From Social Relevance to Public Intervention Cultural Analysis in and out of the Classroom

One of the defining features of the practice of cultural analysis is its insistence on testing the bearing of concepts by putting them in dialogue with the contemporary in order to produce socially relevant analysis. I propose to “test” the concept of social relevance itself by attending to its travels across contemporary contexts, and bring in another concept, intervention, into the conversation. While “being relevant to” implies a prior knowability of a context according to which the (ir)relevance of analysis can be measured, “intervening into” suggests the possibility of reconfiguring that very context through analysis. To unpack this, I focus on “public intervention” as a pedagogical tactic and offer examples from students’ interventions from the courses I taught in the last few years.