From cultural studies to cultural research : engaged scholarship in the twenty-first century

Tony Bennett, for example, has forcefully argued that cultural studies should 'acquire a better understanding of both its own concerns and practices as well as that of their relations to those of adjacent disciplines'.5 To be sure, the conceptual malleability, methodological pluralism, and radically contextual nature of cultural studies theory and practice have been important factors in its versatility in very different contexts around the world, but these same, arguably postmodern characteristics are also the very reasons why there is so much enduring confusion, not to mention anxiety, both inside and outside the field, what cultural studies is and should be.