Transformations Conference: introducing Professor Gary Hall

Transformations Conference,

Introducing the keynote: Gary Hall

Cardiff University, 7^th July 2011

 

Hello. I am Paul Bowman, one of the organisers of this conference, and it is my great pleasure to introduce our keynote speaker, Professor Gary Hall.

 

Now: in the context first of the Labour-commissioned Browne Report, which recommended removing virtually all state funding for university teaching, and second the execution of these recommended cuts, and more, by the accursed coalition of the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats – or the current government, that has been appropriately called the ‘Con-Dem’ coalition – in the context of this, it has become not simply fashionable or current to rethink the university, but urgent. The transformation of the university is widely recognized as urgent, as serious, as challenging, as immensely significant – as likely to be transformative not just of the university, but of untold realms and contexts of culture and society.

 

Well, our keynote today, Professor Gary Hall has long been at the forefront of thinking and rethinking all manner of transformations of the university, long before the current state of emergency. He is currently Professor of Media and Performing Arts in the School of Art and Design at Coventry University. But his first book, Culture in Bits (Continuum, 2002) was located firmly in the field of cultural studies. And when I say ‘cultural studies’ I mean to refer to a very precise institutional field, which is also what Professor Hall means when he refers to cultural studies: a project, a politicization of academia – or, at least, an insistence on the political dimensions of academic work; some of the features of which more and more of us are now coming to see, now that the Con-Dem Government are working to transform the university in so many ways. The disciplines are political. They have political charges, values, orientations, and consequences.

 

Gary Hall’s first book, Culture in Bits, identified and focused on many of these, and argued for the importance of cultural theory (and, specifically, deconstruction) not only for rethinking culture, but also for rethinking, reworking and potentially – hopefully – transforming the disciplines – but in directions that we, as academics, as scholars, as researchers, might desire (rather than the corporate, consumerist directions preferred by managerialism and government).

 

This is also why Professor Hall set up an online, open access, experimental but peer reviewed and eminently serious academic journal – called Culture Machine – and long before the proliferation of such journals. Most importantly, this project did not have anything like a ‘business model’. In fact it always aimed to promote basic, theoretical, innovative, political, philosophical, and otherwise cutting edge experiments and transformations in cultural studies and cultural theory – and it did so in order to try to disarticulate academia from a business model – to release it from the stranglehold that profit-seeking publishers were tightening around academics’ necks. (This was at a time when – it is important to know – a few big publishers dominated the landscape and would routinely tell new PhDs to forget about trying to publish their research as a monograph and instead just to write them a snappy ‘lite’ entry-level undergraduate textbook.)

 

This concern feeds into Hall’s next book: Digitize This Book!: The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now (Minnesota UP, 2008). We need open access, Hall argues, for all sorts of ethical, political and scholarly reasons. Without it, we lose a lot. And we lose it not just into thin air, but we actually it to a certain enemy.

 

As part of this project, Gary founded CSeARCH, the cultural studies e archive, and then, with an international group of academics, The Open Humanities Press. This largely online endeavour also has a print dimension, but it is not tied to it. Rather, Hall seeks to experiment with new formats and functions: as part of The Open Humanities Press he is an editor of the Liquid Books series, which is open access, open ended, collaborative and democratic.

 

His other books include  New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory (Edinburgh UP, 2006) and Experimenting: Essays with Samuel Weber (Fordham UP, 2007). And he has published in numerous journals, including Angelaki, Cultural Politics, Cultural Studies, Parallax and The Oxford Literary Review. In 2010 he was Visiting Fellow in The Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge.

 

His website tells me he is currently developing a series of what are called ‘politico-institutional interventions’ that have been called activist scholarship or 'deconstructions in the public sphere' – which draw on digital media to actualise or creatively perform critical and cultural theory; and that he is currently writing two monographs: Media Gifts, designed as a follow-up to Digitize This Book! and There Are No Digital Humanities. Together with a few others and The Open Humanities Press, he is also working on the JISC-funded project LivBL: Living Books about Life, a sustainable series of electronic open access books about life – with life understood both philosophically and biologically – which seeks to provide a bridge between the humanities and the sciences.

 

I have known Gary Hall’s work since I was an editor of the journal Parallax the mid-90s. It immediately and has always struck me as being committed to transforming the university, by tactics and strategies of subverting the stultifying holds of corporatism, elitism, homogeneity, and, indeed, anti-intellectualism. His work is theoretical, yes; but it is also democratizing. It is always rigorous and diligent, but always equally unquestionably fascinating and engaging.

 

On a slightly more personal note, I want to conclude by saying that – for his sins – Gary was the editor of some of the first reviews and articles that I ever published. So I should probably take this opportunity to apologize to him for all the extra work that my clumsy, bumbling early drafts caused him. I’m sorry. But thank you: For this is another way of saying that he was the most patient, caring, tolerant and consistently constructive editor I have ever worked with. He set the bar very high. For Gary Hall never wants to reject. He always wants and works to transform. As a speaker, too, he is attentive and caring: he never wants to lose even a single listener, and always hopes to engage everyone on their terms, in terms of their concerns. And all of this is why I have such great pleasure in introducing to you, Professor Gary Hall.