Lilia Efimova has been thinking about the academic’s desire to explore and hunt down treasures deep in “theory land”, and how best to reconcile that with the ethics of research – by which both she and I mean something much more than the functional applied ethics that are represented by the hoop-jumping processes of getting “ethical clearance” from your university. Rather, the ethics at the core of our research practice have serious implications for how we go about engaging research “subjects”, the relationship theory has to methodology, and how our research is fed back into the world ‘out there’.:

For me research is about impact. Of course, intellectual curiosity, contribution to a theory and rigor should be there, but for me my own research makes sense only if it makes a difference in the lives of people. People who may or may not understand the language of theory […] It’s only now I’m starting to articulate my implicit beliefs in [the] researcher’s accountability to the broader community than his or her research peers, the responsibility to bring the research results back from the theory land to where most people live, either by translating them into everyday words, teaching the language of theory or even involving them as co-researchers…

Amen to that. Back here, there has been a bit of a discussion going around lately about the place of theory in Australian cultural studies.

What I would say about it is that cultural studies as research practice, at least in the tradition that I identify with most (OK, mostly ‘British’), has traditionally integrated and built cultural and critical theory in symbiosis with various kinds of empirical work, with both ‘theory’ and ‘praxis’ emphasised to greater or lesser extent. But if work that is happy to march under the banner of cultural studies loses its core ethics – which I might articulate variously as popular empathy, ‘critical’ engagement, and a commitment to building agency – then for me it just becomes the egocentric performance of theory. Really, although it can be seductive and mesmerising and intimidating, some of these modes of performance are not too much more than an exercise in theoretical and cultural omnivorousness and competetive aesthetic virtuosity.

More seriously, when the main game of theory is the performance of theory, it implicitly disavows any need on its own behalf to achieve material outcomes, or even material relevance, because Theory is supposed to be somehow inherently, transcendently, transformative. I didn’t leave classical music for more of that.