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Cultural studies

Cultural studies is a politically engaged postdisciplinary academic field that explores the dynamics of especially contemporary culture (including the politics of popular culture) and its social and historical foundations.[1] Cultural studies researchers generally investigate how cultural practices relate to wider systems of power associated with, or operating through, social phenomena. These include ideology, class structures, national formations, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and generation. Employing cultural analysis, cultural studies views cultures not as fixed, bounded, stable, and discrete entities, but rather as constantly interacting and changing sets of practices and processes.[2] The field of cultural studies encompasses a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives and practices. Although distinct from the discipline of cultural anthropology and the interdisciplinary field of ethnic studies, cultural studies draws upon and has contributed to each of these fields.[3]

Cultural studies was initially developed by British Marxist academics in the late 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and has been subsequently taken up and transformed by scholars from many different disciplines around the world. Cultural studies is avowedly and even radically interdisciplinary and can sometimes be seen as anti-disciplinary. A key concern for cultural studies practitioners is the examination of the forces within and through which socially organized people conduct and participate in the construction of their everyday lives.[4]

Cultural studies combines a variety of politically engaged critical approaches drawn including semiotics, Marxism, feminist theory, ethnography, post-structuralism, postcolonialism, social theory, political theory, history, philosophy, literary theory, media theory, film/video studies, communication studies, political economy, translation studies, museum studies and art history/criticism to study cultural phenomena in various societies and historical periods. Cultural studies seeks to understand how meaning is generated, disseminated, contested, bound up with systems of power and control, and produced from the social, political and economic spheres within a particular social formation or conjuncture. The movement has generated important theories of cultural hegemony and agency. Its practitioners attempt to explain and analyze the cultural forces related and processes of globalization.

During the rise of neoliberalism in Britain and the US, cultural studies both became a global movement, and attracted the attention of many conservative opponents both within and beyond universities for a variety of reasons. A worldwide movement of students and practitioners with a raft of scholarly associations and programs, annual international conferences and publications carry on work in this field today.[5][6] Distinct approaches to cultural studies have emerged in different national and regional contexts.

Overview edit

Sardar's characteristics edit

In his 1994 book, Introducing Cultural Studies, orientalist scholar Ziauddin Sardar lists the following five main characteristics of cultural studies:[7]

  • The objective of cultural studies is to understand culture in all its complex forms, and analyzing the social and political context in which culture manifests itself.
  • Cultural study is a site of both study/analysis and political criticism. For example, not only would a cultural studies scholar study an object, but they may also connect this study to a larger political project.
  • Cultural studies attempts to expose and reconcile constructed divisions of knowledge that purport to be grounded in nature.
  • Cultural studies has a commitment to an ethical evaluation of modern society.
  • One aim of cultural studies could be to examine cultural practices and their relation to power, following critical theory. For example, a study of a subculture (such as white working-class youth in London) would consider their social practices against those of the dominant culture (in this example, the middle and upper classes in London who control the political and financial sectors that create policies affecting the well-being of white working-class youth in London).

British cultural studies edit

Dennis Dworkin writes that "a critical moment" in the beginning of cultural studies as a field was when Richard Hoggart used the term in 1964 in founding the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham.[8] The centre would become home to the development of the intellectual orientation that has become known internationally as the "Birmingham School" of cultural studies,[8][9] thus becoming the world's first institutional home of cultural studies.[10]

Hoggart appointed as his assistant Stuart Hall, who would effectively be directing CCCS by 1968.[11] Hall formally assumed the directorship of CCCS in 1971, when Hoggart left Birmingham to become Assistant Director-General of UNESCO.[12] Thereafter, the field of cultural studies became closely associated with Hall's work.[13][14] In 1979, Hall left Birmingham to accept a prestigious chair in sociology at the Open University, and Richard Johnson took over the directorship of the centre.

In the late 1990s, "restructuring" at the University of Birmingham led to the elimination of CCCS and the creation of a new Department of Cultural Studies and Sociology (CSS) in 1999. Then, in 2002, the university's senior administration abruptly announced the disestablishment of CSS, provoking a substantial international outcry. The immediate reason for disestablishment of the new department was an unexpectedly low result in the UK's Research Assessment Exercise of 2001, though a dean from the university attributed the decision to "inexperienced 'macho management'."[15] The RAE, a holdover initiative of the Margaret Thatcher-led British government of 1986, determines research funding for university programs.[16]

To trace the development of British Cultural Studies, see, for example, the work of Richard Hoggart, E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Paul Willis, Angela McRobbie, Paul Gilroy, David Morley, Charlotte Brunsdon, Richard Dyer, and others.[17] There are also many published overviews of the historical development of cultural studies, including Graeme Turner's British Cultural Studies: An Introduction, 3rd Ed. and John Hartley's A Short History of Cultural Studies[18][19][20]

Stuart Hall's directorship of CCCS at Birmingham centre edit

Beginning in 1964, after the initial appearance of the founding works of British Cultural Studies in the late 1950s, Stuart Hall's pioneering work at CCCS, along with that of his colleagues and postgraduate students, gave shape and substance to the field of cultural studies. This would include such people as Paul Willis, Dick Hebdige, David Morley, Charlotte Brunsdon, John Clarke, Richard Dyer, Judith Williamson, Richard Johnson, Iain Chambers, Dorothy Hobson, Chris Weedon, Tony Jefferson, Michael Green and Angela McRobbie.

Many cultural studies scholars employed Marxist methods of analysis, exploring the relationships between cultural forms (i.e., the superstructure) and that of the political economy (i.e., the base). By the 1970s, the work of Louis Althusser radically rethought the Marxist account of base and superstructure in ways that had a significant influence on the "Birmingham School." Much of the work done at CCCS studied youth-subcultural expressions of antagonism toward "respectable" middle-class British culture in the post-WWII period. Also during the 1970s, the politically formidable British working classes were in decline. Britain's manufacturing industries while continuing to grow in output and value, were decreasing in share of GDP and numbers employed, and union rolls were shrinking. Millions of working-class Britons backed the rise of Margaret Thatcher, through the labour losses. For Stuart Hall and his colleagues, this shift in loyalty from the Labour Party to the Conservative Party had to be explained in terms of cultural politics, which they had been tracking even before Thatcher's first victory. Some of this work was presented in the cultural studies classic, Policing the Crisis,[21] and in other later texts such as Hall's The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left,[22] and New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s.[23]

In 2016, Duke University Press launched a new series of Stuart Hall's collected writings, many of which detail his major and decisive contributions toward the establishment of the field of cultural studies.[24] In 2023, a new Stuart Hall Archive Project was launched at the University of Birmingham to commemorate Hall's contributions in pioneering the field of cultural studies at CCCS.[25]

Late-1970s and beyond edit

By the late 1970s, scholars associated with The Birmingham School had firmly placed questions of gender and race on the cultural studies agenda, where they have remained ever since. Also by the late 1970s, cultural studies had begun to attract a great deal of international attention. It spread globally throughout the 1980s and 1990s. As it did so, it both encountered new conditions of knowledge production, and engaged with other major international intellectual currents such as poststructuralism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism.[26] The wide range of cultural studies journals now located throughout the world, as shown below, is one indication of the globalization of the field. For overviews of and commentaries on developments in cultural studies during the twenty-first century, see Lawrence Grossberg's Cultural Studies in the Future Tense, Gilbert Rodman's Why Cultural Studies? and Graeme Turner's What's Become of Cultural Studies?

Developments outside the UK edit

In the US, prior to the emergence of British Cultural Studies, several versions of cultural analysis had emerged largely from pragmatic and liberal-pluralist philosophical traditions.[27] However, in the late 1970s and 1980s, when British Cultural Studies began to spread internationally, and to engage with feminism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, and race, critical cultural studies (i.e., Marxist, feminist, poststructuralist, etc.) expanded tremendously in American universities in fields such as communication studies, education, sociology, and literature.[28][29][30] Cultural Studies, the flagship journal of the field, has been based in the US since its founding editor, John Fiske, brought it there from Australia in 1987.

A thriving cultural studies scene has existed in Australia since the late 1970s, when several key CS practitioners emigrated there from the UK, bringing British Cultural Studies with them, after Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of the UK in 1979. A school of cultural studies known as cultural policy studies is one of the distinctive Australian contributions to the field, though it is not the only one. Australia also gave birth to the world's first professional cultural studies association (now known as the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia) in 1990.[31][32] Cultural studies journals based in Australia include International Journal of Cultural Studies, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, and Cultural Studies Review.

In Canada, cultural studies has sometimes focused on issues of technology and society, continuing the emphasis in the work of Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis, and others. Cultural studies journals based in Canada include Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies.

In Africa, human rights and Third-World issues are among the central topics treated. There is a thriving cultural and media studies scholarship in Southern Africa, with its locus in South Africa and Zimbabwe.[33] Cultural Studies journals based in Africa include the Journal of African Cultural Studies.

In Latin America, cultural studies have drawn on thinkers such as José Martí, Ángel Rama, and other Latin-American figures, in addition to the Western theoretical sources associated with cultural studies in other parts of the world. Leading Latin American cultural studies scholars include Néstor García Canclini, Jésus Martín-Barbero, and Beatriz Sarlo.[34][35] Among the key issues addressed by Latin American cultural studies scholars are decoloniality, urban cultures, and postdevelopment theory. Latin American cultural studies journals include the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies.

Even though cultural studies developed much more rapidly in the UK than in continental Europe, there is significant cultural studies presence in countries such as France, Spain, and Portugal. The field is relatively undeveloped in Germany, probably due to the continued influence of the Frankfurt School,[36] which is now often said to be in its third generation, which includes notable figures such as Axel Honneth. Cultural studies journals based in continental Europe include the European Journal of Cultural Studies, the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, French Cultural Studies, and Portuguese Cultural Studies.

In Germany, the term cultural studies specifically refers to the field in the Anglosphere, especially British Cultural Studies,[37] to differentiate it from the German Kulturwissenschaft which developed along different lines and is characterized by its distance from political science. However, Kulturwissenschaft and cultural studies are often used interchangeably, particularly by lay people.

Throughout Asia, cultural studies have boomed and thrived since at least the beginning of the 1990s.[38] Cultural studies journals based in Asia include Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. In India, the Centre for Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore and the Department of Cultural Studies at The English and Foreign Languages and the University of Hyderabad are two major institutional spaces for Cultural Studies.

Issues, concepts, and approaches edit

Marxism has been an important influence upon cultural studies. Those associated with CCCS initially engaged deeply with the structuralism of Louis Althusser, and later in the 1970s turned decisively toward Antonio Gramsci. Cultural studies has also embraced the examination of race, gender, and other aspects of identity, as is illustrated, for example, by a number of key books published collectively under the name of CCCS in the late 1970s and early 1980s, including Women Take Issue: Aspects of Women's Subordination (1978), and The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain (1982).

Gramsci and hegemony edit

To understand the changing political circumstances of class, politics, and culture in the United Kingdom, scholars at The Birmingham School turned to the work of Antonio Gramsci, an Italian thinker, writer, and Communist Party leader. Gramsci had been concerned with similar issues: why would Italian laborers and peasants vote for fascists? What strategic approach is necessary to mobilize popular support in more progressive directions? Gramsci modified classical Marxism, and argued that culture must be understood as a key site of political and social struggle. In his view, capitalists used not only brute force (police, prisons, repression, military) to maintain control, but also penetrated the everyday culture of working people in a variety of ways in their efforts to win popular "consent."

It is important to recognize that for Gramsci, historical leadership, or hegemony, involves the formation of alliances between class factions, and struggles within the cultural realm of everyday common sense. Hegemony was always, for Gramsci, an interminable, unstable and contested process.[39]

Scott Lash writes:

In the work of Hall, Hebdige and McRobbie, popular culture came to the fore... What Gramsci gave to this was the importance of consent and culture. If the fundamental Marxists saw the power in terms of class-versus-class, then Gramsci gave to us a question of class alliance. The rise of cultural studies itself was based on the decline of the prominence of fundamental class-versus-class politics.[40]

Edgar and Sedgwick write:

The theory of hegemony was of central importance to the development of British cultural studies [particularly The Birmingham School. It facilitated the analysis of the ways subordinate groups actively resist and respond to political and economic domination. The subordinate groups needed not to be seen merely as the passive dupes of the dominant class and its ideology.[41]

Structure and agency edit

The development of hegemony theory in cultural studies was in some ways consonant with work in other fields exploring agency, a theoretical concept that insists on the active, critical capacities of subordinated people (e.g. the working classes, colonized peoples, women).[42] As Stuart Hall famously argued in his 1981 essay, "Notes on Deconstructing 'the Popular'": "ordinary people are not cultural dopes."[43] Insistence on accounting for the agency of subordinated people run counter to the work of traditional structuralists. Some analysts[who?] have however been critical of some work in cultural studies that they feel overstates the significance of or even romanticizes some forms of popular cultural agency.

Cultural studies often concerns itself with the agency at the level of the practices of everyday life, and approaches such research from a standpoint of radical contextualism.[44] In other words, cultural studies rejects universal accounts of cultural practices, meanings, and identities.

Judith Butler, an American feminist theorist whose work is often associated with cultural studies, wrote that:

the move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure. It has marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.[45]

Globalization edit

In recent decades, as capitalism has spread throughout the world via contemporary forms of globalization, cultural studies has generated important analyses of local sites and practices of negotiation with and resistance to Western hegemony.[46]

Cultural consumption edit

Cultural studies criticizes the traditional view of the passive consumer, particularly by underlining the different ways people read, receive and interpret cultural texts, or appropriate other kinds of cultural products, or otherwise participate in the production and circulation of meanings. On this view, a consumer can appropriate, actively rework, or challenge the meanings circulated through cultural texts. In some of its variants, cultural studies has shifted the analytical focus from traditional understandings of production to consumption – viewed as a form of production (of meanings, of identities, etc.) in its own right. Stuart Hall, John Fiske, and others have been influential in these developments.

A special 2008 issue of the field's flagship journal, Cultural Studies, examined "anti-consumerism" from a variety of cultural studies angles. Jeremy Gilbert noted in the issue, cultural studies must grapple with the fact that "we now live in an era when, throughout the capitalist world, the overriding aim of government economic policy is to maintain consumer spending levels. This is an era when 'consumer confidence' is treated as the key indicator and cause of economic effectiveness."[47]

The concept of "text" edit

Cultural studies, drawing upon and developing semiotics, uses the concept of text to designate not only written language, but also television programs, films, photographs, fashion, hairstyles, and so forth; the texts of cultural studies comprise all the meaningful artifacts of culture. This conception of textuality derives especially from the work of the pioneering and influential semiotician, Roland Barthes, but also owes debts to other sources, such as Juri Lotman and his colleagues from Tartu–Moscow School. Similarly, the field widens the concept of culture. Cultural studies approach the sites and spaces of everyday life, such as pubs, living rooms, gardens, and beaches, as "texts."[48]

Culture, in this context, includes not only high culture,[49] but also everyday meanings and practices, a central focus of cultural studies.

Jeff Lewis summarized much of the work on textuality and textual analysis in his cultural studies textbook and a post-9/11 monograph on media and terrorism.[50][51] According to Lewis, textual studies use complex and difficult heuristic methods and require both powerful interpretive skills and a subtle conception of politics and contexts. The task of the cultural analyst, for Lewis, is to engage with both knowledge systems and texts and observe and analyze the ways the two interact with one another. This engagement represents the critical dimensions of the analysis, its capacity to illuminate the hierarchies within and surrounding the given text and its discourse.

Academic reception edit

Cultural studies has evolved through its uptake across a variety of different disciplines—anthropology, media studies, communication studies, literary studies, education, geography, philosophy, sociology, politics, and others.

While some have accused certain areas of cultural studies of meandering into political relativism and a kind of empty version of "postmodern" analysis, others hold that at its core, cultural studies provides a significant conceptual and methodological framework for cultural, social, and economic critique. This critique is designed to "deconstruct" the meanings and assumptions that are inscribed in the institutions, texts, and practices that work with and through, and produce and re-present, culture.[52][page needed] Thus, while some scholars and disciplines have dismissed cultural studies for its methodological rejection of disciplinarity, its core strategies of critique and analysis have influenced areas of the social sciences and humanities; for example, cultural studies work on forms of social differentiation, control and inequality, identity, community-building, media, and knowledge production has had a substantial impact. Moreover, the influence of cultural studies has become increasingly evident in areas as diverse as translation studies, health studies, international relations, development studies, computer studies, economics, archaeology, and neurobiology.

Cultural studies has also diversified its own interests and methodologies, incorporating a range of studies on media policy, democracy, design, leisure, tourism, warfare, and development. While certain key concepts such as ideology or discourse, class, hegemony, identity, and gender remain significant, cultural studies has long engaged with and integrated new concepts and approaches. The field thus continues to pursue political critique through its engagements with the forces of culture and politics.[53][page needed]

The Blackwell Companion to Cultural Studies, edited by leading cultural studies scholar Toby Miller, contains essays that analyze the development of cultural studies approaches within each of a wide range of disciplines across the contemporary social sciences and humanities.[54]

Literary scholars edit

Many cultural studies practitioners work in departments of English or comparative literature. Nevertheless, some traditional literary scholars such as Yale professor Harold Bloom have been outspoken critics of cultural studies. On the level of methodology, these scholars dispute the theoretical underpinning of the movement's critical framework.

Bloom stated his position during the 3 September 2000 episode of C-SPAN's Booknotes, while discussing his book How to Read and Why:

[T]here are two enemies of reading now in the world, not just in the English-speaking world. One [is] the lunatic destruction of literary studies...and its replacement by what is called cultural studies in all of the universities and colleges in the English-speaking world, and everyone knows what that phenomenon is. I mean, the...now-weary phrase 'political correctness' remains a perfectly good descriptive phrase for what has gone on and is, alas, still going on almost everywhere and which dominates, I would say, rather more than three-fifths of the tenured faculties in the English-speaking world, who really do represent treason of the intellectuals, I think, a 'betrayal of the clerks'."[55]

Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton is not wholly opposed to cultural studies, but has criticised aspects of it and highlighted what he sees as its strengths and weaknesses in books such as After Theory (2003). For Eagleton, literary and cultural theory have the potential to say important things about the "fundamental questions" in life, but theorists have rarely realized this potential.

English departments also host cultural rhetorics scholars. This academic field defines cultural rhetorics as "the study and practice of making meaning and knowledge with the belief that all cultures are rhetorical and all rhetorics are cultural."[56] Cultural rhetorics scholars are interested in investigating topics like climate change,[57] autism,[58] Asian American rhetoric,[59] and more.

Sociology edit

Cultural studies have also had a substantial impact on sociology. For example, when Stuart Hall left CCCS at Birmingham, it was to accept a prestigious professorship in Sociology at the Open University in Britain. The subfield of cultural sociology, in particular, is disciplinary home to many cultural studies practitioners. Nevertheless, there are some differences between sociology as a discipline and the field of cultural studies as a whole. While sociology was founded upon various historic works purposefully distinguishing the subject from philosophy or psychology, cultural studies have explicitly interrogated and criticized traditional understandings and practices of disciplinarity. Most CS practitioners think it is best that cultural studies neither emulate disciplines nor aspire to disciplinarity for cultural studies. Rather, they promote a kind of radical interdisciplinarity as the basis for cultural studies.

One sociologist whose work has had a major influence on cultural studies is Pierre Bourdieu, whose work makes innovative use of statistics and in-depth interviews.[60][61] However, although Bourdieu's work has been highly influential within cultural studies, and although Bourdieu regarded his work as a form of science, cultural studies has never embraced the idea that it should aspire toward "scientificity," and has marshalled a wide range of theoretical and methodological arguments against the fetishization of "scientificity" as a basis for cultural studies.

Two sociologists who have been critical of cultural studies, Chris Rojek and Bryan S. Turner, argue in their article, "Decorative sociology: towards a critique of the cultural turn," that cultural studies, particularly the flavor championed by Stuart Hall, lacks a stable research agenda, and privileges the contemporary reading of texts, thus producing an ahistorical theoretical focus.[62] Many,[who?] however, would argue, following Hall, that cultural studies have always sought to avoid the establishment of a fixed research agenda; this follows from its critique of disciplinarity. Moreover, Hall and many others have long argued against the misunderstanding that textual analysis is the sole methodology of cultural studies, and have practiced numerous other approaches, as noted above. Rojek and Turner also level the accusation that there is "a sense of moral superiority about the correctness of the political views articulated" in cultural studies.[62]

Science wars edit

In 1996, physicist Alan Sokal expressed his opposition to cultural studies by submitting a hoax article to a cultural studies journal, Social Text. The article, which was crafted as a parody of what Sokal referred to as the "fashionable nonsense" of postmodernism, was accepted by the editors of the journal, which did not at the time practice peer review. When the paper appeared in print, Sokal published a second article in a self-described "academic gossip" magazine, Lingua Franca, revealing his hoax on Social Text. Sokal stated that his motivation stemmed from his rejection of contemporary critiques of scientific rationalism:[63]

Politically, I'm angered because most (though not all) of this silliness is emanating from the self-proclaimed Left. We're witnessing here a profound historical volte-face. For most of the past two centuries, the Left has been identified with science and against obscurantism; we have believed that rational thought and the fearless analysis of objective reality (both natural and social) are incisive tools for combating the mystifications promoted by the powerful – not to mention being desirable human ends in their own right. The recent turn of many "progressive" or "leftist" academic humanists and social scientists toward one or another form of epistemic relativism betrays this worthy heritage and undermines the already fragile prospects for progressive social critique. Theorizing about "the social construction of reality" won't help us find an effective treatment for AIDS or devise strategies for preventing global warming. Nor can we combat false ideas in history, sociology, economics and politics if we reject the notions of truth and falsity.

In response to this critique, Jacques Derrida wrote:[64]

In whose interest was it to go for a quick practical joke rather than taking part in the work which, sadly, it replaced?

Founding works edit

Hall and others have identified some core originating texts, or the original "curricula," of the field of cultural studies:

See also edit

References edit

  1. ^ See Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler (eds.), Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1992. Also see Simon During (ed.), The Cultural Studies Reader, 3rd Ed. New York: Routledge, 2007.
  2. ^ "Cultural studies" is not synonymous with either "area studies" or "ethnic studies," although there are many cultural studies practitioners working in both area studies and ethnic studies programs and professional associations (e.g. American studies, Asian studies, African-American studies, Latina/o Studies, European studies, Latin American studies, etc.).
  3. ^ "cultural studies | interdisciplinary field". Encyclopædia Britannica. from the original on 1 August 2017. Retrieved 28 June 2017.
  4. ^ Pain, R. and Smith, S. eds., 2008. Fear: Critical geopolitics and everyday life. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
  5. ^ Bérubé, Michael (2009), "What's the Matter with Cultural Studies?" 12 November 2016 at the Wayback Machine, The Chronicle of Higher Education.
  6. ^ "Cultural Studies Associations, Networks and Programs" 9 November 2011 at the Wayback Machine, extensive, but incomplete, list of associations, networks and programs as found on the website for the Association of Cultural Studies, Tampere, Finland.
  7. ^ Sardar, Ziauddin, and Borin Van Loon. 1994. Introducing Cultural Studies. New York: Totem Books
  8. ^ a b Dworkin, Dennis. 1997. Cultural Marxism in Post-War Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies. Durham: Duke University Press. p. 116.
  9. ^ see also: Corner, John. 1991. "Postscript: Studying Culture—Reflections and Assessment: An Interview with Richard Hoggart." Media, Culture & Society 13(2).
  10. ^ "About the Birmingham CCCS – University of Birmingham". birmingham.ac.uk. from the original on 2 June 2017. Retrieved 14 June 2017.
  11. ^ Davies, Ioan (1991). "British Cultural Marxism". International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society. 4 (3): 323–344. doi:10.1007/BF01386507. S2CID 143846218.
  12. ^ Hoggart, Richard. 2011. An Idea and Its Servants: UNESCO from Within. Newark, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
  13. ^ David Morley; Kuan-Hsing Chen, eds. (1996). Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London: Routledge.
  14. ^ Paul Gilroy; Lawrence Grossberg; Angela McRobbie, eds. (2000). Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall. London: Verso.
  15. ^ Webster, Frank (2004). "Cultural Studies and Sociology at, and After, the Closure of the Birmingham School". Cultural Studies. 18 (6): 848. doi:10.1080/0950238042000306891. S2CID 145110580.
  16. ^ Curtis, Polly (2002), "Birmingham's cultural studies department given the chop 13 March 2007 at the Wayback Machine." The Guardian.
  17. ^ Storey, John (1996). "What is Cultural Studies?" (PDF). (PDF) from the original on 26 October 2016. Retrieved 14 June 2017.
  18. ^ Turner, Graeme (2003). British Cultural Studies: An Introduction (Third ed.). London: Routledge.
  19. ^ Hartley, John (2003). A Short History of Cultural Studies. London: Sage.
  20. ^ a b Hall 1980
  21. ^ Stuart Hall; Chas Critcher; Tony Jefferson; John Clarke; Brian Roberts (1978). Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc.
  22. ^ Hall, Stuart (1988). The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London: Verso.
  23. ^ Stuart Hall; Martin Jacques, eds. (1991). New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s. London: Verso.
  24. ^ See the Duke University Press Stuart Hall: Selected Writings webpage (below in External Links)
  25. ^ See the Stuart Hall Archive Project webpage (below in External Links)
  26. ^ Ackbar Abbas; John Nguyet Erni, eds. (2005). Internationalizing Cultural Studies: An Anthology. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
  27. ^ Lindlof & Taylor, 2002, p. 60.
  28. ^ Grossberg, Nelson & Treichler 1992
  29. ^ Catherine A. Warren; Mary Douglas Vavrus, eds. (2002). American Cultural Studies. Urbana Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.
  30. ^ John Hartley; Roberta E. Pearson, eds. (2000). American Cultural Studies: A Reader. Oxford University Press.
  31. ^ John Frow; Meaghan Morris, eds. (1993). Australian Cultural Studies: A Reader. Urbana Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.
  32. ^ Turner, Graeme, ed. (1993). Nation, Culture, Text: Australian Cultural and Media Studies. London: Routledge.
  33. ^ Tomaselli, K.G.; Ronning, H.; Mboti, N (2013). "South–North perspectives: the development of cultural and media studies in Southern Africa". Media, Culture & Society. 35 (1): 36–43. doi:10.1177/0163443712464556. S2CID 145257054.
  34. ^ Ana del Sarto; Alicia Ríos; Abril Trigo, eds. (2004). The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
  35. ^ Robert McKee Irwin; Mónica Szurmuk, eds. (2012). Dictionary of Latin American Cultural Studies. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
  36. ^ See, e.g., Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, "Cultural Studies and German Media Theory," in Gary Hall & Claire Birchall (eds.), New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory (pp. 88-104). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006.
  37. ^ Ahrens, Johannes; Beer, Raphael; Bittlingmayer, Uwe H.; Gerdes, Jürgen (10 February 2011). Normativität: Über die Hintergründe sozialwissenschaftlicher Theoriebildung (in German). Springer-Verlag. ISBN 9783531930107. from the original on 30 June 2023. Retrieved 2 October 2020.
  38. ^ Chen, Kuan-Hsing; Chua, Beng Huat (2007). The Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Reader. London: Routledge.
  39. ^ Hall, Stuart (June 1986). "Gramsci's Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity". Journal of Communication Inquiry. 10 (2): 5–27. doi:10.1177/019685998601000202. S2CID 53782.
  40. ^ Lash 2007, pp. 68–69
  41. ^ Edgar & Sedgewick, 165.
  42. ^ Giddens, Anthony (1984). The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Malden, MA: Polity Press.
  43. ^ Guins, Raiford; Cruz, Omayra Zaragoza, eds. (1 May 2005). Popular Culture: A Reader. London: SAGE Publications. p. 67. ISBN 978-0-7619-7472-7. from the original on 30 June 2023. Retrieved 6 January 2023.
  44. ^ Grossberg, Lawrence (2010). Cultural Studies in the Future Tense. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
  45. ^ Butler, Judith (1997). "Further Reflections on Conversations of Our Time". Diacritics. 27 (1): 13–15. doi:10.1353/dia.1997.0004. S2CID 170598741. (PDF) from the original on 30 June 2023. Retrieved 2 October 2020.
  46. ^ Appadurai, Arjun (1996). Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
  47. ^ Gilbert, Jeremy (2008). "Against the Commodification of Everything". Cultural Studies. 22 (5): 551–566. doi:10.1080/09502380802245811. S2CID 142515063.
  48. ^ Fiske, Hodge and Turner (1987). Myths of Oz: Reading Australian Popular Culture. Allen & Unwin: Boston.
  49. ^ Bakhtin, Mikhail 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, p. 4.
  50. ^ Lewis, Jeff. 2008. Cultural Studies. London: SAGE.
  51. ^ Lewis, Jeff. 2005. Language Wars: The Role of Media and Culture in Global Terror and Political Violence. London: Pluto Press.
  52. ^ Lewis 2008
  53. ^ During 2007
  54. ^ Miller 2006, p. index
  55. ^ "How to Read and Why". C-SPAN. 3 September 2000. from the original on 19 April 2017. Retrieved 19 April 2017.
  56. ^ "Cultural Rhetorics Consortium". from the original on 24 September 2021. Retrieved 13 September 2021.
  57. ^ "Introduction: Rhetorics and Literacies of Climate Change | enculturation". enculturation.net. from the original on 12 October 2021. Retrieved 13 September 2021.
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  60. ^ Richard Harker, Cheleen Mahar, Chris Wilkes (eds), An Introduction to the Work of Pierre Bourdieu: The Theory of Practice. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1990, pp. 68–71.
  61. ^ Bourdieu, Pierre (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674212770.
  62. ^ a b Rojek, Chris, and Bryan Turner. 2000. "Decorative sociology: towards a critique of the cultural turn." The Sociological Review 48(4):629–48.
  63. ^ Sokal, Alan. 1996. "A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies 4 September 2019 at the Wayback Machine," translated by D. Sleator. NYU Department of Physics.
  64. ^ Derrida, Jacques. 2005. "Sokal and Bricmont aren't serious" In: J. Derrida (Ed.), R. Bowlby (Trans.),Paper Machine. (pp. 70-72). Stanford CA: Stanford University Press (first published 1997 "Sokal et Bricmont ne sont pas sérieux." in Le Monde: p. 17.).

Sources edit

  • Bitar, Amer (2020). Bedouin Visual Leadership in the Middle East: The Power of Aesthetics and Practical Implications. Springer Nature. ISBN 9783030573973.
  • Du Gay, Paul, et al. 1997. Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman. Culture, Media and Identities. London: SAGE, in association with Open University.
  • During, Simon (2007). The cultural studies reader (3rd ed.). London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-37412-5.
  • Edgar, Andrew, and Peter Sedgwick. 2005. Cultural Theory: The Key Concepts (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge.
  • Engel, Manfred. 2008. "Cultural and Literary Studies." Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 31:460–67.
  • Grossberg, Lawrence (2010). Cultural Studies in the Future Tense. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
  • Grossberg, Lawrence; Nelson, Cary; Treichler, Paula, eds. (1992). Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-90351-3..
  • Hall, Gary & Birchall, Claire, eds. (2006). New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
  • Hall, Stuart, ed. (1980). Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-1979. London: Routledge in association with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham. ISBN 0-09-142070-9.
  • —— 1980. "Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms." Media, Culture, and Society 2.
  • —— 1992. "Race, Culture, and Communications: Looking Backward and Forward at Cultural Studies." Rethinking Marxism 5(1):10–18.
  • Hoggart, Richard. 1957. The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working Class Life. Chatto and Windus. ISBN 0-7011-0763-4
  • Hartley, John (2003). A Short History of Cultural Studies. London: Sage.
  • Johnson, Richard. 1986–87. "What Is Cultural Studies Anyway?" Social Text 16:38–80.
  • —— 2004. "Multiplying Methods: From Pluralism to Combination." pp. 26–43 in Practice of Cultural Studies. London: SAGE.
  • —— "Post-Hegemony? I Don't Think So" Theory, Culture & Society 24(3):95–110.
  • Lash, Scott (May 2007). "Power after Hegemony: Cultural Studies in Mutation?". Theory, Culture & Society. 24 (3): 55–78. doi:10.1177/0263276407075956. S2CID 145639801.
  • Lewis, Jeff (2008). Cultural Studies: The Basics (2nd ed.). London: Sage Publications. ISBN 978-1-4129-2229-6.
  • Lindlof, T. R., and B. C. Taylor. 2002. Qualitative Communication Research Methods (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
  • Longhurst, Brian, Greg Smith, Gaynor Bagnall, Garry Crawford, and Michael Ogborn. 2008. Introducing Cultural Studies (2nd ed.). London: Pearson. ISBN 978-1-4058-5843-4.
  • Miller, Toby, ed. (2006). A Companion to Cultural Studies. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. ISBN 978-0-631-21788-6.
  • Pollock, Griselda, ed. 1996. Generations and Geographies: Critical Theories and Critical Practices in Feminism and the Visual Arts. Routledge.
  • —— 2006. Psychoanalysis and the Image. Boston: Blackwell.
  • Smith, Paul. 1991. "A Course In 'Cultural Studies'." The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 24(1):39–49.
  • —— 2006. "Looking Backwards and Forwards at Cultural Studies[permanent dead link]." pp. 331–40 in A Companion to Cultural Studies, edited by T. Miller. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. ISBN 978-0-631-21788-6.
  • Rodman, Gil (2015). Why Cultural Studies? Maldon, MA: Wiley Blackwell.
  • Turner, Graeme (2003). British Cultural Studies: An Introduction (Third ed.). London: Routledge.
  • —— 2012. What's Become of Cultural Studies? Los Angeles: SAGE.
  • Williams, Jeffrey, interviewer. 1994. "Questioning Cultural Studies: An Interview with Paul Smith." Hartford, CT: MLG Institute for Culture and Society, Trinity College. Retrieved 1 July 2020.
  • Williams, Raymond. 1985. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (revised ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.
  • —— 1966. Culture and Society, 1780-1950. New York: Harper & Row.

External links edit

  • CCCS publications (Annual Reports and Stencilled Occasional [sic] Papers) of the University of Birmingham 10 May 2019 at the Wayback Machine
  • CSAA: Cultural Studies Association of Australasia
  • Cultural Studies
  • International Journal of Cultural Studies
  • Stuart Hall Archive Project, University of Birmingham, UK
  • Stuart Hall: Selected Writings, Duke University Press

cultural, studies, journal, cultural, studies, journal, confused, with, culture, theory, cultural, theory, risk, this, article, multiple, issues, please, help, improve, discuss, these, issues, talk, page, learn, when, remove, these, template, messages, this, a. For the journal see Cultural Studies journal Not to be confused with Culture theory or Cultural theory of risk This article has multiple issues Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page Learn how and when to remove these template messages This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia s quality standards The specific problem is Many of the references are vague one or more publications with no specific page some are just explanations and notes Please help improve this article if you can January 2024 Learn how and when to remove this template message This article is written like a personal reflection personal essay or argumentative essay that states a Wikipedia editor s personal feelings or presents an original argument about a topic Please help improve it by rewriting it in an encyclopedic style January 2024 Learn how and when to remove this template message This article s tone or style may not reflect the encyclopedic tone used on Wikipedia See Wikipedia s guide to writing better articles for suggestions January 2024 Learn how and when to remove this template message Learn how and when to remove this template message Cultural studies is a politically engaged postdisciplinary academic field that explores the dynamics of especially contemporary culture including the politics of popular culture and its social and historical foundations 1 Cultural studies researchers generally investigate how cultural practices relate to wider systems of power associated with or operating through social phenomena These include ideology class structures national formations ethnicity sexual orientation gender and generation Employing cultural analysis cultural studies views cultures not as fixed bounded stable and discrete entities but rather as constantly interacting and changing sets of practices and processes 2 The field of cultural studies encompasses a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives and practices Although distinct from the discipline of cultural anthropology and the interdisciplinary field of ethnic studies cultural studies draws upon and has contributed to each of these fields 3 Cultural studies was initially developed by British Marxist academics in the late 1950s 1960s and 1970s and has been subsequently taken up and transformed by scholars from many different disciplines around the world Cultural studies is avowedly and even radically interdisciplinary and can sometimes be seen as anti disciplinary A key concern for cultural studies practitioners is the examination of the forces within and through which socially organized people conduct and participate in the construction of their everyday lives 4 Cultural studies combines a variety of politically engaged critical approaches drawn including semiotics Marxism feminist theory ethnography post structuralism postcolonialism social theory political theory history philosophy literary theory media theory film video studies communication studies political economy translation studies museum studies and art history criticism to study cultural phenomena in various societies and historical periods Cultural studies seeks to understand how meaning is generated disseminated contested bound up with systems of power and control and produced from the social political and economic spheres within a particular social formation or conjuncture The movement has generated important theories of cultural hegemony and agency Its practitioners attempt to explain and analyze the cultural forces related and processes of globalization During the rise of neoliberalism in Britain and the US cultural studies both became a global movement and attracted the attention of many conservative opponents both within and beyond universities for a variety of reasons A worldwide movement of students and practitioners with a raft of scholarly associations and programs annual international conferences and publications carry on work in this field today 5 6 Distinct approaches to cultural studies have emerged in different national and regional contexts Contents 1 Overview 1 1 Sardar s characteristics 2 British cultural studies 2 1 Stuart Hall s directorship of CCCS at Birmingham centre 2 2 Late 1970s and beyond 3 Developments outside the UK 4 Issues concepts and approaches 4 1 Gramsci and hegemony 4 2 Structure and agency 4 3 Globalization 4 4 Cultural consumption 4 5 The concept of text 5 Academic reception 5 1 Literary scholars 5 2 Sociology 5 3 Science wars 6 Founding works 7 See also 8 References 8 1 Sources 9 External linksOverview editSardar s characteristics edit In his 1994 book Introducing Cultural Studies orientalist scholar Ziauddin Sardar lists the following five main characteristics of cultural studies 7 The objective of cultural studies is to understand culture in all its complex forms and analyzing the social and political context in which culture manifests itself Cultural study is a site of both study analysis and political criticism For example not only would a cultural studies scholar study an object but they may also connect this study to a larger political project Cultural studies attempts to expose and reconcile constructed divisions of knowledge that purport to be grounded in nature Cultural studies has a commitment to an ethical evaluation of modern society One aim of cultural studies could be to examine cultural practices and their relation to power following critical theory For example a study of a subculture such as white working class youth in London would consider their social practices against those of the dominant culture in this example the middle and upper classes in London who control the political and financial sectors that create policies affecting the well being of white working class youth in London British cultural studies editDennis Dworkin writes that a critical moment in the beginning of cultural studies as a field was when Richard Hoggart used the term in 1964 in founding the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies CCCS at the University of Birmingham 8 The centre would become home to the development of the intellectual orientation that has become known internationally as the Birmingham School of cultural studies 8 9 thus becoming the world s first institutional home of cultural studies 10 Hoggart appointed as his assistant Stuart Hall who would effectively be directing CCCS by 1968 11 Hall formally assumed the directorship of CCCS in 1971 when Hoggart left Birmingham to become Assistant Director General of UNESCO 12 Thereafter the field of cultural studies became closely associated with Hall s work 13 14 In 1979 Hall left Birmingham to accept a prestigious chair in sociology at the Open University and Richard Johnson took over the directorship of the centre In the late 1990s restructuring at the University of Birmingham led to the elimination of CCCS and the creation of a new Department of Cultural Studies and Sociology CSS in 1999 Then in 2002 the university s senior administration abruptly announced the disestablishment of CSS provoking a substantial international outcry The immediate reason for disestablishment of the new department was an unexpectedly low result in the UK s Research Assessment Exercise of 2001 though a dean from the university attributed the decision to inexperienced macho management 15 The RAE a holdover initiative of the Margaret Thatcher led British government of 1986 determines research funding for university programs 16 To trace the development of British Cultural Studies see for example the work of Richard Hoggart E P Thompson Raymond Williams Stuart Hall Paul Willis Angela McRobbie Paul Gilroy David Morley Charlotte Brunsdon Richard Dyer and others 17 There are also many published overviews of the historical development of cultural studies including Graeme Turner s British Cultural Studies An Introduction 3rd Ed and John Hartley s A Short History of Cultural Studies 18 19 20 Stuart Hall s directorship of CCCS at Birmingham centre edit Beginning in 1964 after the initial appearance of the founding works of British Cultural Studies in the late 1950s Stuart Hall s pioneering work at CCCS along with that of his colleagues and postgraduate students gave shape and substance to the field of cultural studies This would include such people as Paul Willis Dick Hebdige David Morley Charlotte Brunsdon John Clarke Richard Dyer Judith Williamson Richard Johnson Iain Chambers Dorothy Hobson Chris Weedon Tony Jefferson Michael Green and Angela McRobbie Many cultural studies scholars employed Marxist methods of analysis exploring the relationships between cultural forms i e the superstructure and that of the political economy i e the base By the 1970s the work of Louis Althusser radically rethought the Marxist account of base and superstructure in ways that had a significant influence on the Birmingham School Much of the work done at CCCS studied youth subcultural expressions of antagonism toward respectable middle class British culture in the post WWII period Also during the 1970s the politically formidable British working classes were in decline Britain s manufacturing industries while continuing to grow in output and value were decreasing in share of GDP and numbers employed and union rolls were shrinking Millions of working class Britons backed the rise of Margaret Thatcher through the labour losses For Stuart Hall and his colleagues this shift in loyalty from the Labour Party to the Conservative Party had to be explained in terms of cultural politics which they had been tracking even before Thatcher s first victory Some of this work was presented in the cultural studies classic Policing the Crisis 21 and in other later texts such as Hall s The Hard Road to Renewal Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left 22 and New Times The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s 23 In 2016 Duke University Press launched a new series of Stuart Hall s collected writings many of which detail his major and decisive contributions toward the establishment of the field of cultural studies 24 In 2023 a new Stuart Hall Archive Project was launched at the University of Birmingham to commemorate Hall s contributions in pioneering the field of cultural studies at CCCS 25 Late 1970s and beyond edit By the late 1970s scholars associated with The Birmingham School had firmly placed questions of gender and race on the cultural studies agenda where they have remained ever since Also by the late 1970s cultural studies had begun to attract a great deal of international attention It spread globally throughout the 1980s and 1990s As it did so it both encountered new conditions of knowledge production and engaged with other major international intellectual currents such as poststructuralism postmodernism and postcolonialism 26 The wide range of cultural studies journals now located throughout the world as shown below is one indication of the globalization of the field For overviews of and commentaries on developments in cultural studies during the twenty first century see Lawrence Grossberg s Cultural Studies in the Future Tense Gilbert Rodman s Why Cultural Studies and Graeme Turner s What s Become of Cultural Studies Developments outside the UK editIn the US prior to the emergence of British Cultural Studies several versions of cultural analysis had emerged largely from pragmatic and liberal pluralist philosophical traditions 27 However in the late 1970s and 1980s when British Cultural Studies began to spread internationally and to engage with feminism poststructuralism postmodernism and race critical cultural studies i e Marxist feminist poststructuralist etc expanded tremendously in American universities in fields such as communication studies education sociology and literature 28 29 30 Cultural Studies the flagship journal of the field has been based in the US since its founding editor John Fiske brought it there from Australia in 1987 A thriving cultural studies scene has existed in Australia since the late 1970s when several key CS practitioners emigrated there from the UK bringing British Cultural Studies with them after Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of the UK in 1979 A school of cultural studies known as cultural policy studies is one of the distinctive Australian contributions to the field though it is not the only one Australia also gave birth to the world s first professional cultural studies association now known as the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia in 1990 31 32 Cultural studies journals based in Australia include International Journal of Cultural Studies Continuum Journal of Media amp Cultural Studies and Cultural Studies Review In Canada cultural studies has sometimes focused on issues of technology and society continuing the emphasis in the work of Marshall McLuhan Harold Innis and others Cultural studies journals based in Canada include Topia Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies In Africa human rights and Third World issues are among the central topics treated There is a thriving cultural and media studies scholarship in Southern Africa with its locus in South Africa and Zimbabwe 33 Cultural Studies journals based in Africa include the Journal of African Cultural Studies In Latin America cultural studies have drawn on thinkers such as Jose Marti Angel Rama and other Latin American figures in addition to the Western theoretical sources associated with cultural studies in other parts of the world Leading Latin American cultural studies scholars include Nestor Garcia Canclini Jesus Martin Barbero and Beatriz Sarlo 34 35 Among the key issues addressed by Latin American cultural studies scholars are decoloniality urban cultures and postdevelopment theory Latin American cultural studies journals include the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies Even though cultural studies developed much more rapidly in the UK than in continental Europe there is significant cultural studies presence in countries such as France Spain and Portugal The field is relatively undeveloped in Germany probably due to the continued influence of the Frankfurt School 36 which is now often said to be in its third generation which includes notable figures such as Axel Honneth Cultural studies journals based in continental Europe include the European Journal of Cultural Studies the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies French Cultural Studies and Portuguese Cultural Studies In Germany the term cultural studies specifically refers to the field in the Anglosphere especially British Cultural Studies 37 to differentiate it from the German Kulturwissenschaft which developed along different lines and is characterized by its distance from political science However Kulturwissenschaft and cultural studies are often used interchangeably particularly by lay people Throughout Asia cultural studies have boomed and thrived since at least the beginning of the 1990s 38 Cultural studies journals based in Asia include Inter Asia Cultural Studies In India the Centre for Study of Culture and Society Bangalore and the Department of Cultural Studies at The English and Foreign Languages and the University of Hyderabad are two major institutional spaces for Cultural Studies Issues concepts and approaches editMarxism has been an important influence upon cultural studies Those associated with CCCS initially engaged deeply with the structuralism of Louis Althusser and later in the 1970s turned decisively toward Antonio Gramsci Cultural studies has also embraced the examination of race gender and other aspects of identity as is illustrated for example by a number of key books published collectively under the name of CCCS in the late 1970s and early 1980s including Women Take Issue Aspects of Women s Subordination 1978 and The Empire Strikes Back Race and Racism in 70s Britain 1982 Gramsci and hegemony edit To understand the changing political circumstances of class politics and culture in the United Kingdom scholars at The Birmingham School turned to the work of Antonio Gramsci an Italian thinker writer and Communist Party leader Gramsci had been concerned with similar issues why would Italian laborers and peasants vote for fascists What strategic approach is necessary to mobilize popular support in more progressive directions Gramsci modified classical Marxism and argued that culture must be understood as a key site of political and social struggle In his view capitalists used not only brute force police prisons repression military to maintain control but also penetrated the everyday culture of working people in a variety of ways in their efforts to win popular consent It is important to recognize that for Gramsci historical leadership or hegemony involves the formation of alliances between class factions and struggles within the cultural realm of everyday common sense Hegemony was always for Gramsci an interminable unstable and contested process 39 Scott Lash writes In the work of Hall Hebdige and McRobbie popular culture came to the fore What Gramsci gave to this was the importance of consent and culture If the fundamental Marxists saw the power in terms of class versus class then Gramsci gave to us a question of class alliance The rise of cultural studies itself was based on the decline of the prominence of fundamental class versus class politics 40 Edgar and Sedgwick write The theory of hegemony was of central importance to the development of British cultural studies particularly The Birmingham School It facilitated the analysis of the ways subordinate groups actively resist and respond to political and economic domination The subordinate groups needed not to be seen merely as the passive dupes of the dominant class and its ideology 41 Structure and agency edit The development of hegemony theory in cultural studies was in some ways consonant with work in other fields exploring agency a theoretical concept that insists on the active critical capacities of subordinated people e g the working classes colonized peoples women 42 As Stuart Hall famously argued in his 1981 essay Notes on Deconstructing the Popular ordinary people are not cultural dopes 43 Insistence on accounting for the agency of subordinated people run counter to the work of traditional structuralists Some analysts who have however been critical of some work in cultural studies that they feel overstates the significance of or even romanticizes some forms of popular cultural agency Cultural studies often concerns itself with the agency at the level of the practices of everyday life and approaches such research from a standpoint of radical contextualism 44 In other words cultural studies rejects universal accounts of cultural practices meanings and identities Judith Butler an American feminist theorist whose work is often associated with cultural studies wrote that the move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition convergence and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure It has marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power 45 Globalization edit In recent decades as capitalism has spread throughout the world via contemporary forms of globalization cultural studies has generated important analyses of local sites and practices of negotiation with and resistance to Western hegemony 46 Cultural consumption edit Cultural studies criticizes the traditional view of the passive consumer particularly by underlining the different ways people read receive and interpret cultural texts or appropriate other kinds of cultural products or otherwise participate in the production and circulation of meanings On this view a consumer can appropriate actively rework or challenge the meanings circulated through cultural texts In some of its variants cultural studies has shifted the analytical focus from traditional understandings of production to consumption viewed as a form of production of meanings of identities etc in its own right Stuart Hall John Fiske and others have been influential in these developments A special 2008 issue of the field s flagship journal Cultural Studies examined anti consumerism from a variety of cultural studies angles Jeremy Gilbert noted in the issue cultural studies must grapple with the fact that we now live in an era when throughout the capitalist world the overriding aim of government economic policy is to maintain consumer spending levels This is an era when consumer confidence is treated as the key indicator and cause of economic effectiveness 47 The concept of text edit Cultural studies drawing upon and developing semiotics uses the concept of text to designate not only written language but also television programs films photographs fashion hairstyles and so forth the texts of cultural studies comprise all the meaningful artifacts of culture This conception of textuality derives especially from the work of the pioneering and influential semiotician Roland Barthes but also owes debts to other sources such as Juri Lotman and his colleagues from Tartu Moscow School Similarly the field widens the concept of culture Cultural studies approach the sites and spaces of everyday life such as pubs living rooms gardens and beaches as texts 48 Culture in this context includes not only high culture 49 but also everyday meanings and practices a central focus of cultural studies Jeff Lewis summarized much of the work on textuality and textual analysis in his cultural studies textbook and a post 9 11 monograph on media and terrorism 50 51 According to Lewis textual studies use complex and difficult heuristic methods and require both powerful interpretive skills and a subtle conception of politics and contexts The task of the cultural analyst for Lewis is to engage with both knowledge systems and texts and observe and analyze the ways the two interact with one another This engagement represents the critical dimensions of the analysis its capacity to illuminate the hierarchies within and surrounding the given text and its discourse Academic reception editCultural studies has evolved through its uptake across a variety of different disciplines anthropology media studies communication studies literary studies education geography philosophy sociology politics and others While some have accused certain areas of cultural studies of meandering into political relativism and a kind of empty version of postmodern analysis others hold that at its core cultural studies provides a significant conceptual and methodological framework for cultural social and economic critique This critique is designed to deconstruct the meanings and assumptions that are inscribed in the institutions texts and practices that work with and through and produce and re present culture 52 page needed Thus while some scholars and disciplines have dismissed cultural studies for its methodological rejection of disciplinarity its core strategies of critique and analysis have influenced areas of the social sciences and humanities for example cultural studies work on forms of social differentiation control and inequality identity community building media and knowledge production has had a substantial impact Moreover the influence of cultural studies has become increasingly evident in areas as diverse as translation studies health studies international relations development studies computer studies economics archaeology and neurobiology Cultural studies has also diversified its own interests and methodologies incorporating a range of studies on media policy democracy design leisure tourism warfare and development While certain key concepts such as ideology or discourse class hegemony identity and gender remain significant cultural studies has long engaged with and integrated new concepts and approaches The field thus continues to pursue political critique through its engagements with the forces of culture and politics 53 page needed The Blackwell Companion to Cultural Studies edited by leading cultural studies scholar Toby Miller contains essays that analyze the development of cultural studies approaches within each of a wide range of disciplines across the contemporary social sciences and humanities 54 Literary scholars edit Many cultural studies practitioners work in departments of English or comparative literature Nevertheless some traditional literary scholars such as Yale professor Harold Bloom have been outspoken critics of cultural studies On the level of methodology these scholars dispute the theoretical underpinning of the movement s critical framework Bloom stated his position during the 3 September 2000 episode of C SPAN s Booknotes while discussing his book How to Read and Why T here are two enemies of reading now in the world not just in the English speaking world One is the lunatic destruction of literary studies and its replacement by what is called cultural studies in all of the universities and colleges in the English speaking world and everyone knows what that phenomenon is I mean the now weary phrase political correctness remains a perfectly good descriptive phrase for what has gone on and is alas still going on almost everywhere and which dominates I would say rather more than three fifths of the tenured faculties in the English speaking world who really do represent treason of the intellectuals I think a betrayal of the clerks 55 Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton is not wholly opposed to cultural studies but has criticised aspects of it and highlighted what he sees as its strengths and weaknesses in books such as After Theory 2003 For Eagleton literary and cultural theory have the potential to say important things about the fundamental questions in life but theorists have rarely realized this potential English departments also host cultural rhetorics scholars This academic field defines cultural rhetorics as the study and practice of making meaning and knowledge with the belief that all cultures are rhetorical and all rhetorics are cultural 56 Cultural rhetorics scholars are interested in investigating topics like climate change 57 autism 58 Asian American rhetoric 59 and more Sociology edit Cultural studies have also had a substantial impact on sociology For example when Stuart Hall left CCCS at Birmingham it was to accept a prestigious professorship in Sociology at the Open University in Britain The subfield of cultural sociology in particular is disciplinary home to many cultural studies practitioners Nevertheless there are some differences between sociology as a discipline and the field of cultural studies as a whole While sociology was founded upon various historic works purposefully distinguishing the subject from philosophy or psychology cultural studies have explicitly interrogated and criticized traditional understandings and practices of disciplinarity Most CS practitioners think it is best that cultural studies neither emulate disciplines nor aspire to disciplinarity for cultural studies Rather they promote a kind of radical interdisciplinarity as the basis for cultural studies One sociologist whose work has had a major influence on cultural studies is Pierre Bourdieu whose work makes innovative use of statistics and in depth interviews 60 61 However although Bourdieu s work has been highly influential within cultural studies and although Bourdieu regarded his work as a form of science cultural studies has never embraced the idea that it should aspire toward scientificity and has marshalled a wide range of theoretical and methodological arguments against the fetishization of scientificity as a basis for cultural studies Two sociologists who have been critical of cultural studies Chris Rojek and Bryan S Turner argue in their article Decorative sociology towards a critique of the cultural turn that cultural studies particularly the flavor championed by Stuart Hall lacks a stable research agenda and privileges the contemporary reading of texts thus producing an ahistorical theoretical focus 62 Many who however would argue following Hall that cultural studies have always sought to avoid the establishment of a fixed research agenda this follows from its critique of disciplinarity Moreover Hall and many others have long argued against the misunderstanding that textual analysis is the sole methodology of cultural studies and have practiced numerous other approaches as noted above Rojek and Turner also level the accusation that there is a sense of moral superiority about the correctness of the political views articulated in cultural studies 62 Science wars edit Main articles Science wars and Sokal affair In 1996 physicist Alan Sokal expressed his opposition to cultural studies by submitting a hoax article to a cultural studies journal Social Text The article which was crafted as a parody of what Sokal referred to as the fashionable nonsense of postmodernism was accepted by the editors of the journal which did not at the time practice peer review When the paper appeared in print Sokal published a second article in a self described academic gossip magazine Lingua Franca revealing his hoax on Social Text Sokal stated that his motivation stemmed from his rejection of contemporary critiques of scientific rationalism 63 Politically I m angered because most though not all of this silliness is emanating from the self proclaimed Left We re witnessing here a profound historical volte face For most of the past two centuries the Left has been identified with science and against obscurantism we have believed that rational thought and the fearless analysis of objective reality both natural and social are incisive tools for combating the mystifications promoted by the powerful not to mention being desirable human ends in their own right The recent turn of many progressive or leftist academic humanists and social scientists toward one or another form of epistemic relativism betrays this worthy heritage and undermines the already fragile prospects for progressive social critique Theorizing about the social construction of reality won t help us find an effective treatment for AIDS or devise strategies for preventing global warming Nor can we combat false ideas in history sociology economics and politics if we reject the notions of truth and falsity In response to this critique Jacques Derrida wrote 64 In whose interest was it to go for a quick practical joke rather than taking part in the work which sadly it replaced Founding works editHall and others have identified some core originating texts or the original curricula of the field of cultural studies Richard Hoggart s The Uses of Literacy Raymond Williams Culture and Society and The Long Revolution 20 page needed E P Thompson s The Making of the English Working Class See also editCulturology Cultural Studies Association US European Communication Research and Education Association Norway International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies South Korea Popular culture studiesReferences edit See Lawrence Grossberg Cary Nelson and Paula A Treichler eds Cultural Studies New York Routledge 1992 Also see Simon During ed The Cultural Studies Reader 3rd Ed New York Routledge 2007 Cultural studies is not synonymous with either area studies or ethnic studies although there are many cultural studies practitioners working in both area studies and ethnic studies programs and professional associations e g American studies Asian studies African American studies Latina o Studies European studies Latin American studies etc cultural studies interdisciplinary field Encyclopaedia Britannica Archived from the original on 1 August 2017 Retrieved 28 June 2017 Pain R and Smith S eds 2008 Fear Critical geopolitics and everyday life Ashgate Publishing Ltd Berube Michael 2009 What s the Matter with Cultural Studies Archived 12 November 2016 at the Wayback Machine The Chronicle of Higher Education Cultural Studies Associations Networks and Programs Archived 9 November 2011 at the Wayback Machine extensive but incomplete list of associations networks and programs as found on the website for the Association of Cultural Studies Tampere Finland Sardar Ziauddin and Borin Van Loon 1994 Introducing Cultural Studies New York Totem Books a b Dworkin Dennis 1997 Cultural Marxism in Post War Britain History the New Left and the Origins of Cultural Studies Durham Duke University Press p 116 see also Corner John 1991 Postscript Studying Culture Reflections and Assessment An Interview with Richard Hoggart Media Culture amp Society 13 2 About the Birmingham CCCS University of Birmingham birmingham ac uk Archived from the original on 2 June 2017 Retrieved 14 June 2017 Davies Ioan 1991 British Cultural Marxism International Journal of Politics Culture and Society 4 3 323 344 doi 10 1007 BF01386507 S2CID 143846218 Hoggart Richard 2011 An Idea and Its Servants UNESCO from Within Newark NJ Transaction Publishers David Morley Kuan Hsing Chen eds 1996 Stuart Hall Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies London Routledge Paul Gilroy Lawrence Grossberg Angela McRobbie eds 2000 Without Guarantees In Honour of Stuart Hall London Verso Webster Frank 2004 Cultural Studies and Sociology at and After the Closure of the Birmingham School Cultural Studies 18 6 848 doi 10 1080 0950238042000306891 S2CID 145110580 Curtis Polly 2002 Birmingham s cultural studies department given the chop Archived 13 March 2007 at the Wayback Machine The Guardian Storey John 1996 What is Cultural Studies PDF Archived PDF from the original on 26 October 2016 Retrieved 14 June 2017 Turner Graeme 2003 British Cultural Studies An Introduction Third ed London Routledge Hartley John 2003 A Short History of Cultural Studies London Sage a b Hall 1980 Stuart Hall Chas Critcher Tony Jefferson John Clarke Brian Roberts 1978 Policing the Crisis Mugging the State and Law and Order New York Holmes amp Meier Publishers Inc Hall Stuart 1988 The Hard Road to Renewal Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left London Verso Stuart Hall Martin Jacques eds 1991 New Times The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s London Verso See the Duke University Press Stuart Hall Selected Writings webpage below in External Links See the Stuart Hall Archive Project webpage below in External Links Ackbar Abbas John Nguyet Erni eds 2005 Internationalizing Cultural Studies An Anthology Malden MA Blackwell Publishing Lindlof amp Taylor 2002 p 60 Grossberg Nelson amp Treichler 1992 Catherine A Warren Mary Douglas Vavrus eds 2002 American Cultural Studies Urbana Champaign IL University of Illinois Press John Hartley Roberta E Pearson eds 2000 American Cultural Studies A Reader Oxford University Press John Frow Meaghan Morris eds 1993 Australian Cultural Studies A Reader Urbana Champaign IL University of Illinois Press Turner Graeme ed 1993 Nation Culture Text Australian Cultural and Media Studies London Routledge Tomaselli K G Ronning H Mboti N 2013 South North perspectives the development of cultural and media studies in Southern Africa Media Culture amp Society 35 1 36 43 doi 10 1177 0163443712464556 S2CID 145257054 Ana del Sarto Alicia Rios Abril Trigo eds 2004 The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader Durham NC Duke University Press Robert McKee Irwin Monica Szurmuk eds 2012 Dictionary of Latin American Cultural Studies Gainesville University Press of Florida See e g Geoffrey Winthrop Young Cultural Studies and German Media Theory in Gary Hall amp Claire Birchall eds New Cultural Studies Adventures in Theory pp 88 104 Edinburgh Edinburgh University Press 2006 Ahrens Johannes Beer Raphael Bittlingmayer Uwe H Gerdes Jurgen 10 February 2011 Normativitat Uber die Hintergrunde sozialwissenschaftlicher Theoriebildung in German Springer Verlag ISBN 9783531930107 Archived from the original on 30 June 2023 Retrieved 2 October 2020 Chen Kuan Hsing Chua Beng Huat 2007 The Inter Asia Cultural Studies Reader London Routledge Hall Stuart June 1986 Gramsci s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity Journal of Communication Inquiry 10 2 5 27 doi 10 1177 019685998601000202 S2CID 53782 Lash 2007 pp 68 69 Edgar amp Sedgewick 165 Giddens Anthony 1984 The Constitution of Society Outline of the Theory of Structuration Malden MA Polity Press Guins Raiford Cruz Omayra Zaragoza eds 1 May 2005 Popular Culture A Reader London SAGE Publications p 67 ISBN 978 0 7619 7472 7 Archived from the original on 30 June 2023 Retrieved 6 January 2023 Grossberg Lawrence 2010 Cultural Studies in the Future Tense Durham NC Duke University Press Butler Judith 1997 Further 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24 September 2021 Retrieved 13 September 2021 Introduction Rhetorics and Literacies of Climate Change enculturation enculturation net Archived from the original on 12 October 2021 Retrieved 13 September 2021 I Am ActuallyAutistic Hear Me Tweet The Autist Topoi of Autistic Activists on Twitter enculturation enculturation net Archived from the original on 13 September 2021 Retrieved 13 September 2021 Beyond Representation Spatial Temporal and Embodied Trans Formations of Asian Asian American Rhetoric enculturation enculturation net Archived from the original on 13 September 2021 Retrieved 13 September 2021 Richard Harker Cheleen Mahar Chris Wilkes eds An Introduction to the Work of Pierre Bourdieu The Theory of Practice Houndmills Macmillan 1990 pp 68 71 Bourdieu Pierre 1984 Distinction A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste Cambridge Massachusetts Harvard University Press ISBN 9780674212770 a b Rojek Chris and Bryan Turner 2000 Decorative sociology towards a critique of the cultural turn The Sociological Review 48 4 629 48 Sokal Alan 1996 A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies Archived 4 September 2019 at the Wayback Machine translated by D Sleator NYU Department of Physics Derrida Jacques 2005 Sokal and Bricmont aren t serious In J Derrida Ed R Bowlby Trans Paper Machine pp 70 72 Stanford CA Stanford University Press first published 1997 Sokal et Bricmont ne sont pas serieux in Le Monde p 17 Sources edit Bitar Amer 2020 Bedouin Visual Leadership in the Middle East The Power of Aesthetics and Practical Implications Springer Nature ISBN 9783030573973 Du Gay Paul et al 1997 Doing Cultural Studies The Story of the Sony Walkman Culture Media and Identities London SAGE in association with Open University During Simon 2007 The cultural studies reader 3rd ed London Routledge ISBN 978 0 415 37412 5 Edgar Andrew and Peter Sedgwick 2005 Cultural Theory The Key Concepts 2nd ed New York Routledge Engel Manfred 2008 Cultural and Literary Studies Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 31 460 67 Grossberg Lawrence 2010 Cultural Studies in the Future Tense Durham NC Duke University Press Grossberg Lawrence Nelson Cary Treichler Paula eds 1992 Cultural Studies New York Routledge ISBN 0 415 90351 3 Hall Gary amp Birchall Claire eds 2006 New Cultural Studies Adventures in Theory Edinburgh Edinburgh University Press Hall Stuart ed 1980 Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies 1972 1979 London Routledge in association with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies University of Birmingham ISBN 0 09 142070 9 1980 Cultural Studies Two Paradigms Media Culture and Society 2 1992 Race Culture and Communications Looking Backward and Forward at Cultural Studies Rethinking Marxism 5 1 10 18 Hoggart Richard 1957 The Uses of Literacy Aspects of Working Class Life Chatto and Windus ISBN 0 7011 0763 4 Hartley John 2003 A Short History of Cultural Studies London Sage Johnson Richard 1986 87 What Is Cultural Studies Anyway Social Text 16 38 80 2004 Multiplying Methods From Pluralism to Combination pp 26 43 in Practice of Cultural Studies London SAGE Post Hegemony I Don t Think So Theory Culture amp Society 24 3 95 110 Lash Scott May 2007 Power after Hegemony Cultural Studies in Mutation Theory Culture amp Society 24 3 55 78 doi 10 1177 0263276407075956 S2CID 145639801 Lewis Jeff 2008 Cultural Studies The Basics 2nd ed London Sage Publications ISBN 978 1 4129 2229 6 Lindlof T R and B C Taylor 2002 Qualitative Communication Research Methods 2nd ed Thousand Oaks CA SAGE Longhurst Brian Greg Smith Gaynor Bagnall Garry Crawford and Michael Ogborn 2008 Introducing Cultural Studies 2nd ed London Pearson ISBN 978 1 4058 5843 4 Miller Toby ed 2006 A Companion to Cultural Studies Malden MA Blackwell Publishers ISBN 978 0 631 21788 6 Pollock Griselda ed 1996 Generations and Geographies Critical Theories and Critical Practices in Feminism and the Visual Arts Routledge 2006 Psychoanalysis and the Image Boston Blackwell Smith Paul 1991 A Course In Cultural Studies The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 24 1 39 49 2006 Looking Backwards and Forwards at Cultural Studies permanent dead link pp 331 40 in A Companion to Cultural Studies edited by T Miller Malden MA Blackwell Publishers ISBN 978 0 631 21788 6 Rodman Gil 2015 Why Cultural Studies Maldon MA Wiley Blackwell Turner Graeme 2003 British Cultural Studies An Introduction Third ed London Routledge 2012 What s Become of Cultural Studies Los Angeles SAGE Williams Jeffrey interviewer 1994 Questioning Cultural Studies An Interview with Paul Smith Hartford CT MLG Institute for Culture and Society Trinity College Retrieved 1 July 2020 Williams Raymond 1985 Keywords A Vocabulary of Culture and Society revised ed New York Oxford University Press 1966 Culture and Society 1780 1950 New York Harper amp Row External links edit nbsp Wikimedia Commons has media related to Cultural studies CCCS publications Annual Reports and Stencilled Occasional sic Papers of the University of Birmingham Archived 10 May 2019 at the Wayback Machine CSAA Cultural Studies Association of Australasia Cultural Studies International Journal of Cultural Studies Stuart Hall Archive Project University of Birmingham UK Stuart Hall Selected Writings Duke University Press Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Cultural studies amp oldid 1206111634, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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