Critical Understandings of Culture Breaking the Shackles of Time

In this episode, Dr. Nadine Chan, Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies at Claremont Graduate University, joins the podcast to discuss some of the key elements and methods of Cultural Studies. We also discuss her own projects on film as a colonial and counter-colonial object in Malaysia and Singapore, and the various ways of documenting environmental degradation in contemporary Southeast Asia.
Marcus Weakley:
Hello. Welcome to Breaking the Shackles of Time, a podcast about writing and other topics. We are continuing our new trend here with episode five. I have a wonderful guest with me today. I have Dr. Nadine Chan with me today. Welcome. Thank you so much for being here.
Nadine Chan:
Thank you for having me.
Marcus Weakley:
Yeah. I appreciate you coming and visiting and having a conversation. For a little bit of background about Dr. Chan, she’s a assistant professor of cultural studies at Claremont Graduate University. Her areas of research and teaching include media historiography and theory, post-colonial and new empire studies, environmental humanities media, and the Anthropocene, visual studies, global Asia, South East Asian film and media, amongst others. She received her PhD in cinema and media studies from USC, University of Southern California, and is a former Harper Schmidt fellow through the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago, and a Global Asia postdoctoral fellow from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
Marcus Weakley:
From what I know, she has two main projects right now. One is a project that’s conceptualizing film as an object that is animated by both colonial and counter colonial energies. And hopefully we’ll have a chance to talk a bit more about that, as well as another project that’s focusing more on the visualizations of the Anthropocene, particularly through questions of archive information and effect. And I think both of those studies will be great examples of the uniqueness of cultural studies as a field.
Marcus Weakley:
Just a bit more. Her research has been supported by a Social Science Research Council, Andrew W. Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship, Global Asia Postdoctoral Fellowship amongst others. And we are welcoming her here today to discuss the unique qualities of the field of cultural studies, as well as her specific work within that. So once again, thank you so much for joining me. And I would like to start as I typically do at a more general level, and then we’ll narrow in to your specific research. My sense is the audience might not fully understand what cultural studies is uniquely as a field or an academic discipline, so if you had to describe it to someone who doesn’t know anything about it, how would you do that?
Nadine Chan:
Yeah. So first of all, thank you for having me Marcus and for that intro. Well, cultural studies, it’s a lot of things. I mean, you could ask anyone in the field what the discipline is and they might all well give you different answers. But I think one thing we would all agree on is that as a discipline, it’s fundamentally interested in unearthing infrastructures of inequality, oppression, thinking about networks of power and politics an the production and circulation and use of cultural objects or at particular cultural moments. So, yeah, I mean the concerns of cultural studies, as I say, will always be fundamentally about the interrogation of power and the structures of power in whatever forms. So I think in the nutshell, that is what it would really be. Yeah, I guess I’d say it’s a discipline that’s built around an ethos, the ethos of always doing scholarship that in some way intervenes into questions of power, hegemony and ideology.
Marcus Weakley:
Yeah. So that’s really interesting. I mean, it seems to me that then it has kind of that social justice critical paradigm, and then it’s also very pragmatic, it seems like are very practical. Like