School
Cultural studies
Overview
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. 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.
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.
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. Distinct approaches to cultural studies have emerged in different national and regional contexts.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
Yet those who know the habits of the continent of Europe are aware how apparently small a motive often outweighs the desire of money getting, even in the operations which have money getting for their direct object. The more highly the science of ethology is cultivated, and the better the diversities of individual and national character are understood, the smaller, probably, will the number of propositions become…
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive
States what Cultural studies is.
In each case we have seen that the aims when partially stated come into conflict with each other. The partial statement of natural development takes the primitive powers in an alleged spontaneous development as the end-all. From this point of view training which renders them useful to others is an abnormal constraint; one which profoundly modifies them through deliberate nurture is corrupting. But when we recognize…
John Dewey, Democracy and Education
States what Cultural studies is.
Even when the progress of social changes forced more and more useful studies into the curriculum, the idea of a graded rank in the cultural value of studies persisted. Occupations like banking and commerce involved less manual activity and less direct personal service to others than housekeeping, manufacturing, and farming, consequently the studies which prepared for them were at least more “genteel” than studies…
John Dewey, Schools of to-morrow
Close in meaning to Cultural studies; the term itself is not named.
Philosophers who discussed Cultural studies
- Pierre Bourdieu
- René Girard
- Judith Butler
- Marshall McLuhan
- Jean Baudrillard
- Jean-François Lyotard
- Susan Sontag
- Theodor W. Adorno
- Dwight Macdonald
- Bruno Latour
- Paul Ricœur
- Michel Foucault
- Antonio Gramsci
- Ch'ien Mu
- Susan Bordo
- Byung-Chul Han
Related ideas
- Empiricism
- Feminist theory
- Contextualism
- Ethnicity
- History
- Pierre Bourdieu
- Fascism
- Feminism
- Analysis
- Polity (publisher)
- Germany
- Harvard University Press
- Philosophy
- Human rights
- High culture
- Transaction Publishers
- Hierarchy
- Power (social and political)
- Judith Butler
- Academic discipline
- Interdisciplinarity
- Ethnography
- Japan
- Open University
Place in the tradition
Part of Indonesian philosophy.