Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies

A comparison of a 1971 popular song, Eric Bogle’s “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda” with a 1935 poem, Hugh MacDiarmid’s “At the Cenotaph,” enables this article to produce a transnational, trans-genre and trans-historical discourse analysis of memories of the Great War of 1914-1918. While an ethonosymbolic approach allows for the discovery of resemblances and continuities, Nietzschean genealogy criticizes such monumental, associative views of the past and focuses instead on the casual connections between disperse moments in time. Critical discourse analysis, in turn, offers a possible synthesis by distinguishing historical narrative structures, cultural practices (the Anzac parades and cenotaphs to honor the heroic dead), and textual events, in this case the satirical representation of the Great War in later song and poetry.

This article seeks to explore a series of encounters where we engage with research with a view to learning differently. We argue that every encounter is a form of research if we can marshall the connecting threads and consider the individual as both singularity and collective. We use reflexivity to go beyond reflection and strive to construct knowledge as individual and collective purpose. We draw upon striking examples to explore how issues of learning, reflexivity, and pedagogy develop thinking in education, especially in Higher Education (HE). We seek to move beyond accounts of experience that merely describe and report and which borrow from humanistic accounts of a subject (one which both experiences and who thinks) an approach which we dub “De(s)-carting.” We then move toward explorations, which seek more engaged, concrete, ethical approaches that open up possibilities and offer alternative conceptions of working with experience in education, in all its variety.

This co-authored article examines the oldest known treaty between incoming Europeans and Indigenous North Americans to derive five basic principles to guide healthy, productive relationships between Indigenous community-based researchers and university-based ones. Rick Hill, Tuscarora artist and knowledge keeper from the Six Nations of the Grand River, publishes for the first time here the most complete oral history that exists today of that ancient treaty, from the early seventeenth century, known as the Two Row Wampum or the Covenant Chain agreement. Interspersed with Dr. Hill’s reflections, Daniel Coleman, a settler professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, outlines five principles for research partnerships derived from the discussions of the Two Row Research Partnership seminars that Hill and Coleman have been hosting at Deyohahá:ge: Indigenous Knowledge Centre for the past four years. Formed between the Hodinöhsö:ni’ confederacy and Dutch merchants arriving near Albany, New York in 1609, the Two Row Wampum-Covenant Chain treaty set the precedent for nation-to-nation treaties between European colonial powers and Indigenous peoples with two parallel rows representing the Hodinöhsö:ni’ canoe and the Dutch ship sailing down the shared river. Each party agreed to keep their beliefs and laws in their separate vessels, and on this basis of interdependent autonomy, they established a long-lasting friendship. This article suggests that by renewing our understanding of the Two Row Wampum-Covenant Chain treaty, Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers alike can rebuild relationships of trust and cooperation that can decolonize Western presumptions and re-establish healthy and productive research partnerships.

The global economic crash of 2007, the “structural reforms” and “austerity” policies, together with neoliberal processes have led, in recent years, to the emergence in Spain of a number of social movements, which are demanding greater democracy. One such movement is the “Green Tides” for the State Education in Spain, which has developed a series of proposals, from critical discourses in education, in the form of practices of resistance against neoliberal logic. In this article, we analyze this initiative, in particular in connection with some of the basic dimensions of critical pedagogy. Based on a critical analysis of discourse approach, we link the Green Tides’ manifesto and beliefs to dimensions of critical pedagogy. In addition, we show how these groups have developed what Flesher Fominaya calls practices of “prefigurative politics,” which aim to find social alternatives to the mantra of cuts in social rights, austerity policies, and other neoliberalization processes.

In this article, I observe the way Bongha, a small town of South Korea, constructs the tourist experience, using continually maintained silence regarding certain aspects of the past. The town became famous after the former president Moo-hyun Roh committed a politically controversial suicide in 2009. Then Bongha serves as memory-dispositif, putting forward memory aids for Roh that are chosen to highlight his life selectively. Visitors participate in this covert silence by coordinating their behavior into unscripted, but noticeable norms. Touring Bongha brings one into an encounter with mediated memory, and the mourners atone and engage in a pilgrimage to this remote site, full of pregiven memories of Roh, which caused them a sense of indebtedness.

Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of minor literature, minor sociology refers to an epistemological and political program for sociology (and social/cultural analysis more generally) that challenges well-worn paradigms. As new forms of domination and control, worsening class inequalities, environmental degradation, and increasing xenophobia all characterize the current moment, minor sociology aims to offer new ways of thinking about and researching the social. In examination of marginalized or neglected figures and texts from the field, this essay sketches out why minor sociology is relevant and necessary for the 21st century.