International Journal of Cultural Studies

2022, Vol. 25(1) 3–13

© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/13678779211052607
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Original Article
John Fiske and the building
of cultural studies

Graeme Turner
University of Queensland, Federal, New South Wales,
Australia

Abstract
This article reflects on the career of cultural and media studies figure, John Fiske, from both a
personal and a scholarly perspective. Fiske was an influential force within the development of cul-
tural studies and television studies over the 1980s and 1990s, and a much-loved and respected
teacher and mentor. He was also a controversial figure at times. Fiske was accused of cultural
populism, of revisionism, and an unwarranted optimism about the political agency of media con-
sumers. While this article does not take on such accusations in any detail, it sets out to demon-
strate the importance of a proper accounting for his career that also recognizes some of its less
widely known aspects – such as his critical investment in building cultural studies during his eight
years working in Australia. The article also highlights the potential difficulties ahead for cultural
studies’ writing of its own histories of contestation and debate.

Keywords
Australian cultural studies, cultural and media studies history, cultural studies history, John Fiske,
television studies

There is a personal dimension to these reflections on the passing of John Fiske, who left
us in July 2021. I taught alongside John Fiske for seven years at what was, at that time, the
Western Australian Institute of Technology (WAIT) – later to become Curtin University

Corresponding author:
Graeme Turner, School of Communication and Arts, University of Queensland, Federal, New South Wales,
Australia.
Email: graeme.turner@uq.edu.au
4 International Journal of Cultural Studies 25(1)

– in the 1980s in Perth. We worked together on developing what was one of the first cul-
tural studies programs in Australia, team-taught subjects on cultural studies theory, tele-
vision, and popular culture, co-authored (with Bob Hodge) a book of semiotic analyses of
Australian popular culture, and collaborated with John Frow, John Hartley, and Bob
Hodge in the establishment of the Australian Journal of Cultural Studies – Australia’s
first cultural studies journal. Some years older than me, John Fiske remained a valued
mentor well beyond his time in Australia, and his support and advice was fundamental
to the development of my academic career.
In thinking about how the cultural studies community might look back on John Fiske’s
career, I was reminded of the interventions Henry Jenkins, among others,1 had made
more than a decade ago. Henry Jenkins’ several ‘Why Fiske still matters’ pieces
(2005, 2011), and the ‘Fiske Matters’ symposium held in Madison in 2010, were to
some extent recuperative enterprises, aimed not only at honouring a valued teacher
and mentor but also at reassessing John’s contribution to building the field of cultural
studies over the 1980s and 1990s. It is notable that such a reassessment was deemed
necessary. John Fiske was, by any account, a major figure in the development of televi-
sion studies, and cultural and media studies internationally. Nevertheless, there was
clearly a genuine concern among some of his colleagues about how cultural studies
might, over time, view his legacy.
I will return to that concern later on, but I want to begin my own treatment of this
legacy by offering a perspective that so far has not been part of any published discussion
of John Fiske’s contribution to our field. To do this, I want to turn to the period when
Fiske worked in Australia, from 1980 to 1988. At that time, cultural studies was an emer-
ging rather than an established field in Australia, as it was just beginning the process of
becoming a significant international location for cultural studies teaching, scholarship,
and research. Those who may have followed John Fiske’s career only after his move
to the US in 1988 may not be aware of the extent to which the dramatic development
of Australian cultural studies in the 1980s was indebted to John Fiske’s building of insti-
tutional support, and his personal investment in the locally based scholars who identified
with such a project.

Building cultural studies in Australia

When John Fiske arrived in Australia in 1980, there was good work going on in the new
humanities, especially in literary theory and film studies, but cultural studies was only just
beginning. There was a two-tier university system, with the universities in one tier and
‘colleges of advanced education’ (CAEs), similar to the UK’s polytechnics, given a
slightly more vocational and interdisciplinary focus in the second tier. Several universi-
ties had been established with an interdisciplinary mission in the 1970s, but it was in the
CAE sector where there was a greater degree of interest in developing new interdisciplin-
ary programs in the humanities and social sciences. While cultural studies was implicated
in the small steps being made to imagine how popular culture might be studied, it was
film studies, communications studies, and to a lesser extent media studies, that were at
the leading edge of these interdisciplinary initiatives through the 1970s. With the
CAEs being relatively new institutions, and with the interdisciplinary universities
Turner 5

(Griffith University and Murdoch University) seeking to differentiate themselves from

the traditional discipline-based universities which dominated the system, there was con-
siderable opportunity for developing innovative teaching programs in the humanities and
social sciences.
Fiske came to the Western Australian Institute of Technology as a ‘principal lecturer’
(the sector’s equivalent to full professor at the time), which made him the most senior
appointment in our field in Australia. In similar ways to John Tulloch, an associate professor
at Macquarie University who had previously found himself in this position, Fiske was
immediately thrust into what was effectively a national advocacy role. The university
system in Australia at the time, it has to be said, was not of the highest quality. Arts faculties
were still run by an elite class fraction of Anglophile (largely) men, who were challenged by
the changes happening in the new humanities – the discovery of ‘theory’, the attacks upon
disciplines, and the interest in broadening the scope and politics of the scholarly and
research interests of their fields. Introducing new programs in such a context was certainly
possible, but in the case of brand new interdisciplinary fields like cultural studies it could be
difficult, even in the CAEs where this old guard was less dominant. In most cases, the suc-
cessful establishment of programs in media and cultural studies required the production of
authoritative supporting documents, drawn from external referees who were themselves
drawn from the ‘right quarter’. Fiske worked out very quickly that his English background
placed him de jure in that right quarter, and he exploited it expertly to our benefit. He sup-
ported initiatives in media, television, and cultural studies for universities and CAEs around
the country, assuring reluctant heads of school and puzzled deans that these were legitimate
fields of teaching and research, that they were already established in the UK and the US, and
that it was worth investing in them. Literally no-one else was in the position to play such a
role at that time, and Fiske’s embrace of that responsibility made a major contribution to the
significant expansion of cultural and media studies teaching and research programs in
Australia over this period.
Personally, I had been doing my best to establish something like a cultural studies
program at WAIT before John arrived. My instincts were good, I think, but I didn’t actu-
ally know very much about how such a program should look. This was a very interdis-
ciplinary school, with a distinctively diverse student body with many mature-age and
first-generation undergraduates. My (still relatively dim) awareness of what was happen-
ing in the UK at the Open University encouraged me to think this might be the right place
to try something like that. My attempts to convince my colleagues were, I am sure, mem-
orable for their passion and (possibly) their ferocity, but I did not win many hearts or
minds. When John arrived, I was away on study leave, and so he was immediately
lobbied by my irritated colleagues, warning John about this young piece of work who
had been trying to redesign their offerings. Typically, from what he was told, John
thought that he’d probably get along pretty well with this difficult person and organized
to meet with me as soon as possible on my return. Our connection was immediate, and his
careful and canny support resulted in the program’s establishment and success. He knew
how to design such a program, and possessed the gravitas and patience to get it through
those committees. As for me, he undertook to improve my education, opening up his
library of British cultural studies materials – the Open University course handbooks,
6 International Journal of Cultural Studies 25(1)

the CCCS (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies) Working Papers series, and more –
to induct me into the history and theory of the British roots of cultural studies.
Support of this kind, investing time in a younger colleague and encouraging their
development, was central to John Fiske’s contribution to building cultural studies in
Australia. Most of those who were interested in teaching and researching in cultural
and media studies at this time were young, often without a continuing position, and in
many cases working in institutions where they had to fight for some intellectual space
for cultural studies. This was occurring at a turning point in the professionalization of
the university system in Australia, and this generation tended to be better credentialled
than many of their more senior colleagues. Unlike some of their older professors,
many had doctorates from good universities outside Australia, and were committed to
publishing their work. What they lacked would now be described as ‘professional devel-
opment’ – an understanding of what they needed to do to build a rewarding career in the
contemporary university, what their rights and opportunities were, and how to think of
themselves as part of an intellectual community that was larger than Australia. Many
of us had to be taught how to do the things that contemporary postgraduates now do
as a matter of course. In my own case, for instance, I had not considered the possibility
of writing a book from the work I had been doing with my students before John encour-
aged me to do so. Fiske filled a gap in the provision of career mentorship, personal
encouragement, and informed advice for many young cultural studies scholars around
Australia.2 He was particularly keen on helping them get their work published and direc-
ted to an international readership. His spruiking of the quality and distinctiveness of the
work going on in Australia to his editor at Methuen/Routledge, Jane Armstrong, was
responsible for her undertaking her first commissioning trip to Australia to seek new
authors in the mid-1980s.
The development of the pioneering Australian Journal of Cultural Studies, launched
in 1983, was very much John’s idea. At that time, while there were a few
Australian-based writers who had managed to find an international readership for their
work (Meaghan Morris is the most prominent example), Australian-based scholars
without an international profile had difficulty publishing their work, particularly if it
was focused on Australian subject matter. Setting up a local journal not only provided
a publishing outlet for these individuals, it also set up a platform that foregrounded the
best of the work that was coming out of Australian cultural studies. The distinctiveness
of that work was the reason why Routledge made us an offer to take the journal over from
the local editorial team and to relaunch it as what is now the premier international journal
Cultural Studies. This did raise its own problems. Since the transition coincided with
John’s move to the US, there were genuine concerns that the Australian dimension of
the journal would diminish or disappear entirely as the editorship moved with him.
While his successor, Larry Grossberg, worked diligently to protect our interests, the
journal did eventually lose that Australian identification. Realistically, one sees in retro-
spect, the internationalization of the journal was always going to have that kind of
outcome, given the disparities in scale and volume between what was going on in
Australia and what was happening in the UK and the US. By that stage, however,
bridges had been built and other Australian cultural studies journals, such as the still-
running Continuum, had come onstream.
Turner 7

Of course, later on over the 1980s and 1990s, other talented émigrés from the UK and
Europe would also play foundational roles in Australia – John Hartley, Tony Bennett, and
Ien Ang, among them. John Fiske was the first, however, and he had the distinctive focus
on building national platforms which would enable the field as a whole to develop. He
was not at all interested in becoming what the universities now call a ‘rockstar’ academic
himself, and there was little opportunity for developing that kind of status in Australia at
that time in any case. Rather, and with great enthusiasm and energy, Fiske just got on with
the job of working towards the growth and maturation of Australian cultural studies.
Much of this was done one on one, and in private – reading people’s work, advising
on book proposals, writing references for promotions, encouraging new ideas for research
and publication, and so on. When he left for the US, however, it was relatively sudden
and, regrettably, there was little opportunity for those of us in Australian cultural
studies to collectively acknowledge his service to us. Fortunately, I was able to invite
him to return to Australia in 2000 to address what was the first international television
conference to be held there, at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the
University of Queensland. He presented the lead keynote, a prescient exploration of
the likely political consequences of the early tendencies in surveillance market profiling,
and he was received with great warmth and affection. It was one of the last presentations
he gave before retiring from the university.

After Australia
There is no doubt that Fiske was a hugely influential international figure in the early
development of a cultural studies approach to television studies. Reading Television
(1978), co-authored with John Hartley and published within Terry Hawkes’ important
‘New Accents’ series for Methuen, is arguably one of the most significant contributions
to the serious development of television studies that proceeded from the 1980s onwards.
Drawing upon Saussure, Althusser, Barthes, and Lévi-Strauss for their methods of textual
analysis, Fiske and Hartley’s approach to television texts dramatically broke with the
conventional dismissal of the content of television as trivial, meaningless, and meretri-
cious. Television Culture (Fiske, 1987) was the next step in the project that Reading
Television had initiated, elaborating more sophisticated models for the analysis of televi-
sion texts, before Fiske cast his net more widely with the three books aimed at ‘reading’
popular culture: Myths of Oz: Reading Australian Popular Culture (1987) co-authored
with Bob Hodge and myself, Reading the Popular (1989a) and Understanding
Popular Culture (1989b). All of these continued an argument that had also informed
the earlier work on television: differentiating between popular culture and mass culture
in order to retrieve the potential of audience agency and to better understand how audi-
ences created their own meanings and pleasures from the popular texts they consumed or
‘lived’, and the cultural practices in which they engaged.
The move to America in 1988 eventually saw Fiske undertake a more direct engage-
ment with the politics of the social, as he turned from what had been a focus on the prac-
tice of textual analysis that had drawn from semiotics and structuralism, to what was
actually a more sociological interest in the structure and function of the relationships
between the media, culture, and power where he drew upon the work of de Certeau,
8 International Journal of Cultural Studies 25(1)

Foucault, and Bourdieu. Power Plays, Power Works (Fiske, 1993) and Media Matters
(Fiske, 1996) might be seen in this way. The beginning of Power Plays, Power Works
is particularly ambitious in setting out a whole theory of the politics of culture; it was
much less interested in providing the synthesizing and explanatory surveys that had
shaped the earlier books. In both of these books, the point of the analysis is political
and theoretical as much as it is pedagogic. One might suggest that Fiske, the translator
or popularizer of existing cultural studies approaches, had taken a back seat to Fiske,
the theorist, who wanted to articulate his own distinctive position. Certainly a great
many of his articles and chapters in the last decade of his career were focused upon the-
oretical debates. The focus of both these later books was upon race and gender, keenly
contested areas of theoretical and political debate within US cultural and media studies
at this point, and spoke directly (and provocatively) to a US readership in presenting
Fiske’s account of how power was structured in their country.
Whether or not John Fiske wanted this to happen, with his move to the US he did end
up becoming the ‘rockstar academic’ that he hadn’t been in Australia. The extent to which
that had occurred was brought home to me when I was sitting beside him for the opening
session of the famous ‘Cultural Studies Now and in the Future’ conference, organized by
Larry Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, at the Champaign-Urbana campus of
the University of Illinois in 1990. We were seated towards the back, and when John asked
a question in response to the first paper – introducing his question by identifying himself
– virtually the entire 800-person audience, as one, turned around in their seats to see him.
There were very good reasons for this prominence, of course. His books were widely used
by large cohorts of grateful graduate students as they grappled with what were unfamiliar
theoretical materials, and he was a charismatic personal presence. An exceptional teacher
in the classroom, he was also a gifted presenter in larger contexts, able to deliver complex
and well-organized lectures apparently without notes, and always supported by a cleverly
curated and often highly entertaining selection of slides and videos. Energetic and
engaged, his passion for the subject filtered through a lively and mischievous sense of
humour, he responded generously to questions and criticism from his audiences. There
was usually an edge to these performances, too. As Henry Jenkins has noted, Fiske
enjoyed ‘playing the bad boy’ (2005: xxiii), and was often deliberately provocative in
how he made his arguments, and indeed in the territory upon which he chose to make
those arguments.
That said, it was not hard to be provocative in early 1990s cultural studies. As the field
was picking up speed and moving into the higher gears, the debates about what it should
do, and how it might do it, had become diverse, extensive, robust, and at times personal.
While the introduction of textual analysis had generated much initial excitement, this was
fading as other approaches developed and competed for representation. The focus on the
polysemic text had inevitably led to questions about what audiences might actually do
with these texts, and so there was a growing body of work on audiences and what cultural
studies at the time called ethnographic research. The focus on audiences’ agency, in turn,
led to a backlash from those who were concerned that this work risked understating the
power of the larger overdetermining structures within which audiences were provided
with their choices. The political economists, in particular, accused cultural studies of
ignoring the political structures which framed the relationship between the media and
Turner 9

culture, and of lacking sufficient interest in understanding the media industries and their
regulatory environments. Within cultural studies itself, there was also the question of
whether the field was losing its oppositional politics as it became more respectable,
more institutionally embedded, and more popular (among publishers, in particular).
Some versions of cultural studies were accused of being complicit with the industries
and tendencies it had originally set out to critique, while there was also a continuing
concern about what would happen to that original oppositional politics (especially
around race and class) once cultural studies succumbed to the embrace of a highly pro-
fessionalized American academy.
Over the 1990s, Gray and Lotz (2012: 66) have suggested, John Fiske proved to be
something of a ‘lightning rod’ for almost all of these areas of contestation, criticism,
and debate. Where cultural studies was accused of quietism and cultural populism
(McGuigan, 1992), or in Meaghan Morris’s (1996) essay, ‘banality’, it was Fiske who
was named as the ‘exemplary figure’ (McGuigan, 1992: 159) of the wrong kind of cul-
tural studies. This, for McGuigan, was a cultural studies which displayed ‘abjectly uncri-
tical complicity with prevailing “free market” ideology and its hidden powers’ (1992:
159). The account of cultural studies outlined in Fiske’s early textbooks was also
accused of oversimplification. Morris characterized it as running ‘perilously close to
this kind of formulation: people in modern mediatized societies are complex and contra-
dictory, mass cultural texts are complex and contradictory, therefore people using them
produce complex and contradictory culture’ (1996: 159–60). The focus on the ‘activated
text’, the ‘active audience’, and the potential for resistant readings, all issues that are
investigated in Television Culture, generated the criticism that Fiske was too optimistic
about what these kinds of agency might actually deliver. Indeed, I was myself one of
those who argued that the progressive effect of ‘this multitude of textual possibilities’
was compromised by the fact that ‘the textual system may be more porous than the
social system’ (Turner, 2003: 99). While these criticisms certainly reflected legitimate
concerns and related to issues within the field that were widely debated over quite
some time, it is also notable how frequently John Fiske became the ‘exemplary
figure’, singled out as the key representative of what were actually widespread tendencies
and areas of contest and debate within the field as a whole.3

The pedagogic project

If Fiske was indeed a lightning rod for criticism over this period, there is also a view that
at least some of this criticism was ‘ill-spirited and personal’, at times misrepresenting his
actual positions or reducing them to caricature (Gray and Lotz, 2012: 70). If that is indeed
the case, then it is worth considering why. One reason for this may lie in what seems to be
a reaction against the kind of academic enterprise in which he was engaged. In my view,
and notwithstanding his increasing activity as a theorist and a political analyst over the
1990s, what Fiske was up to over his career was more a pedagogic than a theoretical
project. Or, as Henry Jenkins has put it while making a similar point, ‘as a theorist,
Fiske was also always a teacher’ (2005: xxxiv). The early television books, together
with his Introduction to Communication Studies (Fiske, 1982), while not all explicitly
framed as textbooks, were structured either as introductions to cultural studies analysis,
10 International Journal of Cultural Studies 25(1)

or as both an introduction to and an application of what was proposed as a new way of

understanding popular culture. They were accessibly written and set out to translate the
complexities of cultural studies theory into a simpler discourse – much in the way we
might do as teachers when introducing complicated ideas to a first-year undergraduate
class, with the full intention of adding nuance and detail at a later point. Furthermore,
the early books on popular culture, Myths of Oz, Reading Popular Culture, and
Understanding Popular Culture, were about popularizing cultural studies: readable, sim-
plified, and engaging analyses of familiar sets of so-called ‘lived texts’ employed as a
means of attracting popular interest in, and some understanding of, cultural studies’
approaches.4
Both of these publishing strategies – writing textbooks and engaging in popularization
– were crucial contributions, in my view, to the building of cultural studies both beyond
and within the academy. Indeed, they constituted part of what was brave and distinctive
about this emerging field of writing, teaching, and research. But they were still a risky
business within the academy. While they certainly attracted readers who were new to cul-
tural studies, they risked compromising the seriousness with which Fiske’s work was
regarded by his peers. Within the humanities and social sciences in general, the
writing of textbooks has customarily been seen as a second-order activity, dependent
on the work of others and not usually regarded as original research. There hasn’t
always been such a clear distinction in cultural studies and its version of media
studies, however. Early on, within a new and still developing field, some textbooks
played a substantially formative role, establishing an agenda, clarifying approaches
and practices, and in some cases providing original formulations or syntheses that
were subsequently adopted by scholars publishing in the more elevated formats of
research monographs and journal articles. Both Reading Television and Television
Culture did that, but Fiske was not the only one to do this kind of work. Small popular-
izing books opening up new theoretical territory (such as, say, Hebdige’s Subculture
[1979] in the New Accents series), or textbooks setting out new approaches to an estab-
lished field (such as Hartley’s Understanding News [1982], which was published in
Fiske’s Studies in Communication series), played a significant role in cultural studies’
development over the 1970s and 1980s.
Nonetheless, it is not hard to see how radically a project of popularization and transla-
tion ran against the grain of a cultural studies project that was so fully engaged in a
process that was not (I would suggest) one of theoretical clarification, as Hall once put
it, but probably more realistically of theoretical elaboration and complication. There is
also the possibility that the precise character of Fiske’s commitment to the notion of
the popular – the underlying element of romanticism within it that attracted, inaccurately
in my view, the label of populism – did not sit well within the more hard-nosed (and, yes,
rigorous) Marxist formation that was customary within the British origins of the field.
Within the US, while his direct engagement with US politics and culture might well
have been regarded positively, it is clear that within some quarters it was not. Perhaps
this could have been foreseen. Fiske’s readiness to take on such complicated socio-
historical issues as the US’s dealing with race, and his fearless wading into debates
around gender at a point when the historical resistance to feminism from within cultural
studies’ beginnings were being discussed in quite dramatic terms (Brunsdon, 1996; Hall,
Turner 11

1992; Women’s Studies Group, 1978), made it almost inevitable that he would hit
trouble. After all, he was a white, male Brit presuming to teach Americans something
about America –and if he succeeded, that was probably almost as galling as if he
failed. Nonetheless, all of that reinforces the possibility that the dismissive treatment to
which his work was at times subject was indeed, at least to some extent, personal. The
scale and extent of Fiske’s celebrity, the degree to which this may have seemed like a
‘cult of personality’, may be implicated in the degree of animus evident in these treat-
ments of his work; at times it does seem as if his critics just wanted to ‘bring him
down a peg or two’.
All of that said, though, the temperature of these debates also indicates what was at
stake here. This was the framing and reframing of the project of cultural studies at a
point when it was now up and running. It mattered very much how that took place,
and where that reframing positioned the field (or the discipline) for the future. Fiske’s
work is so important, and attracted so much attention, precisely because it took place
along that fault line – on the one hand, vigorously involved in translating, synthesizing
and popularizing the theoretical dimensions of cultural studies in order to make them
more useful for the kind of critical analysis the politics of cultural studies demanded,
and on the other hand treating popular culture with an optimism and a determined insis-
tence on individual agency that risked, at times, looking as if it was running against the
grain of that politics.

Cultural studies and its histories

Reviewing John Fiske’s career at a moment like this inescapably reminds us of the dyna-
mism of these first few decades of cultural studies. Thinking about some of the debates
which accompanied that career, however, raises questions about how well equipped con-
temporary cultural studies is to review its early histories, and to evaluate the contributions
of individual scholars to those histories. While it was relatively unproblematic for us to
properly acknowledge the contributions made to the shared histories of cultural studies by
pioneering figures such as Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, or Stuart Hall, it seems
to me that there is an emerging challenge for us as we accept the task of acknowledging
the legacies of that next generation – a generation that is now beginning to retire, or with-
draw from the field, or regrettably pass away. This generation played a fundamental role
not just in continuing the ongoing work of theoretical development but also in prosecut-
ing the spread and purchase of cultural studies. This was not just an internal expansion –
the field growing and diversifying in its approaches and interests. It was also the expan-
sion of cultural studies’ international reach, the establishment of an institutional presence
in many locations, its gradual take-up as something like a theoretical lingua franca for the
so-called ‘new humanities’ interdisciplines, and ultimately permeating the conceptual fra-
meworks unthinkingly applied every day by commentators and analysts from outside the
academic field when they referred to ‘the culture’ in ways that implicitly understood it as
a ‘whole way of life’. This ‘second generation’ was also, however, writing and teaching
over a period when there was vigorous debate, even at times deep division, over what
cultural studies might be, what it should do, and even whether and to what extent the
field of cultural studies should set out to police its borders.
12 International Journal of Cultural Studies 25(1)

In some cases, the issues at stake were never really resolved and so the intellectual dif-
ferences became more or less embedded in the ongoing shape and character of the project
of cultural studies. For example, there are still the unresolved debates about the institu-
tionalization of cultural studies, whether it should seek to replicate the disciplinary for-
mations of other fields of teaching and research, and indeed the desirability of
constituting cultural studies as a discipline at all (Grossberg, 2010; Rodman, 2014;
Turner, 2012). Further, while thinking of itself as field of continuing contestation and the-
oretical clarification has certainly made cultural studies a robust environment for debate,
it may also have encouraged a tendency to see each new development in the field as
superseding, rather than building upon, what had gone before. As cultural studies has
aged, it has formed generational strata that, typically, tend to focus most intently on
their own formation and on what differentiates them from what has gone before. It is
easy to imagine that such a tendency could affect how appropriately cultural studies
deals with the legacies of those whose contributions were viewed as important at the
time, but have been subsequently displaced. There is also, of course, cultural studies’
fabled presentism, and the still patchy engagement with its own histories that raises
further questions about what kind of recognition might be afforded to the work of
those who shaped these histories but who are no longer at the forefront of the practice
of cultural studies in the present.
All of that said, it is important that cultural studies maintains an interest in assessing its
histories, in properly understanding how they were built, and in acknowledging those
whose work created the conditions for the practice of cultural studies – work which it
is too easy to take for granted once its achievements are in place, and the struggles
involved too easy to forget. Cultural studies needs its memory, and the legacies of
figures such as John Fiske are fundamental to that.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this
article.

ORCID iD
Graeme Turner https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5967-7006

Notes
1. I am thinking here of those who spoke at the ‘Fiske Matters’ conference, such as Jason Mittell
and Lisa Parks, as well as those involved in organizing it such as Ron Becker and Elana
Levine.
2. It is probably worth pointing out that the cohort interested in cultural studies at the time prob-
ably numbered around 100 or so, nationally, and so it was possible to get to know just about
every one of them.
Turner 13

3. I am not going into these issues in detail here. Henry Jenkins (2005) has done this already, with
his thorough and insightful analysis of the criticisms of Fiske’s work.
4. There is certainly evidence that this worked with Myths of Oz; our structuralist analysis of the
layout of the suburban home resulted in an invitation to address the national conference of the
Master Builders Association – although it has to be said that the assembled builders were
clearly more interested in the following speaker, ex-cricketer Max Walker, who had just pub-
lished a volume of reminiscences entitled How to Hypnotise Chooks (‘chooks’, in Australia,
are chickens).

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Author biography
Graeme Turner is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland. One of
the founding figures in Australian cultural studies, and a significant contributor to the international
field, his most recent book is Essays in Media and Cultural Studies: In Transition (Routledge,
2020).