23 Facts About Cultural studies

Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary field that examines the political dynamics of contemporary culture and its historical foundations.

The field of cultural studies encompasses a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives and practices.

Cultural studies was initially developed by British Marxist academics in the late 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, 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 anti-disciplinary.

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.

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Distinct approaches to cultural studies have emerged in different national and regional contexts.

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.

Also by the late 1970s, cultural studies had begun to attract a great deal of international attention.

In Canada, cultural studies has sometimes focused on issues of technology and society, continuing the emphasis in the work of Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis, and others.

Cultural studies journals based in Canada include Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies.

In Latin America, cultural studies have drawn on thinkers such as Jose Marti, Angel Rama, and other Latin-American figures, in addition to the Western theoretical sources associated with cultural studies in other parts of the world.

However, Kulturwissenschaft and cultural studies are often used interchangeably, particularly by lay people.

Cultural studies journals based in Asia include Inter-Asia Cultural Studies.

The rise of cultural studies itself was based on the decline of the prominence of fundamental class-versus-class politics.

In other words, cultural studies rejects universal accounts of cultural practices, meanings, and identities.

In recent decades, as capitalism has spread throughout the world via contemporary forms of globalization, cultural studies has generated important analyses of local sites and practices of negotiation with and resistance to Western hegemony.

Special 2008 issue of the field's flagship journal, Cultural Studies, examined "anti-consumerism" from a variety of cultural studies angles.

Cultural studies, drawing upon and developing semiotics, uses the concept of text to designate not only written language, but television programs, films, photographs, fashion, hairstyles, and so forth; the texts of cultural studies comprise all the meaningful artifacts of culture.

Cultural studies has evolved through the confluence of various disciplines—anthropology, media studies, communication studies, Literary Studies, education, geography, philosophy, sociology, politics, and others.

Cultural studies has diversified its own interests and methodologies, incorporating a range of studies on media policy, democracy, design, leisure, tourism, warfare, and development.

One sociologist whose work has had a major influence on cultural studies is Pierre Bourdieu, whose work makes innovative use of statistics and in-depth interviews.

Many would argue, following Hall, that cultural studies have always sought to avoid the establishment of a fixed research agenda; this follows from its critique of disciplinarity.

In 1996, physicist Alan Sokal expressed his opposition to cultural studies by submitting a hoax article to a cultural studies journal, Social Text.