We Don’t Need Another Hero: A Personal Celebration of Meaghan Morris

Graeme Turner

doi:10.5130/csr.v24i1.5967

Abstract

It was a great pleasure and an honour to be asked to contribute to the Meaghan Morris Festival at the University of Sydney in 2016, to acknowledge and celebrate Meaghan Morris’s foundational contribution to cultural studies in Australia, and internationally. What follows is, more or less, what I said at the time.For many years now, Meaghan has been my most valued colleague in cultural studies; she has been the firmest of friends, and a doughty comrade-in-arms for a critical, politically engaged and explicitly located cultural studies. I have to admit, though, that our relationship didn’t begin all that well. I first met Meaghan Morris when we were both speaking at the now legendary Cultural Studies Now and In The Future conference that Larry Grossberg hosted at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, in 1990. Meaghan was already an international star by then, and her presence at this event is evident to anyone who reads the book which came from that conference.

Highlights

ISSN 1837-8692 | Published by UTS ePRESS | http://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/csrj/index. It was a great pleasure and an honour to be asked to contribute to the Meaghan Morris Festival at the University of Sydney in 2016, to acknowledge and celebrate Meaghan Morris’s foundational contribution to cultural studies in Australia, and internationally
I first met Meaghan Morris when we were both speaking at the legendary Cultural Studies and In The Future conference that Larry Grossberg hosted at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, in 1990
On the West Coast, was the cultural studies identified with the group in Perth who founded the Australian Journal of Cultural Studies in 1983, including John Fiske, John Hartley, Bob Hodge and myself—who oriented themselves around British cultural studies figures such as Stuart Hall, and were at the time especially besotted with Levi-Strauss and Althusser