Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

everyday speech. Much remains to be said about the precise history by which the word normal came to
move from professional discourse into the public sphere during the first half of the twentieth century. Some
of the most important and influential work on this history has been undertaken in the context of critical
disability studies. The aim of this paper is to contribute to such work by examining what and how the term
normal meant over the crucial period of its popular emergence in the first half of the twentieth century,
focusing on a number of key instances in which the concept of the normal began to circulate in the public
sphere, focusing on the scientific research, legal frameworks and popular opinion that shaped its emergence.
5L
Thinking about normativity through education, transgression, and self-care (Chair, Kylie Cardell)
Alexandra Coleman
“Good Life” Genre(s): Higher Education and Becoming Middle Class?
University promises the “good life”. A degree is sold as an essential commodity: as something one must have
to go places, to be someone, to have a life worth living. It is a fantasy that works to construct working-class
existence as deficit. It is a fantasy of escape: the end point is a middle-class life, a middle-class way of being
in the world. This genre of the “good life” works to block a recognition of other good life genres – that is,
other negotiations of what it means to have a meaningful and satisfactory life. Not everyone is interpellated
by the capitalist fantasy on offer. Using Bourdieu’s work on the “perseverance of being” and Hage’s work on
the “accumulation of being”, this paper will attend to the ways working-class university students from
Western Sydney negotiate this genre of the “good life” and the tensions and symbolic struggles that emerge
through this process.
Yrjö Kallinen
A culture of transgression
This paper is based on an ethnography on the experiences of a delinquent youth group in Tampere, Finland.
The initial shared understanding between the youth seems to stem from shared experiences of low
structural positions, broken backgrounds and exclusion. However, the cultural logic of transgression occurs
at the crossroads of these various overdeterminations and mutual efforts to actively self-determine the
immediacy. I explore the transgressive nature of these reciprocal cultural practices. This particular relation to
society is based on a strong internal sense of mutual solidarity and sharing and simultaneous external thrillseeking
transgression and theft. It is profoundly carnivalesque in its drive for excess and revelry, infallible
counter-normativity and deeply ambivalent, concurrently laughing and hostile, creative and destructive,
worldview. My focus is on the ambivalence of this cultural carnivalism as a way of living out social
contradictions.
Amber Gwynne “It’s up to you”: readers and the construction of reading in self-help books for depression
Since the early 1980s, popular psychology books concerning depression have emerged as a significant subset
of the commercially successful self-help genre, encompassing an increasingly broad spectrum of
approaches. Self-help research to date has focused primarily on evaluating efficacy in structured trials or
giving close readings from numerous critical frameworks. While these two bodies of research offer
important insights into both the positive and problematic potential of self-help discourse, neither
adequately addresses how actual readers choose and use texts that explicitly claim to help or transform.
Reader-reception frameworks provide a much-needed middle ground in the study of psychological self-help
books. This paper draws on recent survey and interview data to characterise some of the ways that readers
experience and enact self-help texts, highlighting the agency and authority they employ to negotiate and
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