Cultural studies as a construct (original) (raw)

What it is and what it isn't: Introducing…Cultural Studies

A Companion to Cultural Studies, 2000

Cultural studies is magnetic. 1 It accretes various tendencies that are splintering the human sciences: Marxism, feminism, queer theory, and the postcolonial. Thè`c ultural'' has become a``master-trope'' in the humanities, blending and blurring textual analysis of popular culture with social theory, and focusing on the margins of power rather than reproducing established lines of force and authority (Czaplicka et al. 1995: 3). In place of focusing on canonical works of art, governmental leadership, or quantitative social data, cultural studies devotes time to subcultures, popular media, music, clothing, and sport. By looking at how culture is used and transformed by``ordinary'' and``marginal'' social groups, cultural studies sees people not simply as consumers, but as potential producers of new social values and cultural languages. This amounts to a comprehensive challenge to academic business as usual. And the investment in the popular makes waves in the extramural world, too, as the humanities' historic task of criticizing entertainment is sidestepped and new commercial trends become part of cultural studies itself. Cultural studies is a tendency across disciplines, rather than a discipline itself. This is evident in practitioners' simultaneously expressed desires to: refuse definition, insist on differentiation, and sustain conventional departmental credentials (as well as pyrotechnic, polymathematical capacities for reasoning and research). Cultural studies' continuities come from shared concerns and methods: the concern is the reproduction of culture through structural determinations on subjects versus their own agency, and the method is historical materialism (Morrow 1995: 3, 6). Cultural studies is animated by subjectivity and power ± how human subjects are formed and how they experience cultural and social space. It takes its agenda and mode of analysis from economics, politics, media and communication studies, sociology, literature, education, the law, science and technology studies, anthropology, and history, with a particular focus on gender, race, class, and sexuality in everyday life, commingling textual and social theory under the sign of a commitment to progressive social change.

A Culture of Cultural Studies: an introduction

Journal of Communication Inquiry, 1997

What is the object of cultural studies? If we want to reconsider cultural studies we need an object for our attention. So what of the subject of cultural studies? Are we explained by Judith Butler's paradox of subjection: that we are the instrument of agency and at the same time the effect of subordination, or the deprivation of agency? (Butler, 1997, p. 10). Perhaps we are in a discursive formation that one learns (or has learned) to understand, and from that point on the formation partially constitutes its learner—its "taught." Our investigations then become a kind a literacy, a way of seeing :

The Practice of Cultural Studies

2004

© Richard Johnson, Deborah Chambers, Parvati Raghuram and Estella Tincknell 2004 First published 2004 Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this ...

CULTURAL STUDIES: THE DOMAINS AND THEORETICAL METHODOLOGIES OF THE DISCIPLINE

The crossing of disciplinary boundaries by the new humanities and the “humanities-tocome”is lumped as “cultural studies” in a very confused way.The term, cultural studies, wascoined by Richard Hoggart in 1964; and the movement was inaugurated by Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society (1958) and by The Uses of Literacy (1958), and it became institutionalized in the influential Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies [CCCS], founded by Hoggart in 1964. It is evident that much of what falls under cultural studies could easily be classified under various other labels such as marxism, structuralism, new historicism, feminism and postcolonialism. Since the term has become popularized, I would not focus on why it is named so. Instead, the concern of this paper is to provide a deep theoretical understanding of cultural studies. Cultural studies analyzes the social, religious, cultural, discourses and institutions, and their role in the society. It basically aims to study the functioning of the social, economic, and political forces and power-structure that produce all forms of cultural phenomena and give them social “meanings” and significance.

A cultural studies without guarantees: response to Kuan-Hsing Chen

Cultural Studies: 10: 1 Controversies in …, 1996

In the ten years since this journal was founded, the field of cultural studies has expanded and flourished. It has at once become broader and more focused, facing as it does the challenges of global economic, cultural and political reconfiguration on the one hand, and of new attacks on the university and intellectual work on the other. As we look forward to the next decade, we expect Cultural Studies to continue to contribute to both the expansion and the integration of cultural studies.

A Puzzle Constantly Changing Itself: Cultural Studies in the 21st Century A review of

Cultural studies is a field constantly questioning itself, with its practitioners reflecting on its objects of study, methods and the politics of the knowledge it produces. For some, this reflexivity represents a problem with the field. It is seen as a relic of cultural studies' struggle to constitute itself as a particular form of scholarly practice that is no longer necessary because of its increasing institutionalization within the university. For others, this inquisitiveness and commitment to consider its own assumptions are cultural studies' greatest strengths and a reason why the field has the potential to improve our knowledge of a constantly changing world. These positions (and various points between them) have been taken up in a number of recent works on cultural studies, of which I will here discuss Lawrence Grossberg's Cultural Studies in the Future Tense (CSFT), Paul Smith's edited collection e Renewal of Cultural Studies (RCS), and Canadian Cultural Studies: A Reader (CCS), edited by Sourayan Mookerjea, Imre Szeman and Gail Faurschou. With cultural studies itself as their subject, these works help to provide different perspectives of the field as they map its key themes, issues, and debates. However, they may also be seen as working to take cultural studies into the future, with each book suggesting ways to ensure the discipline's value as an interdisciplinary intellectual and institutional practice.

Cultural Studies and its Politics: Theory and Practice

Marxism has long been implicitly involved in breaking down barriers between...domains (culture from social and economic and political relations) making each a site of interpretive activityby politicizing interpretive and cultural practices, by looking at economic determinations of cultural production, by radically historicizing our understanding of signifying practices, and by continuing to revise and enlarge a body of theory with multidisciplinary implications. i

Perspectives in Cultural Studies I

This course introduces students to the work and significance of representation and power in the understanding of culture as social practice. It helps students to understand the relationships among sign, culture and the making of meanings in society. From this base it approaches the question of ideology and subjectivity in the shaping of culture. With reference to various cultural texts and social contexts, we study examples of cultural production from history and politics to lived experiences of the everyday, from photography and art to cinema and museum, from popular culture to lifestyle etc. In appreciating divergent concerns in the critical analysis of culture and power, we focus on selected topics both mainstream and emergent, with an emphasis on contemporary developments in the Asian contexts. A brief account of the intellectual formations of Cultural Studies will be provided to allow students to appreciate the global, regional and local perspectives in the evolving field of study.