Teaching as cultural practice: The pedagogy of Cultural Studies in Italy

This essay took the lead from conversations, worries and queries regarding the difficult situation of Europe – facing economic crisis, social instability, political myopia, and disaggregating drives – and the role of education as possibly indicating ways out of the present impasse. Major questions coalesced around the act of teaching, both in general and specific frameworks, and drew theoretical inspiration and practical suggestions on the methodological approach of Cultural Studies. The overall interrogation concerned the future of Cultural Studies in the specific European and Italian contexts: how would Cultural Studies in university teaching cope with Europe's widespread economic and social crisis? How would Cultural Studies resist the tendency towards assimilation within canonical subjects that had become evident in Italy since Legge Gelmini of 2010? How would political involvement and critical thinking (seen in a wide and ethical sense) be protected in Cultural Studies university courses and, specifically, in our course in Language Mediation and Intercultural Communication at Milan University? How would the project of Cultural Studies continue to be "done" (Giroux 1994) in the different contexts where we live? Indeed, following Andrew Hickey's argument in "The Pedagogies of Cultural Studies" our view of pedagogy is "as a mobilizing concept […] an opportunity for inquiry […] something performed […] suggestive of action" (Hickey 2016: 4). How would our pedagogy continue to be collaborative, dialogic, and transdisciplinary? How would we, as practitioners of Cultural Studies, help to read the present through the lens of the past for a better future? Lawrence Grossberg claims that Cultural Studies does not offer a "right story, no perfect story, and no complete or finished story" (Grossberg 2010a: 98), but it does offer a space for debate by growing the seeds that diverse intellectuals have sown in the Frankfurt, Chicago, and Birmingham Schools, and in particular Stuart Hall, whose work still informs and inspires the praxis of Cultural Studies worldwide (cf. Grossberg 2015; Apple 2015; Roman 2015). It proposes an advisable project that convincingly relies on education (Grossberg 2010b).