Vol 21 No 1 (2015): Interventions

This title of this issue of Cultural Studies Review, ‘Interventions’, was inspired by two different ideas. First, it refers to Grant Farred’s point that ‘interventions’—the drive to intervene and the insufficiency of ‘old’ methods as responses to new political sites and institutional eruptions—has meant that cultural studies has been forced to invent new methods, and cobble together existing methods, to engage contingently with emerging cultures. ‘Interventions’ call on cultural studies to look elsewhere, in what Farred calls  ‘the imperative to think out of context’ is reflected diverse ways in the research articles that appear in this issue. 

The title was also drawn from ‘Same But Different’, the special section edited by Jennifer Biddle and Lisa Stefanoff that makes up the second half of this issue. The contributions gathered together in the section were not an organised response to the Northern Territory Intervention (officially, the Northern Territory National Emergency Response Act 2007), rather they emerged from forums concerned with experimental and innovative Indigenous arts held in Alice Springs. But as the guest editors suggest, this collection ‘can be understood as itself an intervention in the non-consultative and top-down tendencies of current national policy and debate.’