A review of Richard E. Lee, Knowledge Matters: The Structures of Knowledge and the Crisis of the Modern World System (UQP, 2010).

This article considers higher education in the context of global knowledge economy policies as a site for the production of economic subjectivities. Drawing insights from poststructuralist theory and feminist economics, it explores how the incorporation of economic discourse and market…

Higher education on the corporate model imagines students as consumers, choosing between knowledge products and brands. It imagines itself liberating the university from the dictates of the State/tradition/aristocratic self-replication, and putting it in the hands of its democratic stakeholders. It…

In mainstream humanities and social sciences, a traditional humanism has given way to an ethos of cultural difference. One form of cosmopolitanism triumphs over another as the goal of pedagogy. Both these cosmopolitanisms keep alive a model of culture as…

The Crossroads Conference in Paris, July 2012 offered an international perspective on cultural studies. After the event, seeing mention of cultural studies in the context of Nazi Germany opened up questions about the history of cultural studies, its ambitions and position in the contemporary,…

This essay is a result of the author's research into Buddhism and poststructuralist theories on knowledge, self and ethics and attempts to articulate the ethico-political implications of his own practice of Vipassana (a form of Buddhist meditation) and interrogate what…

This article considers the broad politics of the creation and maintenance of two large erotica collections in European national libraries across their histories and in relation to definitions of censorship and obscenity. It also examines the popular and intellectual discourses…

This article examines, in part, the spread of an introduced grass species, Buffel grass (Cenchrus ciliaris), in central Australia. It is also about immersing oneself in an unfamiliar landscape and environment, and exploring the kind of writing that can emerge…

The myth of the Maid of the Mist of Niagara Falls is a settler story of an Indigenous woman who kills herself by piloting her canoe over the cataract. This is presented not as a tragedy, but as a cultural…

A randomised survey in Texas found that 22 per cent of the public identified themselves as consumers of New Age media. Despite widespread recognition of the ‘spiritual supermarket’ there has been little sustained analysis of the production of spiritual commodities…