Culture/communication/theory in Australia

"Culture/Communication/Theory" is a difficult, maybe impossible object to survey, for this special issue of AUMLA, and if I claimed to know exactly what I was talking about I would thereby show that I didn't. A crucial issue in this field is whether C/C/T in its parts or as a whole does or should exist in a definite form. All the terms on their own have meanings, but they are re-configured in this new complex. The study of "culture," with its 2000-year history, develops a different inflection in this complex, affected by specific understandings of "communication," and both by a specific body and type of "theory." Since interactions like this are what makes C/C/T important, and not any strand in isolation, I will deal throughout with the irreducible complex, rather than simpler substitutes. For instance, "cultural studies" appears in many descriptions of departments, courses, journals etc., but currently in Australian universities what is studied under this name could be found under many headings, such as English, Cultural/Communication/Film/Media Studies, sometimes separately, sometimes combined. There are as well differences between "traditional" and "post-traditional" universities, but something important has happened in the Australian academic world underlying all these differences.