AustLit

'Even though the Cultural Studies Review is now, after two iterations and many years, finally reaching the end of its career, its production teams’ commitment to serving the cultural studies community exemplifies the value of persistence. Unfortunately, its closure takes on added significance right now as it joins a worrying number of instances of institutional disinvestment in our field. Persistence seems to be running in just one direction. At its peak, Australian cultural studies had many strong local journals, it was successfully taught as a stand-alone field in a couple of dozen universities, it returned outstanding results across a range of ARC grants programs, and it became one of the most internationally engaged and respected of the humanities research fields in Australia. It even reached the point where people in other disciplines started to think there might be an advantage in pretending that they did cultural studies, too. We had mixed feelings about this, of course. While it provided welcome evidence of our influence and visibility, it also had the ironic consequence of tempting some of those who strongly identified with the field to engage in precisely the kind of boundary policing that had made cultural studies necessary in the first place. Nonetheless, for at least twenty years from the late 1980s, Australian cultural studies was that rare thing—a field of critical teaching and research in the humanities that prospered in what were, in general, difficult times for the humanities disciplines in Australia.' (Introduction)