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Cultural studies is anacademic field that explores the dynamics of contemporaryculture (including the politics ofpopular culture) and its social and historical foundations.[1] Cultural studies researchers investigate how cultural practices relate to wider systems ofpower associated with, or operating through, social phenomena. These includeideology,class structures,national formations,ethnicity,sexual orientation,gender, and generation. Employingcultural 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.[2][3]
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. 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.[4]
Cultural studies combines a variety of politically engaged critical approaches includingsemiotics,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 andart history/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 ofcultural hegemony andagency. Its practitioners attempt to explain and analyze the cultural forces related and processes ofglobalization.
During the rise ofneoliberalism in Britain and the U.S., cultural studies both became a global phenomenon, and 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 carry on work in this field today.[5][6] Distinct approaches to cultural studies have emerged in different national and regional contexts.
In his 1994 book,Introducing Cultural Studies,orientalist scholarZiauddin Sardar lists the following five main characteristics of cultural studies:[7]
Dennis Dworkin writes that "a critical moment" in the beginning of cultural studies as a field was whenRichard Hoggart used the term in 1964 in founding theCentre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at theUniversity of Birmingham.[8] The centre would become home to the development of the intellectual orientation that has become known internationally as the "Birmingham School" of cultural studies,[8][9] thus becoming the world's first institutional home of cultural studies.[10]
Hoggart appointed as his assistantStuart Hall, who would effectively be directing CCCS by 1968.[11] Hall formally assumed the directorship of CCCS in 1971, when Hoggart left Birmingham to become Assistant Director-General ofUNESCO.[12] Thereafter, the field of cultural studies became closely associated with Hall's work.[13][14] In 1979, Hall left Birmingham to accept a prestigious chair insociology at theOpen 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 disestablishment of the new department was an unexpectedly low result in the UK'sResearch Assessment Exercise of 2001, though a dean from the university attributed the decision to "inexperienced 'macho management'."[15] The RAE, a holdover initiative of theMargaret Thatcher-ledBritish government of 1986, determines research funding for university programs.[16]
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.[17] There are also many published overviews of the historical development of cultural studies, including Graeme Turner'sBritish Cultural Studies: An Introduction, 3rd Ed. and John Hartley'sA Short History of Cultural Studies.[18][19][20]
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 andpostgraduate 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 employedMarxist methods of analysis, exploring the relationships between cultural forms (i.e., thesuperstructure) and that of thepolitical economy (i.e., thebase). By the 1970s, the work ofLouis Althusser radically rethought the Marxist account ofbase andsuperstructure in ways that had a significant influence on the "Birmingham School". Much of the work done at CCCS studiedyouth-subcultural expressions of antagonism toward "respectable"middle-classBritish culture in the post-WWII period. Also during the 1970s, the politically formidable Britishworking 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, andunion rolls were shrinking. Millions of working-classBritons backed the rise ofMargaret Thatcher, through the labour losses. For Stuart Hall and his colleagues, this shift in loyalty from theLabour Party to theConservative 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,[21] and in other later texts such as Hall'sThe Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left,[22] andNew Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s.[23]
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.[24] 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.[25]
By the late 1970s, scholars associated with The Birmingham School had firmly placed questions ofgender andrace on the cultural studies agenda, where they have remained ever since. Also by the late 1970s, cultural studies had begun to attract a great deal of 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 aspoststructuralism,postmodernism, andpostcolonialism.[26] The wide range of cultural studies journals now located throughout the world, as shown below, is one indication of theglobalization of the field. For overviews of and commentaries on developments in cultural studies during the twenty-first century, see Lawrence Grossberg'sCultural Studies in the Future Tense, Gilbert Rodman'sWhy Cultural Studies? and Graeme Turner'sWhat's Become of Cultural Studies?
Hall's cultural studies explores culture as a system that affects individuals' identities through the meanings and practices that arise from the constant power dynamics that comprise culture.[27] Hall viewed culture as a "critical site of social action and intervention, where power relations are both established and potentially unsettled."[28] He perceived culture as a power dynamic, in which the media unintentionally possesses more control over ideology than the public.[29] Hall viewed the media as a source of preserving the status quo of a reflection that already exists in society. The media hegemony in question, he emphasized, "is not a conscious plot or conspiracy, it's not overtly coercive, and its effects are not total."[30] Compared to other thinkers on this subject, he studied and analyzed symbols, ideologies, signs, and other representations within cultural studies.[31] Most of his contributions occurred in the 1980s, where he looked at how media cultivates cultural power, how it is consumed, mediated and negotiated, etc.[32] Hall has also been accredited with the expansion of cultural studies through "the primacy of culture's role as an educational site where identities are being continually transformed, power is enacted, and learning assumes a political dynamic."[33] He viewed politics as being used mainly for power instead of the betterment of society.[34] This led to the belief that political dynamics could change with a reform in the education system (if one changes the education system, then one can change the culture).[34] Hall viewed culture as something that is institutionalized, which could only be studied through the interactional patterns that people within a culture exhibit and experience.[35] Culture is something that makes up society, is a learned trait, and is influenced by various forms of media that help to establish it.[36] Power is the underlying tone of Hall's cultural studies.[37] Hall believed that culture has some power, but the media's use of it is what sways and dictates culture itself.[38]
In the US, prior to the emergence of British cultural studies, several versions ofcultural analysis had emerged largely from pragmatic andliberal-pluralist philosophical traditions.[39] However, in the late 1970s and 1980s, when British Cultural Studies began to spread internationally, and to engage withfeminism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, and race,critical cultural studies (i.e.,Marxist, feminist, poststructuralist, etc.) expanded tremendously in American universities in fields such ascommunication studies,education, sociology, andliterature.[40][41][42]Cultural Studies, the flagship journal of the field, has been based in the US since its founding editor,John Fiske, brought it there fromAustralia in 1987.
A thriving cultural studies scene has existed in Australia since the late 1970s, when several key CS practitioners emigrated there from the UK, bringing British cultural studies with them, after Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of the UK in 1979. A school of cultural studies known ascultural policy studies is one of the distinctive Australian contributions to the field, though it is not the only one. Australia also gave birth to the world's first professional cultural studies association (now known as the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia) in 1990.[43][44] Cultural studies journals based in Australia includeInternational Journal of Cultural Studies,Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, andCultural Studies Review.
InCanada, cultural studies has sometimes focused on issues oftechnology and society, continuing the emphasis in the work ofMarshall McLuhan,Harold Innis, and others. Cultural studies journals based in Canada includeTopia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies.
In Africa,human rights andthird-world issues are among the central topics treated. There is a thriving cultural and media studies scholarship in Southern Africa, with its locus in South Africa and Zimbabwe.[45] Cultural studies journals based in Africa include theJournal of African Cultural Studies.
InLatin America, cultural studies have drawn on thinkers such asJosé Martí,Ángel Rama, and other Latin-American figures, in addition to the Western theoretical sources associated with cultural studies in other parts of the world. Leading Latin American cultural studies scholars includeNéstor García Canclini,Jésus Martín-Barbero, andBeatriz Sarlo.[46][47] Among the key issues addressed by Latin American cultural studies scholars aredecoloniality,urban cultures, andpostdevelopment theory. Latin American cultural studies journals include theJournal of Latin American Cultural Studies.
Even though cultural studies developed much more rapidly in the UK than incontinental Europe, there is significant cultural studies presence in countries such asFrance,Spain, andPortugal. The field is relatively undeveloped inGermany, probably due to the continued influence of theFrankfurt School,[48] which is now often said to be in its third generation, which includes notable figures such asAxel Honneth. Cultural studies journals based in continental Europe include theEuropean Journal of Cultural Studies, theJournal of Spanish Cultural Studies,French Cultural Studies, andPortuguese Cultural Studies.
In Germany, the termcultural studies specifically refers to the field in theAnglosphere, especially British cultural studies,[49] to differentiate it from the GermanKulturwissenschaft which developed along different lines and is characterized by its distance from political science. However,Kulturwissenschaft and cultural studies are often used interchangeably, particularly by lay people.
Throughout Asia, cultural studies have thrived since at least the beginning of the 1990s.[50] Cultural studies journals based in Asia includeInter-Asia Cultural Studies. In India, the Centre for Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore and the Department of Cultural Studies at TheEnglish and Foreign Languages and theUniversity of Hyderabad are two major institutional spaces for Cultural Studies.
Marxism has been an important influence upon cultural studies. Those associated with CCCS initially engaged deeply with thestructuralism of Louis Althusser, and later in the 1970s turned decisively towardAntonio Gramsci. Cultural studies has also embraced the examination of race, gender, and other aspects of identity, as is illustrated, for example, by a number of key books published collectively under the name of CCCS in the late 1970s and early 1980s, includingWomen Take Issue: Aspects of Women's Subordination (1978), andThe Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain (1982).
To understand the changing political circumstances ofclass,politics, and culture in the United Kingdom, scholars at The Birmingham School turned to the work of Antonio Gramsci, an Italian thinker, writer, andCommunist Party leader. Gramsci had been concerned with similar issues: why would Italian laborers and peasants vote forfascists? What strategic approach is necessary to mobilize popular support in more progressive directions? Gramsci modifiedclassical Marxism, and argued that culture must be understood as a key site of political and social struggle. In his view,capitalists used not only brute force (police,prisons,repression,military) to maintaincontrol, but also penetrated the everyday culture of working people in a variety of ways in their efforts to win popular "consent".
For Gramsci, historical leadership, orhegemony, involves the formation of alliances between class factions, and struggles within the cultural realm of everyday common sense.Hegemony was always, for Gramsci, an interminable, unstable and contested process.[51]
Scott Lash writes:
In the work of Hall, Hebdige and McRobbie, popular culture came to the fore... What Gramsci gave to this was the importance of consent and culture. If the fundamental Marxists saw the power in terms of class-versus-class, then Gramsci gave to us a question ofclass alliance. The rise of cultural studies itself was based on the decline of the prominence of fundamental class-versus-class politics.[52]
Edgar and Sedgwick write:
The theory of hegemony was of central importance to the development of British cultural studies [particularly The Birmingham School. It facilitated the analysis of the ways subordinate groups actively resist and respond to political and economic domination. The subordinate groups needed not to be seen merely as the passive dupes of the dominant class and its ideology.[53]
The development ofhegemony theory in cultural studies was in some ways consonant with work in other fields exploringagency, a theoretical concept that insists on the active, critical capacities of subordinated people (e.g. the working classes, colonized peoples, women).[54] As Stuart Hall famously argued in his 1981 essay, "Notes on Deconstructing 'the Popular'": "ordinary people are not cultural dopes."[55] Insistence on accounting for the agency of subordinated people run counter to the work of traditional structuralists. Some analysts[who?] have however been critical of some work in cultural studies that they feel overstates the significance of or even romanticizes some forms of popular cultural agency.
Cultural studies often concerns itself with the agency at the level of the practices of everyday life, and approaches such research from a standpoint of radicalcontextualism.[56] In other words, cultural studies rejects universal accounts ofcultural practices, meanings, and identities.
Judith Butler, an Americanfeminist theorist whose work is often associated with cultural studies, wrote that:
the move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure. It has marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.[57]
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.[58]
Cultural studies criticizes the traditional view of the passive consumer, particularly by underlining the different ways peopleread, receive and interpret cultural texts, or appropriate other kinds of cultural products, or otherwise participate in the production and circulation of meanings. On this view, a consumer canappropriate, actively rework, or challenge the meanings circulated through cultural texts. In some of its variants, cultural studies has shifted the analytical focus from traditional understandings of production to consumption – viewed as a form of production (of meanings, of identities, etc.) in its own right. Stuart Hall,John Fiske, and others have been influential in these developments.
A special 2008 issue of the field's flagship journal,Cultural Studies, examined "anti-consumerism" from a variety of cultural studies angles. Jeremy Gilbert noted in the issue, cultural studies must grapple with the fact that "we now live in an era when, throughout the capitalist world, the overriding aim of government economic policy is to maintainconsumer spending levels. This is an era when 'consumer confidence' is treated as the key indicator and cause of economic effectiveness."[59]
Cultural studies, drawing upon and developingsemiotics, uses the concept oftext to designate not only written language, but alsotelevision programs,films,photographs,fashion,hairstyles, and so forth; the texts of cultural studies comprise all the meaningful artifacts of culture. This conception of textuality derives especially from the work of the pioneering and influential semiotician,Roland Barthes, but also owes debts to other sources, such asJuri Lotman and his colleagues fromTartu–Moscow School. Similarly, the field widens the concept ofculture. Cultural studies approach the sites and spaces of everyday life, such as pubs, living rooms, gardens, and beaches, as "texts".[60]
Culture, in this context, includes not onlyhigh culture,[61] but also everyday meanings and practices, a central focus of cultural studies.
Jeff Lewis summarized much of the work ontextuality andtextual analysis in his cultural studies textbook and apost-9/11monograph on media and terrorism.[62][63] According to Lewis,textual studies use complex and difficultheuristic methods and require both powerful interpretive skills and a subtle conception of politics and contexts. The task of the cultural analyst, for Lewis, is to engage with both knowledge systems and texts and observe and analyze the ways the two interact with one another. This engagement represents the critical dimensions of the analysis, its capacity to illuminate thehierarchies within and surrounding the given text and itsdiscourse.
Cultural studies has evolved through its uptake across a variety of different disciplines—anthropology,media studies, communication studies,literary studies, education,geography,philosophy, sociology,politics, and others.
While some[who?] have accused certain areas of cultural studies of meandering into politicalrelativism and a kind of empty version of "postmodern" analysis, others[who?] hold that at its core, cultural studies provides a significantconceptual andmethodological framework forcultural,social, and economic critique. This critique is designed to "deconstruct" the meanings and assumptions that are inscribed in the institutions, texts, and practices that work with and through, and produce and re-present, culture.[64][page needed] Thus, while some scholars and disciplines have dismissed cultural studies for its methodological rejection of disciplinarity, its core strategies ofcritique andanalysis have influenced areas of thesocial sciences andhumanities; for example, cultural studies work on forms ofsocial differentiation, control andinequality,identity,community-building, media, andknowledge production has had a substantial impact. Moreover, the influence of cultural studies has become increasingly evident in areas as diverse astranslation studies, health studies,international relations,development studies,computer studies,economics,archaeology, andneurobiology.[citation needed]
Cultural studies has also diversified its own interests and methodologies, incorporating a range of studies onmedia policy,democracy,design,leisure,tourism,warfare, and development. While certain key concepts such asideology or discourse, class, hegemony, identity, and gender remain significant, cultural studies has long engaged with and integrated new concepts and approaches. The field thus continues to pursue political critique through its engagements with the forces of culture and politics.[65][page needed]
The integration ofpopular culture in classrooms has influenced educational practices in cultural studies. Through the analysis of TV series, movies, memes, and other cultural materials, educators can encouragemedia literacy,critical thinking, and a deeper understanding of social issues. Incorporating popular culture into education through cultural studies helps students critically engage with the world around them, fostering media literacy and critical thinking. Educators can use cultural texts to discuss societal issues, challenge norms, and prepare students for active participation in a media-dominated world.
Popular culture can be an effective tool forcritical pedagogy.Evan Faidley explores how TV shows, movies, andmemes can be used in the classroom to discuss topics likesocial justice and identity.[66] Shows likeSouth Park allow students to evaluate societal norms and political issues, using apedagogy of resistance.[67] Cultural studies encourage students to analyzeintertextuality.Patricia Duff discusses how popular culture incorporates with academic discourse to build media literacy which helps students critically engage with the media they consume daily.[68]Kathy Mills also highlights the importance ofmultiliteracies, which encourages students to utilize a variety of communication media outside of the standard text, including digital and visual media.[69]Diane Penrod argues that incorporating popular culture in education makes learning more relevant and engaging. Teachers can aid students in comprehending difficult concepts like gender, ethnicity, and class by utilizing works from their own culture. Students are also encouraged to develop critical analytical abilities which they can use in both academic and everyday situations when popular culture is integrated into the classroom.[70]
Many cultural studies practitioners work in departments ofEnglish orcomparative literature. Nevertheless, some traditionalliterary scholars such asYale professorHarold Bloom have been outspoken critics of cultural studies. On the level of methodology, these scholars dispute the theoretical underpinning of the movement's critical framework.
Bloom stated his position during the 3 September 2000 episode ofC-SPAN'sBooknotes, while discussing his bookHow to Read and Why:
[T]here are two enemies of reading now in the world, not just in the English-speaking world. One [is] the lunatic destruction of literary studies...and its replacement by what is called cultural studies in all of the universities and colleges in the English-speaking world, and everyone knows what that phenomenon is. I mean, the...now-weary phrase 'political correctness' remains a perfectly good descriptive phrase for what has gone on and is, alas, still going on almost everywhere and which dominates, I would say, rather more than three-fifths of the tenured faculties in the English-speaking world, who really do represent treason of the intellectuals, I think, a 'betrayal of the clerks'."[71]
Marxist literary criticTerry Eagleton is not wholly opposed to cultural studies, but has criticised aspects of it and highlighted what he sees as its strengths and weaknesses in books such asAfter Theory (2003). For Eagleton, literary and cultural theory have the potential to say important things about the "fundamental questions" in life, but theorists have rarely realized this potential.
English departments also host culturalrhetorics scholars. This academic field defines cultural rhetorics as "the study and practice of making meaning and knowledge with the belief that all cultures are rhetorical and all rhetorics are cultural."[72] Cultural rhetorics scholars are interested in investigating topics likeclimate change,[73]autism,[74]Asian American rhetoric,[75] and more.
Cultural studies have also had a substantial impact on sociology. For example, when Stuart Hall left CCCS at Birmingham, it was to accept a prestigiousprofessorship in Sociology at the Open University in Britain. The subfield ofcultural sociology, in particular, is disciplinary home to many cultural studies practitioners. Nevertheless, there are some differences between sociology as adiscipline and the field of cultural studies as a whole. While sociology was founded upon various historic works purposefully distinguishing the subject from philosophy orpsychology, cultural studies have explicitly interrogated and criticized traditional understandings and practices of disciplinarity. Most CS practitioners think it is best that cultural studies neither emulate disciplines nor aspire to disciplinarity for cultural studies. Rather, they promote a kind of radicalinterdisciplinarity as the basis for cultural studies.
One sociologist whose work has had a major influence on cultural studies isPierre Bourdieu, whose work makes innovative use of statistics and in-depth interviews.[76][77] However, although Bourdieu's work has been highly influential within cultural studies, and although Bourdieu regarded his work as a form ofscience, cultural studies has never embraced the idea that it should aspire toward "scientificity", and has marshalled a wide range of theoretical and methodological arguments against thefetishization of "scientificity" as a basis for cultural studies.
Two sociologists who have been critical of cultural studies, Chris Rojek andBryan S. Turner, argue in their article, "Decorative sociology: towards a critique of the cultural turn," that cultural studies, particularly the flavor championed by Stuart Hall, lacks a stable research agenda, and privileges the contemporary reading of texts, thus producing an ahistorical theoretical focus.[78] Many,[who?] however, 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. Moreover, Hall and many others have long argued against the misunderstanding that textual analysis is the sole methodology of cultural studies, and have practiced numerous other approaches, as noted above. Rojek and Turner also level the accusation that there is "a sense of moral superiority about the correctness of the political views articulated" in cultural studies.[78]
In 1996, physicistAlan Sokal expressed his opposition to cultural studies bysubmitting a hoax article to a cultural studies journal,Social Text. The article, which was crafted as a parody of what Sokal referred to as the "fashionable nonsense" of postmodernism, was accepted by the editors of the journal, which did not at the time practicepeer review. When the paper appeared in print, Sokal published a second article in a self-described "academic gossip" magazine,Lingua Franca, revealing his hoax onSocial Text. Sokal stated that his motivation stemmed from his rejection of contemporary critiques ofscientific rationalism:[79]
Politically, I'm angered because most (though not all) of this silliness is emanating from the self-proclaimed Left. We're witnessing here a profound historicalvolte-face. For most of the past two centuries, the Left has been identified with science and againstobscurantism; we have believed thatrational thought and the fearless analysis of objective reality (both natural and social) are incisive tools for combating the mystifications promoted by the powerful – not to mention being desirable human ends in their own right. The recent turn of many "progressive" or "leftist" academic humanists and social scientists toward one or another form of epistemic relativism betrays this worthy heritage and undermines the already fragile prospects for progressive social critique. Theorizing about "the social construction of reality" won't help us find an effective treatment for AIDS or devise strategies for preventing global warming. Nor can we combat false ideas in history, sociology, economics and politics if we reject the notions of truth and falsity.
In response to this critique,Jacques Derrida wrote:[80]
In whose interest was it to go for a quick practical joke rather than taking part in the work which, sadly, it replaced?
Hall and others have identified some core originating texts, or the original "curricula", of the field of cultural studies:
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