Is there a shred of use for this institution? : Cultural studies and its making in Hong Kong

As a context-specific project, Cultural Studies has taken shape in Hong Kong through a changing set of institutional frames conditioned by the ex-colony’s proximity to the rapid changes occurring on the Chinese mainland, as well as globalizing networks with various developments in the Asia-Pacific region, where cultural education and politics are crossing new borders. Doing Cultural Studies today we must work with many partners, to explore useful interfaces between the teaching/research programme and the cultural industry/policy practitioners, media professionals, schools, and NGO groups etc. I shall draw on three set of issues informing my career as a Cultural Studies scholar: (1) the shaping of academic work in which the institutionalization of critique is subject to various social, economic and political changes since the late colonial period; (2) the disciplinary making process in which the shifting needs and challenges of pedagogy interact with evolving institutional parameters and critical functions of Cultural Studies; and (3) the complex relationship between the daily practice of public pedagogy, the constant re-shaping of identity imaginary, and the governing technologies of citizenship in the course of Hong Kong’s transition from colony to post-colony. Approaching the condition of ‘usefulness’ in the local fields of cultural education and development, I shall end with questions reflecting on the social agency, tactics and effectivity of disciplinarity across a range of cultural action struggles, to shed some light on the possibility of what Tony Bennett has called a pragmatic ‘prosaic politics’ for Cultural Studies here and now