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…

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,…

This paper is a multi-faceted engagement with the idea of hybridity and postcolonial community in a settler culture, questioning the relationships between movement, identity and knowledge through the figuring of the memorial, the library and the lesbian. The paper carries…

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…

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…

Proponents of the discipline of Native Studies (in its various guises) have attempted to produce a methodologically and theoretically distinctive body of scholarship to justify its existence in the field of academia. Critiquing Duane Champagne’s recent article published in a…

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…