Book Reviews Transnational Perspectives on Culture, Policy, and Education: redirecting cultural studies in neoliberal times

follows in what is becoming for McCarthy a determined tradition of critical analysis and cultural agency. Most certainly this recent publication does all of that, although McCarthy & Teasley also offer the reader something new. While the thematic focus of this volume does not deviate from the ‘critical ’ agenda, the mechanisms of engagement do incorporate an ‘exercise of transgression ’ that marks a departure from a more predictable cultural studies approach. Promoted as a product of transatlantic cooperation in both ‘translation ’ and ‘relationality’, this collection is said to engender a ‘radical contexualization ’ of predictable centres of inquiry in resisting and deprivileging hegemonic epistemologies of collection and categorization. The stated intention of the book, then, is to encourage ‘multiple-border crossing’, resisting the Anglo-centred dominance in forms of cultural critique and inquiry. McCarthy & Teasley speak to one of the most intractable criticisms levelled against the field of cultural studies as a historical approach – the criticism of ‘Britishness’. Arguably, with cultural studies both mapping and navigating a centre– periphery field of research engagement, the ideals and processes of Western governance scribe a point of reference and divergence. This can result in the traditions and forms of articulated cultural agency resonating in prescriptive ways. The challenge, then, is erected in opposition to th