Only Idiots Do Cultural Studies

Hoyng, Rolien (2025) Only Idiots Do Cultural Studies. In: Better Stories : Mapping Cultural Studies with Lawrence Grossberg. Imbricate Press, pp. 357-363. ISBN 9798289825919

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Abstract

As an advisor, Larry has guided me by giving me a lot of freedom. That is, by telling me to feel free to study anything that seemed important to me as a site of power and transformative potential, regardless of disciplinary boundaries and enclosures. That is how the focus on popular culture had come about in cultural studies, he said, and otherwise we would not ‘give a damn.’ Larry often likened cultural studies to a garbage bin: you can study anything that you can’t study elsewhere because it falls beyond the scope of the field, and they don’t want you to do it. I remember him provoking us, PhD students around 2010, to hand him a study of fridges or aircons. Without these machines humming quietly and controlling the climate, life where we were in North Carolina would not be possible, or at least it would not be very pleasant.