Exclusive:

Cultural studies, academic integrity and university teachers in Googalised world

By Ranga CHANDRARATHNE

A characteristic of postcolonialism is a fracturing of unified versions of history, progress and development. Formerly colonized nations had to (re)discover their histories, languages, religions and traditions that had been burnt, destroyed, discarded and disrespected. So in every postcolonial journey, there is a nationalist moment where a new form of community emerges to understand the past and to construct a sometimes artificial and arbitrary community as a nation. But nations – because they are often born as a bandage to dress and heal invasion and dispossession – are unstable. So new movements for regionalism and city identities emerge that provide new opportunities to think about our identity.

Professor Tara Brabazon

Professor Brabazon, looking at your very lengthy curriculum vitae, I can ask you many questions covering many areas of your expertise. But for this exclusive interview to Montage, I want to focus and cover a few questions on three areas on cultural studies, academic integrity and qualities of a good university teacher in the era of Internet and Google.

Q. You taught cultural studies in several universities both in the northern and southern, hemisphere. This is not a subject we do teach in Sri Lankan universities despite our colonial heritage. Could you please define cultural studies and its scope and boundaries, the strengths and weaknesses comparing it with social sciences?

A. Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary frame work that combines the best of history, sociology, politics and literature. It captures the deep textual engagement of literary studies with the contextual rigour of history, the sharpness of argument from politics and the rich social awareness of sociology. We align ‘the what’ of texts with ‘the who’ of sociology, ‘the when’ of history and ‘the why’ of politics.

The resultant paradigm is both flexible and powerful. The type of work that can be conducted varies from a close reading of media and popular culture through to provocative engagements with policy, such as through creative industries strategies. The key imperative of cultural studies is connection: maintaining a profound relevance and alignment to the present. Our goal is to freshen old knowledge and apply it in new ways.

Q. Among other things you teach at University of Brighton, UK, you teach two interesting units. I am speaking about the units such as Thinking Pop and Creative Industries, Teaching, Learning and Writing through Popular Culture. What is Thinking Pop and Creative Industries and how can one learn and write through Popular Culture?

A. You have discovered the two great passions of my life. Thinking Pop is a first year unit. Teaching, Learning and Writing through Popular Culture is a Masters-level course. Both explore the popular culture that serves its society in a thoughtful, rigorous and considered way. Pop – by its nature – is ephemeral. Yet a few special moments of popular culture resonate, to both capture and comment on our lives, narrating our hopes, passions, disappointments and confusions. I do not see popular culture as good or bad. But I am interested in the Thinking Pop, the popular culture that questions, probes, unpicks and teaches, arching citizens beyond their daily experience and into collective consciousness of injustice.

Creative industries is the second area of my teaching. I teach a course of that name to first year students, but at MA level this work continues through such courses as City Imaging, which explores how cities are branded, marketed and reinvigorated. Creative Industries describes a movement in economic and cultural policy in the mid to late 1990s. It derived from post-industrial nations, regions and cities trying to discover new engines of economic growth. Instead of agriculture, mining and manufacturing, the paradigm shift was a desire to develop businesses based on patents, designs, copyright and intellectual property.

Charles Leadbeater described this change as “Living on thin air.” This model for economic growth, most frequently based around small and medium sized enterprises, has spread throughout the world. One of the reasons Lord of the Rings has sustained its success beyond the release of the filmic trilogy is because in New Zealand, the Wellington City Council took on the ideas of Leadbeater and Richard Florida. They developed integrated strategies for film, special effects, tourism and education. The goal of these strategies around the world – at their best – is to create a horizontal integration of industries. In other words, a success in one field or profession assists other fields, industries and professions in their development. The creative industries offer strategies for sustained economic growth that are particularly effective in post-industrial cities like Manchester, Sheffield and Liverpool in the United Kingdom.

Q. We hear and talk a lot about popular culture and how important for any country to learn about popular culture in order to develop media and cultural polices?

A. Popular culture is important, mainly because of the adjective in that phrase. It is popular. While ‘we’ may not like particular elements of popular culture, particularly if they are racist, sexist or perpetuate colonial narratives, ignoring this injustice is not an option. The goal of educators is to support, understand and develop Thinking Pop, the popular culture that teaches us about our time and provides space for multiculturalism, the sharing of ideas and the building blocks for collective conversations. To provide one example, Woody Guthrie was a fine singer and songwriter who chose to use music to raise questions about social inequality. Listening to “This Land is Your Land” provides a flash of insight and consciousness about injustice and an opportunity to create change.

Q. One of your specialities is teaching. You are an outstanding teacher and have won six teaching awards, including the Australian National Teaching Award for the Humanities in 1998, along with others in the areas of disability and cultural studies. In 2005, you have also won both the Murdoch University Postgraduate Supervisor of the Year and the Teaching Excellence Award. In 2009 you won the University of Brighton’s Teaching Excellence Award, nominated by both undergraduate and postgraduate students. These awards speak for themselves. Would you please tell us WHY teaching is important for a university teacher?

A. It is a privilege to be a university academic. It is a gift that I appreciate each day. It is a joy to teach the best and brightest of each generation to become their best selves. Academics must always research and write so that we are working at the edge of knowledge, but it is our responsibility to share this new knowledge with the next generation. Teaching students is our first moment and opportunity for dissemination of our research, so that they can build on it in the future. But also, if we as scholars are to survive and assist the society that we are meant to serve, then our first priority each day must be to look after the next generation of thinkers, writers, researchers, policy makers, musicians, film makers and journalists.

These students deserve our best each day. Also, I believe that our universities should represent the best of our societies. So much of life is ruthless, cold, angry, brittle and brutal. For the three years that students are with us, it is important that they are nurtured, listened to, cared for, helped and supported. We know the rest of life is not like our time at university. But through kindness and rigour, we can prepare students for the challenges that follow.

Q. Would you please tell us the qualities you value and like to see in a university teacher?

A. I am very demanding of my profession, because it is such a gift and privilege to teach. The foundation for teaching is a qualification in both a specific field and in education. I believe that all academics should hold both a PhD and – at least – a Bachelor of Education. We require expertise in our subject, but also a clear understanding of curriculum development, literacy theory and information management.

These are the foundational qualities. However, university teaching is also based on respect for students, and a desire to move them from where they are to where they want to be. A teacher must be both a leader and supporter, a talker and a listener. Most importantly, we must share our passion for knowledge and learning with students. We must create a dynamic environment for students to question, test, probe, fail and succeed. Most importantly, a teacher must care. The moment that we become flippant or careless in our teaching is the moment we should walk away from the classroom.

Q. University teaching is a difficult task these days. In an interview you gave on teaching in the Internet era that appeared in The Guardian, on January 22, 2008, the blurb carried, An Australian professor fed up with essays full of regurgitated Internet mediocrity, Why do you say this? Some of us believe that Internet is the panacea and the solution for all our problems. Please comment.

A. The internet is a medium of information and communication. It is not church, temple or mosque. The difficulty and excitement of the online environment is the size and scope of the available information. The challenge is how to manage it. I am very happy for citizens and consumers to use the internet, the web and Google in any way they choose to suit their interests. But education is special and specific. Within formal education, commonsense is frequently not good sense.

My goal as an educator is to challenge students to transcend their personal experience and learn new ideas. The problem with search engines like Google is that we can only place words in the search box that we already know. Therefore, our already existing (limited) knowledge is reinforced by the results returned from the search. To provide one example: if I enter “postcolonialism” into Google, the first return is Wikipedia. That knowledge is fine if you require general information for personal interest. It is not appropriate and difficult enough for what we require at university. However the results transform if the searcher adds the names of three of the key theorists in postcolonialism: “Bhabha, Balibar, Spivak.” High quality materials emerge. Therefore the challenge for education and teachers is not ‘in’ the internet, web or Google. The key for teachers is to intervene, to demonstrate that there is a difference between information and information literacy. Finding information is not difficult. Finding quality information at a level we require in education is much more challenging.

Q. One of our academics published a popular newspaper essay on “the internet”, globalization and nationalism. He appears to believe that there is a choice besides the latter two. Could globalization lead to or promote nationalism?

A. A characteristic of postcolonialism is a fracturing of unified versions of history, progress and development. Formerly colonized nations had to (re)discover their histories, languages, religions and traditions that had been burnt, destroyed, discarded and disrespected. So in every postcolonial journey, there is a nationalist moment where a new form of community emerges to understand the past and to construct a sometimes artificial and arbitrary community as a nation. But nations – because they are often born as a bandage to dress and heal invasion and dispossession – are unstable. So new movements for regionalism and city identities emerge that provide new opportunities to think about our identity.

I am often concerned about how globalization is used. It can often describe colonialism by other means. Instead of empires, we now have corporations.

Q. In searching knowledge, could Internet and its favourite cousins such as Google really assist us to seek knowledge and wisdom?

A. The internet is an expansive platform that provides an extraordinary diversity of information. Google, with its related services such as Google Scholar, is a way to control and sort that information. However because Google enables searching in conversational language and automates the process of finding information, it deskills users and transforms searchers into consumers of information. We find information, but lack the expertise to evaluate it. Therefore, my goal is to ensure that students input higher quality search terms into Google Scholar, to improve the information that they find. I want to bring the skills back to searching.

Information is the foundation of knowledge and wisdom, but these terms are not synonyms. When information is shaped, interpreted and evaluated it becomes knowledge. But when we can render past knowledge relevant to our present, then it can become the font of wisdom.

Q. In a public lecture you gave in the UK, entitled “Google Is White Bread for the Mind”, Why did you say that?

A. There are two major excesses in our culture: an excess of information and an excess of food. To intervene in the assumption that more information is always better information, I borrowed a metaphor from food. We all know that all food is not the same. Some food is better than other food. Fruit and vegetables are healthier than ice cream. White bread can fill us up and give us the calories that we need. We eat. White bread fills us up, but has no nutritional value. Google is the white bread of search engines. Google can deliver to searchers a huge amount of material. But without information literacy, a large amount of low quality data is found. This information can satisfy, but not challenge.

Q. How important is it for university teachers to go back to teaching subjects such as literature, communication or history for that matter?

A. I believe it is important to teach and research the full range of knowledge from the hard sciences through to the traditional humanities. Without teaching the range of subjects, we do not create productive interdisciplinary conversations. Insight and innovation emerges through combining older truths in new ways. If we drop particularly subjects from the curriculum, then we are blocking insight and imagination in our schools and universities.