Cultural studiesFrom Wikipedia, the

Cultural studies
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For the journal, see Cultural Studies (journal).

Cultural studies is a field of theoretically, politically, and empirically engaged cultural analysis that was initially developed by British academics in the late 1950s, '60s and '70s, 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 antidisciplinary. Although most practitioners of cultural studies are professional academics, Gilbert Rodman has argued in his 2015 book, Why Cultural Studies?, that the field must be understood to include some non-academic cultural analysts and practitioners as well as academic ones.[1] A key concern for cultural studies practitioners is the examination of the forces within and through which socially organized people conduct and construct their everyday lives.

The field of cultural studies encompasses a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives and practices. Although distinct from the disciplines of cultural anthropology and ethnic studies, cultural studies draws upon and has contributed to each field. Cultural studies concentrates upon the political dynamics of contemporary culture, its historical foundations, defining traits, and conflicts. The researchers concentrates on how a cultural practice relate to wider systems of power associated with or operating through social phenomena, such as ideology, class structures, national formations, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, generation, etc. The perspective of cultural studies is that a culture is not composed of fixed, bounded, stable, and discrete social entities, but rather as sets of human behaviour and practices in continual interaction and and change.[2]

Cultural studies combines a variety of politically engaged critical approaches drawn from and including semiotics, Marxism, feminist theory, critical race theory, poststructuralism, 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. Thus, 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. Important theories of cultural hegemony and agency have both influenced and been developed by the cultural studies movement, as have many recent major communication theories and agendas, such as those which attempt to explain and analyze the cultural forces related to processes of globalization. Somewhat distinct approaches to cultural studies have emerged in different national and regional contexts such as the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Latin America, Asia, South Africa and Italy.

During the rise of neo-liberalism in Britain and the US, cultural studies both became a global force/movement, and attracted the ire of many conservative opponents both within and beyond universities for a variety of reasons. Many left-wing critics associated particularly with Marxist forms of political economy also attacked cultural studies for allegedly overstating the importance of cultural phenomena. In 2002, the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham, UK, which was the world's first institutional home of cultural studies, was closed due to the result of the Research Assessment Exercise of 2001. The RAE, a holdover initiative of the Margaret Thatcher-led UK government of 1986, determines research funding for university programs.[3] While cultural studies continues to have many detractors, the field has become a kind of world-wide movement that is to this day associated with a raft of scholarly associations and programs, annual international conferences, publications, students and practitioners, from Taiwan to Amsterdam and from Bangalore to Santa Cruz. [4][5]