It was a great pleasure and an honour to be asked to contribute to the Meaghan Morris Festival at the University of Sydney in 2016, to acknowledge and celebrate Meaghan Morris’s foundational contribution to cultural studies in Australia, and internationally. What follows is, more or less, what I said at the time.For many years now, Meaghan has been my most valued colleague in cultural studies; she has been the firmest of friends, and a doughty comrade-in-arms for a critical, politically engaged and explicitly located cultural studies. I have to admit, though, that our relationship didn’t begin all that well. I first met Meaghan Morris when we were both speaking at the now legendary Cultural Studies Now and In The Future conference that Larry Grossberg hosted at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, in 1990. Meaghan was already an international star by then, and her presence at this event is evident to anyone who reads the book which came from that conference.
Hope against hope: COVID-19 and the space for political imagination