As you plan a project that uses Keywords for American Cultural Studies or this website, you may find it helpful to be able to explain to participants what a keyword is, and to give them some guidance on how to approach a keyword project. Reading and discussing the introduction to the volume may help, but we also want to provide some other suggestions here. Feel free to use or adapt all or part of this text in your assignment or project description. In what follows, we address questions of content, process, form, and audience.

Content

On this website, as in Keywords for American Cultural Studies, a keyword is a term that marks a site of significant contestation and disagreement, not consensus. Keywords reward repeated exploration and reflection because debates and research about culture and society can be enhanced—rather than settled or shut down—by an increased understanding of the genealogies of their structuring terms and the conflicts embedded in differing and even contradictory uses of those terms.

As editors of Keywords for American Cultural Studies, we attempted to capture this complex understanding of language and its usages by asking contributors to address four basic questions as they wrote and revised their entries. These questions may be of use to students and others as they embark upon individual or collaborative keyword projects.

• What kinds of critical projects does your keyword enable?
• What are the critical genealogies of the term and how do these genealogies affect its use today?
• Are there ways of thinking that are occluded or obstructed by the use of this term?
• What other keywords constellate around it?

A good keyword project usually includes information about that term’s genealogy and links between the term and other keywords. It also contains an argument about the lines of inquiry that usage of the term opens up or closes down. The goal of a keyword project is not to produce an agreed-upon, dictionary-style definition of a word; rather, it is to generate critical and creative thinking, to inspire work that analyzes and evinces the ways in which keywords are, as Raymond Williams put it, both “binding words in certain activities and their interpretation” and “indicative words in certain forms of thought.” 

Process

The individual contributors to Keywords for American Cultural Studies took a variety of approaches to their entries in the volume,  Like Raymond Williams, some began from dictionary definitions or popular usages and complicated them.  Others started from existing research conversations about the term and then moved to historical and political examples.  Still others worked from a broad sense of archival sources.  All of the contributors wound up with essays that discussed the multiple meanings, existing and emerging, of the term in question.  Most marshaled arguments about where research and reflection on the term should go in the future. 

Courses and working groups may imitate these approaches.  It may be useful to begin an assignment or project with a discussion of popular usage or dictionary definitions, making it clear these references are only points of departure.  Entries in Keywords for American Cultural Studies, Williams's Keywords: A Vocabulary of Cultural and Society, and other volumes may serve a similar function.  Depending on context, it may also be instructive to begin with web searches, ethnographic interviews, or shared course or working group readings. 

One important thing to remember is that the collaboratories are designed to be viewed by anyone who logs into the website.  Individuals outside of the course or working group will be able to offer comments on the work-in-process, though they will not be able to edit the collaboratory page itself.  Operating on the principle that knowledge production is a more public than private activity, the collaboratories offer opportunities for unanticipated feedback without disrupting the focus of the collaboration itself.  They also create the possibility of structured collaboration across courses offered at different institutions or working groups operating in different locations. 

Form

The collaborative structure of the wikis housed on this website enable the production of essays similar to those in the volume.  But they also suggest other possibilities.  Participants in collaboratories may produce annotated and hyperlinked versions of dictionary definitions.  Or they may comment upon keyword essays published in Keywords for American Cultural Studies or elsewhere.  Or they may create and reflect upon archives of quotations and resources.  Or they may do other things that we cannot anticipate.

Underwriting these considerations of form are questions of scope and archive. The scope of a particular keyword project may be a specific research undertaking, historical period, or geographic space. Or it may mark an intersection between two interdisciplinary fields such as those named in the volume’s title: American Studies and Cultural Studies.  The corresponding archive may be limited to the readings of a particular working group or course, the qualifying exam lists of graduate students at one or more universities, or a structured discussion of an ongoing scholarly or popular debate.

As collaboratory participants engage the terms contained in the volume and those left out of it, as they generate new clusters of keywords and explore their intersections, as they track new genealogies and emerging points of agreement and disagreement, they will be producing new and dynamic knowledge formations that no stable printed book could contain.  We look forward to observing this process of knowledge production, and to viewing the results. 

Audience

In addition to housing the keyword collaboratories, this website serves as a potential space for the publication of the products of keyword projects.  If you feel that your course or working group has produced a keyword essay or artifact that merits further circulation, please contact us about publishing it on this site and copyrighting it through a Creative Commons license.  The next keyword project may take your contribution as its starting-point.