Cultural studies or cultural theory is an academic field that explores the dynamics of contemporary culture (including the politics of popular culture) and its social and historical foundations.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 researchers 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."Cultural studies" is not synonymous with either "area studies", "ethnic studies," or cultural anthropology—although there are many cultural studies practitioners working in these areas.
British Marxist academics initially developed cultural studies in the late 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and it has since been 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.Pain, R. and Smith, S. eds., 2008. Fear: Critical geopolitics and everyday life. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Cultural studies combines a variety of politically engaged critical approaches 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 and 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 to and processes of globalization.
During the rise of neoliberalism in Britain and the US, cultural studies became a global phenomenon. It 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, continues the work in this field today.Bérubé, Michael (2009), "What's the Matter with Cultural Studies?" , The Chronicle of Higher Education."Cultural Studies Associations, Networks and Programs" , extensive, but incomplete, list of associations, networks and programs as found on the website for the Association of Cultural Studies, Tampere, Finland. Distinct approaches to cultural studies have emerged in different national and regional contexts.
Overview
Sardar's characteristics In his 1994 book, Introducing Cultural Studies, orientalist scholar Ziauddin Sardar lists the following five main characteristics of cultural studies:Sardar, Ziauddin, and Borin Van Loon. 1994. Introducing Cultural Studies. New York: Totem Books
The objective of cultural studies is to understand culture in all its complex forms and to analyze the social and political context in which culture manifests itself. Cultural study is a site of both study/analysis and political criticism. For example, a cultural studies scholar would not only study an object, but 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 commits 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 who control the political and financial sectors that create policies affecting the well-being of white working-class youth).
British cultural studies 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. The centre would become home to the development of the intellectual orientation that has become known internationally as the "Birmingham School" of cultural studies,see also: thus becoming the world's first institutional home of cultural studies.
Hoggart appointed as his assistant Stuart Hall, who would effectively be directing CCCS by 1968. Hall formally assumed the directorship of CCCS in 1971, when Hoggart left Birmingham to become Assistant Director-General of UNESCO.Hoggart, Richard. 2011. An Idea and Its Servants: UNESCO from Within. Newark, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Thereafter, the field of cultural studies became closely associated with Hall's work. 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 the 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'." The RAE, a holdover initiative of the Margaret Thatcher-led British government of 1986, determines research funding for university programs.
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. 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.
Stuart Hall's directorship of CCCS 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 had radically rethought the Marxist account of base and superstructure, significantly influencing the "Birmingham School". Much of the work done at CCCS examined 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 amid 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, and in other later texts such as Hall's The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left, and New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s.
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.See the Duke University Press Stuart Hall: Selected Writings webpage (below in External Links) 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.See the Stuart Hall Archive Project webpage (below in External Links)
Late-1970s and beyond 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 considerable 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 post-structuralism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism. 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?
Hall's cultural studies