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…

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…

This article begins with the premise that cultural studies has neglected questions about religion and faith. Through an analysis of a discussion in an online Buddhist forum whereby the participants debate the issue of faith vis-a-vis knowledge, the paper explicates…

Sensational trials are a venue for the performance of social knowledge—the kind of knowledge that does not regularly make an appearance on the front pages of national newspapers. if sensational trials routinely catapult private matters into the public sphere, it…

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

This article explores the relation between experience and ‘know-how’ as a ‘tacit’ form of knowledge and the role of enthusiasm in the production of ‘know-how’, and engages with the problem of the transmission of ‘know how’. Why is the transmission…

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…

Why does foodmaking matter? It does partly because it holds within it so much of everyday life, thought and activity across time, place and generation. This article explores women’s embodied foodmaking knowledge as ‘thoughtful practice’. It examines cookbooks as a…

There are many opportunities for lying and cheating in engaging with, what Susan Sontag called, ‘the pain of others’. One of them is the gradual emergence of the feeling that you know what happened, what it was like to go…

I propose this account of community formation, which finds bodies, ungraspable difference and the expression of meaning inextricably linked, in order to address a neglect of the sociality of the body in current models of community. That neglect, I submit,…