Cultural studies

I did.

I did a PhD in sociology and cultural studies.

So this was covering rock against racism and love music, hate racism, which is still happening today.

Yeah.

Welcome to this Culture, Power and Politics seminar with a not before time, Lawrence Grossberg.

uh larry is the professor is your title professor emeritus now yes professor emeritus uh university north carolina chapel hill uh as i think probably everyone here will know he is he has been like one of the major figures in developing the project of cultural studies cultural theory in the us and worldwide he's someone whose own specific kind of theoretical approach you know he's very much can inform my own and it's very much overlaps with my own so i'm very happy to have him here and we've asked him to talk about quite generally the the to speak to the titles of affect and conjuncture I think it's really worth saying at this stage, Lawrence Graceberg is one of the earliest advocates for something like a theory of affect in the humanities and social sciences in the English speaking world.

He was first writing about that.

Well, he was writing about it a little bit in the 80s, but it's a key theme in his 1992 book, We Gotta Get Out of This Place, long before most official accounts claim that the affective turn happened.

It means the material realities of social, political, and cultural relations.

So I began thinking of a plane of affect.

Thinking back, well, at the time I didn't know it, but When I got to the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies, I discovered that Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart had both had a highly under-theorized notion.

Williams in the structure of feeling, Hoggart in, as he put it, what does it feel like to live at a certain time and place? Those were the questions they posed to cultural studies.