After the Disciplines: The Emergence of Cultural Studies

by Michael A. Peters

Since the late 1960s, both internationally and locally, we have witnessed the growth of subject areas outside the traditional liberal arts curriculum and disciplinary structure of the university curriculum: Black Studies (or Indigenous Studies), Feminist or Women's Studies, Critical Legal Studies, Film & Media Studies, Gay Studies, and Cultural Studies are some of the most popular. The principles underlying a global neo-liberalism and managerialism were responsible for restructuring universities during the 1980s. Some thought that such developments imperiled the humanities, while others believed that the context of globalization and the development of new communications technologies offered new hope for both interdisciplinary work and the emergence of a critical approach.

The book asks the following broad questions: What are the underlying historical, epistemological, and political reasons for the emergence of cultural studies? What do these developments imply for the traditional liberal arts curriculum and the traditional discipline-based university? To what extent does the emergence of cultural studies displace or dislocate traditional disciplines? What forms of resistance has cultural studies encountered, and why? To what extent does the emergence of cultural studies reflect a changing mission of the university and changing relations between the university and the wider society? What is the future of cultural studies?

312 pages, Paperback

First published August 30, 1999

About the author

Michael A Peters is Distinguished Professor at Beijing Normal University, China, and Emritus Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He remains attached to the University of Waikato as a research professor affiliate in the Wilf Malcolm Institute of Educational Research. He was professor of Education at the University of Waikato for seven years (2011-2018).

He is the executive editor of the journal, Educational Philosophy and Theory, and editor of three international ejournals, Policy Futures in Education, E-Learning and Digital Media, and Knowledge Cultures.

His interests are in education, philosophy and social policy and is a lifelong Fellow of the New Zealand Academy of Humanities. His research interests are in educational philosophy, theory and policy studies with a focus on the significance of both contemporary philosophers (Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger) and the movements of poststructuralism, critical theory and analytic philosophy to the framing of educational theory and practice.

He is also interested in philosophical and political economy questions of knowledge production and consumption. His major current projects include work on distributed knowledge, learning and publishing systems, and ‘open education’.

He has written over eighty books, including The Global Financial Crisis and the Restructuring of Education (2015), Paulo Freire: The Global Legacy (2015) both with Tina Besley, Education Philosophy and Politics: Selected Works (2011); Education, Cognitive Capitalism and Digital Labour (2011), with Ergin Bulut; and Neoliberalism and After? Education, Social Policy and the Crisis of Capitalism (2011).

He has acted as an advisor to governments on these and related matters in Scotland, NZ, South Africa and the EU. He was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of NZ in 2010 and awarded honorary doctorates by State University of New York (SUNY) in 2012 and University of Aalborg in 2015.