Page 41 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

30 INTRODUCTION

articulation between gender and class relations is now a consistent theme in all
the Centre’s present work.
The different areas of concrete research have also retained distinct
methodological emphases: in some, the emphases on ethnographic field work
and interviewing; in some, the centrality of texts and discourse and the practices
of representation; in some, the difficult methodological moves entailed in
moving from formal ideologies to their ‘lived’ historical implementation—their
implementation, in particular, in institutional practices and policies; in some, the
appropriation of historical methods of research on archives, documentary and
other sources. Like the substantive themes reviewed earlier, these are no longer
neatly distributed between the different research groups, but are combined and
recombined in ways appropriate to the concrete objects of research, across the
groupings. There is a continual dialogue and debate across these substantive
areas and an attempt to appropriate methods to problems. There is a delicate
question of balance here—a tension between probing more deeply the
substantive and methodological areas of specialization and developing a more
integrated style of work. There has, inevitably, been a certain ‘regionalism’ in a
Centre which spans so wide a spectrum of concrete areas. Each ‘region’
continues to have an intellectual responsibility—to know and to confront,
critically, the strategies, methods and findings as these have been defined in the
dominant practice in that area. Each. however, also has a responsibility to make
such progress as it is able to make within its own ‘region’ openly available to
other groupings and thus to develop Cultural Studies as a whole and to advance
it as a field of study. The combination of these ‘regional’ and general emphases
is one of the central and strategic organizational intellectual tasks for the Centre,
to which much energy and many resources have been directed over the years and
for which Centre members are asked to take a collective responsibility.

Developing a practice of intellectual work
We have dealt, so far, with the theoretical problems which have staked out the
Centre’s development and with concrete research. But this account would be
incomplete without some attempt directly to address the actual question of
organizing a practice. It is only ‘in practice’ that aims, goals and intentions can
be actually and effectively (or ineffectively) realized. Though this aspect comes
last, it has been, in many ways, our first priority throughout—and something
genuinely distinctive about the Centre. Here we have striven for what has
sometimes seemed to us and to our critics to be the ‘near-impossible’: to be, at
once, rigorous and open; to be both theoretical and concrete. A certain critical
self-reflexivity has been one necessary consequence of working in a field of
inquiry which has no clear precedents, no fixed reference points, no scholarly
orthodoxy. We have had to make problematic for ourselves what others could
take for granted. We have had to investigate the premises and assumptions
behind a range of available theories and methods—and have thus, one might say,