The last couple of days there has been lots of to and froing with Meaghan over what I should or should not present at Hong Kong. Finally settled on this as an abstact
Hong Kong paper
Beyond a boundary: theorising cultural institutions in cultural studies.
This paper analyses some of the possibilities for theorising cultural institutions within cultural studies by examining C.L.R. James's pioneering account of cricket in relation to the work of two more recent theorists, Jacques Ranciere and Bruno Latour. The problems the paper addresses are these: 1) to what degree to cultural instiutions (in this case Trinidadian cricket) expressive of political communiies and to what degree are they constitutive of them, and 2) what's at stake when cultural theorists give up on strong forms of collectivity for thinking communal institutions like Trinidadian cricket a la James.

This is too abstract, I know.

Feeling that I am inhabiting intellectual worlds that are just too distant: on the one side I am reading a very conservative, fuddy-duddy history of eightneeth-century religiion, Gordon Rupp's Religion in England 1685-1791 and falling under the spell of his account of people like William Law, the mystical non-juror. And on the other trying to figure out conference papers that wont completely alienate Hong Kong cultural studies folk. And on yet another orientating to the North American literary theory crowd for the School of Criticism seminar here. And so on. I actually think there are possibilities for connecting these interests and orientations in relation to one another, but it would not be easy, and I think a paper on William Law and Ranciere for instance would not find much of a readership.