Cautious Optimism: The Alliance of Women's Studies and Cultural Studies

Abstract

As the millennium approaches, post-secondary education in Canada is in crisis. The giddy optimism of the mid-1980s, which projected a future in which retirements would allow universities to make new appointments from the ranks of the by now several generations of not-so-young junior scholars, has become the melancholic realization that the government's fiscal woes mean that the funding for post-secondary education has decreased and will continue to do so. Consequently, university administrators are in a frenzied quest to secure new sources of funding, most often by turning to the private sector. For the humanities, which seem not to be the favoured beneficiary of corporate largesse, this shift in funding has several implications, most obviously that money for research in the humanities inevitably will decline. Universities seem to ignore the effect that this shift in funding will have on the production of knowledge, for presumably the inclination of business is to support research that has the potential to enhance profit rather than that which critiques the social costs of the accumulation of profit. Within the current social climate, cultural studies has a particularly important role, for at its best it is a discipline which engages in a critique which aims to understand 'the ways in which power relations are regulated, distributed, and deployed within industrial societies'