Cultural studies
Cultural studies combines literary theory, film/video studies, sociology, and cultural anthropology to study cultural phenomena in industrial societies. Frequently, cultural studies researchers concentrate on how a particular phenomenon pertains to matters of ideology, race, social class, and/or gender.
In his book Introducing Cultural Studies, Ziauddin Sardhar lists the following five main characterics of cultural studies:
- Cultural studies aims to examine its subject matter in terms of cultural practices and their relation to power.
- It has the objective of understanding culture in all its complex forms and of analysing the social and political context in which culture manifests itself.
- It is both the object of study and the location of political criticism and action.
- It attempts to expose and reconcile the division of knowledge, to overcome the split between tacit (cultural knowledge) and objective (universal) forms of knowledge.
- It has a committment to a moral evaluation of modern society and to a radical line of political action.
Scholars in Great Britain and the United States have developed somewhat different versions of cultural studies since the field's inception in the late 1970s. The British version of cultural studies was often overtly politically leftist and critical of capitalist mass culture; it was influenced by the Frankfurt School critique of the "culture industry". This emerges in the writings of early British cultural-studies scholars and their influences: see the work of (for example) Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, and Paul Gilroy.
In contrast, the American version of cultural studies initially concerned itself more with understanding the subjective and appropriative side of audience reactions to, and uses of, mass culture; American cultural studies advocates wrote about the liberatory aspects of fandom. See the writings of critics such as John Guillory.
Compare culture, cultural history.
See also: postmodernism, queer theory, popular culture, gender studies, orientalism, critical theory, feminism, semiotics
In a loosely related but separate usage, the phrase cultural studies sometimes serves as a rough synonym for area studies, as a general term referring to the academic study of particular cultures in departments and programs such as Islamic studies, Asian studies, African American studies, African studies, et al..
Referenced By
Academic department | Academic discipline | Academic field | CulTure | Cultur | Cultural | List of academic disciplines
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