the empirical validity of two connected and widely made assumptions:

First, that in a democracy such as Britain, most people share an orientation to a public world where matters of common concern are, or at least should be, addressed (we call this orientation 'public connection'), and
Second, that this public connection is focussed principally on mediated versions of that public world (ie that 'public connection' is principally sustained by a convergence in what media people consume, sustained by what we might call 'shared media consumption').

Let me take these assumptions aside. The first assumption is, we would argue, implicit in most political science and political theory (especially republican and civil society models of democracy, but also liberal models and even, it can be argued, elite models of democracy). For it is only on the basis of this first assumption that the (separate) assumption of the legitimacy of democratic political authority can be built: consent to political authority requires that people's attention to the public world can be assumed which from time to time (including the times when consent is explicitly requested) results in actual attention! This orientation (which itself can be analysed into many aspects, including cognitive and emotive) is what we mean by 'public connection'.

Note that in calling orientation public connection, we are taking a view on what itself is a highly contested term: 'publicness'. Drawing on Jeffrey Weintraub's work (1997) we acknowledge the doubleness of the 'public/private' distinction: which, on the one hand, identifies a zone of collective concerns that is properly 'political' and, on the other, identifies a generally visible (and accessible) world that is distinct from the space of private life (protected from visibility). The two questions of collectivity and visibility are related, but distinct. Sometimes the crossover between them is contentious as in the famous feminist principle that 'the personal is always political' which can be interpreted to mean: some things that some regard as private (not accessible) are in fact collective concern, and therefore must be made visible, so that they become accessible to collective intervention. We are not minimising such debates when we suggest, following Jean Elshtain (1997), that underlying those classic debates was still the assumption that we can give meaning to the distinction between what is collective concern and what is not. And it is this collective dimension (of the public/private discussion) that is more important to our research: when we talk about public connection, we mean connection to a world of collective concern. This is position of Hannah Arendt, John Dewey, and others, it remains open to challenge, for example from a radical feminist position which might challenge the usefulness of the public/private distinction at all; from a quite different perspective, one might argue the public/private distinction is inseparable from Western secularism. But any research has to start from some set of assumptions, and the salience of the public/private distinction is ours, as it underlies our interest in what substance 'public connection' takes on in people's lives. Enough then of on the first assumption we're investigating.

The second initial assumption is detachable from the first - you could believe that public connection is sustained by processes other than media consumption, or even (as in Robert Putman's Bowling Alone thesis) that aspects of media consumption undermine public connection. This second assumption, nonetheless, is also, in some form or other, implicit in much political science and media sociology, so once again if is worth examining to see what basis it has in people's lives.

Now you might react that these assumptions are formulated in a quite general, abstract fashion (itself distant from the language we might use in everyday life). The reason is our concern with the empirical validity of a frame of public orientation that could be shared by people even if they disagreed over any of the following more specific issues:

Their political values
Their cultural allegiances and attachments
The range of things that are appropriate topics for political discussion and action
The range of people who are legitimate political actors
The institutional site more appropriate for political discussions and action.

Indeed we cannot any more assume common answers to those detailed questions after decades of feminist debate, shifts in focus of political engagement (cf work on 'postmaterialist values' by Inglehart (1997) and others), debates about what politics should be about. Such disagreements, however, can be seen as dependent upon a shared orientation to a public world (whose contents, precisely, they debate). Hence our attempt to focus our research on that underlying public connection.

Our question then is whether the assumption of public connection has any empirical basis, and if so what basis, in people's lives and actions, and particularly the uses, or not, they make of the media? There are a range of specific reasons for putting this double assumption to the test in contemporary Britain.

The fragmentation, perhaps, of people's attention to any public world (because of pressures of time from changing work patterns etc)
The diminishing, quite possibly, of people's practical connection to institutions of political participation
The fragmentation, perhaps, of media consumption, across and within media, into multiple non-connecting 'sphericules' (as Todd Gitlin (1998) once put it).

Whether these factors are as determining as some believe is what we want to understand.

So how are we trying to do this? Potentially this is a huge and long-term undertaking. For now, we are engaged in a more modest first stage: a detailed qualitative enquiry with around 30 subjects designed (through an open-ended diary form) to uncover the range of understandings they have of their 'public connection' (if any), and its links to (if any) to their media consumption. While we start with the individual voice, we don't want to study the individual in isolation, hence our interest in following the trajectory of individuals' discussions of such issues with others, and conducting subsequent interviews and focus-groups that will track some of those discussions. Towards the end of our project we will do a national survey to generalise out some of the themes that emerge from the detailed qualitative work.

I should say something more about our 'diary' method:

We are using diaries because we are convinced that interviews alone (ie methods involving the presence of the researcher) wouldn't necessarily be adequate in uncovering people's ongoing reflections on such difficult issues. This is why we want to combine research-absent methods - as Liz Bird (2003) calls them in her recent book The Audience in Everyday Life - (that is, diaries) with researcher-present methods (interviews, focus groups) that can reflect back on the diary-writing.
There is some precent for this combination eg in the literature around observing medical conditions but virtually no precedent for the type of diaries we want people to produce: the research literature on diaries has generally been concerned either with using diaries as an alternative to observation (of time-use, or the practices of sick patients) or as open-ended and completely unstructured form of self-expression more like an auto-biographical diary...So our approach - which seeks people's reflections but within a specific framework - is unusual.
Who are we recruiting? For such an intensive method, the sample must be a small sample. We have recruited nearly 40 people around England from metropolitan, small town, suburban and rural areas (six regions in all). Because of the need to ensure not only a regional spread but also an even gender and age balance, and a range of classes and ethnicities, the recruitment has involved working closely with market researchers - I'll come back to that point in a moment.
Another issue is how to guide the diarists in a structured and reasonably 'transparent' way without directing them...This is why we've opted for a blank diary format but whose context is closely structured through introductory letters, initial interview, subsequent letters/phone calls, all planned and recorded as part of the data we gather.
We're well aware that a written diary format will suit some people better than others: gender differences (as Liz Bird argues) may be important, possibly also ethnic and cultural differences. So we're building in flexibility into the diary format: not just a basic written format, but also email (which many people are using).
All those are technical questions about method, which can to a large degree be technically solved. But there's also a more fundamental problem which we must at least acknowledge: the risk that our diarists 'sample' will be self-selecting. Our recruiters did not, of course, specifically look out for people with an intense sense of public connection and the various sampling requirements would have cut across that in any case, but nonetheless there remains an obvious risk a significant degree of engagement with the public world is a precondition for anyone wanting to commit to writing a diary for three months. There is no final answer on this of course: it is related to the problem of control. Constructing the sort of sample we needed meant relying on the mediation of those with recruitment expertise - market researchers - giving up, therefore, full control over the process of recruitment, including over the most difficult thing to control against any qualitative research: the self-selection of those who give up the time to speak or deal with you. We are here back with what in the context quantum mechanics Karl Popper (1970) called 'the Oedipus effect' - the more closely you try to identify a precise object of investigation, such as a sub-atomic particle, the more likely you are to distort that very object, because of the properties your measuring instrument. And if that's true of quantum mechanics there's no reason to suppose it's less true of cultural research!

Our actual conclusions are of course some way in the future, but what type of conclusions in principle could we even now anticipate as interesting outcomes of this research? We are ready to find, for example, that

A number of people lack any sense of public connection (with some of them wanting things otherwise, and others wanting things to remain that same way).
Or, that while everyone we ask reports a sense of public connection, it is focussed on a range of public worlds which differ and may even be exclusive of each other (in terms of institutional site, scale, geographical focus - and let me stress that we do not assume that people's public world is necessarily national rather than local, national rather then global)
Or, that there are a number of people for whom media consumption is less important than our second starting assumption claims (so for them 'public connection' is sustained through local groups, which meet face-to-face around agendas not reflected in media narratives)
Or, that for some people, their sense of public connection is pre-structured by larger forms of disconnection (racism, discrimination based on gender or sexuality, exile) - or, put the other way round, that the absence of such major factors of exclusion for others is what makes 'natural' their 'connection' to a public world. This is one of the clearest differences coming out of preliminary interviews.

These points might not be surprising in the abstract, but what matters is to see how such constraints on connection are lived out in everyday experience, with or without media. And this, we would argue, is something that can only become visible through research whose chief emphasis is on deep qualitative methods, rather than surveys.

Conclusion

But I don't want to end there - because it might suggest that our UK project has a privileged position in addressing the broad concerns about the basis of democratic politics I started from - and of course it doesn't. There's a huge terrain of inquiry here, and inevitably many different ways of approaching it. I want hen to finish by asking whether there are any more general implications emerging from what I've said about who best we can research people's relationship to a public world or worlds. What is the contribution of an approach broadly influenced by cultural studies to the questions of 'politics' - however we define it - and the 'public world', questions that traditionally have the monopoly of political science and political theory? And what does this tell us about the broader relevance today of the research tradition that emerged out of cultural studies?

It's relatively clear what we don't need: we certainly don't need the hyper-theoreticism of much cultural studies in the 1980s and 1990s, which regarded 'practice' - what people do on a daily basis, in their homes, in public spaces and particularly at work - as something to be theoretically transcended, rather than understood and tracked in all its complexity...Nor do we need another version of the populism so familiar from some types of cultural studies (as if old debates about the relevance of popular culture in the broader public world were still live debates that should be determining what we research now - clearly they are not)...

To say what we do need is more difficult and I can only offer my own perspective. Here it is worth holding onto something simple, but I think profound, in Raymond Williams' work, the idea I mentioned at the start that, as intellectuals and also as citizens, and 'wherever we have started from, we need to listen to others who have started from a different position'. This is not only an insistence that we listen across the major structuring differences in our social world, whether class difference (which Williams had in mind) or gender, ethnicity, sexuality, centre/periphery. It also, if we link it with some notion of democracy, means attending sufficiently to the huge range of people's everyday existence.

It is worth remembering that for Raymond Williams one of the key incitements to new thinking, and indeed to the very idea of a new discipline which he could not yet name as cultural studies, was the encounter between teachers and students through the British workers' education movement. For Williams this educational encounter with those outside the formal education system, this 'communication between subjects' (in Touraine's phrase) was productive because it required serious attention to the complexity of others' voices, and to complexity of what it is to have (or not to have)a legitimate voice in the public world.

Put this way, it seems clear that cultural studies remains a tradition of academic work that can teach us vital lessons, but one whose implications and insights for the contemporary world have barely been developed. There are surely many cultural contexts that have so far been neglected in the broad sweep of cultural research, but which we have no right to neglect: the school, the hospital, the public hearing, the sales meeting, to name a few! All of them are sites where various forms of public connection are played out, identities performed, representations negotiated.

If we engage with those unfamiliar sites, it should of course not be in a naively celebratory way (as if our role were simply to find patterns of reproduction or resistance in the cultural domain). But rather, recalling the inspirational work of the American cultural theorist Henry Girous (2002), with a critical reflexivity that acknowledges how much is at stake - in a world riven by profound inequalities - in understanding accurately and without sentimentality the material constraints on individual agency and voice, on collective and narrative representation.

The time has come then, perhaps, for those how have emerged from the disputed lineage of 'cultural studies' not to retreat, not to use the words of past (and in some cases present) opponents as cover for a return to old frameworks and familiar accommodations, but instead to be bold, to look around us and see just how much work there remains still to do for open, empirically informed, and continuously critical research into the complexities and paradoxes of contemporary culture.

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1Many thanks to the ESRC for its financial assistance to this project under grant number RS-143-25-001.