Culture in practice

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ABSTRACT This article provides readers with contextual background to the 2023 Cultural Studies Association of Australasia (CSAA) conference: ‘Culture in Practice’ and thus the papers in this edited collection. The contemporary realities of climate crisis, increasing inequality, multiplying communities of hate, in addition to growing geo-political insecurity demand cultural as well as political, social, and economic responses mean that now more than ever ‘culture’ is a contested site of exclusion and possibility. Thus the conference’s theme sought to explore how we might create an open and inclusive cultural space for collaboration especially in a country like Australia where sovereignty of the First Nations peoples has never been ceded. How do we decolonise culture? How do we re-create it? How do we mobilise it for inclusive ends? The Introduction argues for Cultural Studies as an act of politics as much as a theoretical or methodological approach, that resists acts of forgetting. The enduring politics that papers and scholars throughout this conference demonstrated in practice was this refusal to forget, and an insistence on the urgency of radical, decolonial, queer, powerful feminist practice in Cultural Studies in the contemporary moment.