ABSTRACT
The last two years have seen a spate of academic summit conferences, their (primarily invited) speakers reviewing the field of cultural studies and asking questions about its pasts and futures. In my experience, most have been full of the noise of orthodoxies forming, of the closure of consensus, or of the slightly more muffled sound of differences being elided. Certainly it would be hard to deny that such meetings have a consensualizing, unifying rhythm which makes it increasingly difficult to think of theory as in any way contingent, or to acknowledge the varied social political contexts within which cultural studies’ ideas have been formulated and applied.
