What is Cultural Studies ?

For many of us, there come a point in our education where were introduced to a
theory or a concept and suddenly everything comes into focus. Maybe youve come across a
particular author or musician that helps you see things in an entirely new way, or gives you a
new framework for expressing yourself and explaining the world around you.

Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary field of studies, which means that it draws

from many different subject areas, including sociology, anthropology, political science, and
history. Although it is sometimes misunderstood as being the study of popular culture(pop
cult). CS is in fact, the study of the ways in which culture is constructed and organized and
the ways in which it involves and changes over time.

Cultural studies is a field of theoretically, politically, and empirically engaged

cultural analysis that concentrates upon the political dynamics of contemporary culture, its
historical foundations, defining traits, and conflicts. Cultural studies researchers generally
investigate how cultural practices relate to wider systems of power associated with or
operating through social phenomena, such as ideology, class structures, national
formations, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and generation. Cultural studies views
cultures not as fixed, bounded, stable, and discrete entities, but rather as constantly interacting
and changing sets of practices and processes.[1] The field of cultural studies encompasses a
range of theoretical and methodological perspectives and practices. Although distinct from the
disciplines of cultural anthropology and ethnic studies, cultural studies draws upon and has
contributed to each of these disciplines.

Cultural studies combines a variety of politically engaged critical approaches drawn

from and including semiotics, Marxism, feminist theory, ethnography, critical race theory,
poststructuralism, 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/criticism to study cultural phenomena in
various societies and historical periods. Thus, 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. Important theories of cultural hegemony and agency have both
influenced and been developed by the cultural studies movement, as have many recent major
communication theories and agendas, such as those that attempt to explain and analyze the
cultural forces related to processes of globalization.

Characteristics of Cult.Studs :

The aim of cultural studies is to examine cultural practices and their relation to power.
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 in London who control the political and financial
sectors that create policies affecting the well-being of white working class youth in
London).

The objective of cultural studies includes understanding culture in all its complex
forms and analyzing the social and political context in which culture manifests itself.

Cultural studies is a site of both study/analysis and political criticism/action. (For

example, not only would a cultural studies scholar study an object, but s/he would connect
this study to a larger, progressive political project.)

Cultural studies attempts to expose and reconcile constructed divisions

of knowledge that purport to be grounded in nature.

Cultural studies has a commitment to an ethical evaluation of modern society and to

a radical line of political action.

Theories :

Because it is an academic field of study, CS is built on certain theories and concepts

that guide scholars in their works. Among these, the most significant is the concept of
Cultural construction, which is the theory that many influential social and cultural
characteristics are not inherent but are constructed by people. For example, from the cultural
studies perspective, things like race, gender, or disability dont really exist but are instead
concepts or beliefs that people have created in order to organize their cultures or societies.
This is not to suggest that there arent biological differences between men and women, ot that
there arent variations in skin pigmentation, rather, it simply means that outside of social
systems, these things have no meaning.

Hegemony theory:

Another important theory of cultural studies is Hegemony, which is a term used to

describe the dominance or authority that onr group or culture has over others. For example, in
the US the hegemonic culture is one that is one that is controlled largely by white people and
represents, the majority rather than incorporating diversity that would more accurately
represent the nations population.

The development of hegemony theory in cultural studies was in some ways consonant
with work in other fields exploring agency, a theoretical concept that insists on the active,
critical capacities of subordinated peoples (e.g. the working classes, colonized peoples,
women). As Stuart Hall famously argued in his 1981 essay, "Notes on Deconstructing 'the
Popular'," "ordinary people are not cultural dopes." Insistence on accounting for the agency of
subordinated peoples runs counter to the work of traditional structuralists. Some analysts 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 agency at the level of the practices of
everyday life, and approaches such research from a standpoint of radical contextualism. In
other words, cultural studies rejects universal accounts of cultural practices, meanings, and
identities.

In CS, hegemony is an important theory in the exploration of how the dominant

culture influences other groups, particularly in the construction of identity or confirming to
social norms.

These two theories are critically important in the field but there are many
theories and concepts that guide CS. In many case, these theories overlap or incorporate
concepts from other disciplines, but they are generally aimed at exploring how people
construct culture and how that constructed culture shapes people.
Concept of Text :

Cultural Studies criticizes the traditional view of the passive consumer, particularly
by underlining the different ways people read, 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 can appropriate, actively rework or
challenge the meanings circulated through cultural texts. In some of its variants, then, cultural
studies has thus shifted the analytical focus from (traditional understandings of) production to
consumption, which is nevertheless understood 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.

Cultural studies, drawing upon and developing semiotics, uses the concept of text to
designate not only written language, but also television programs, films, photographs, fashion,
hairstyles, and so forth; the texts of cultural studies comprise all the meaningful artifacts of
culture. Similarly, the field widens the concept of "culture." "Culture," for a cultural studies
researcher, includes not only traditional high culture (the culture of ruling social groups), but
also everyday meanings and practices, which have, as noted above, become a central focus of
cultural studies. Cultural studies even approaches sites and spaces of everyday life, such as
pubs, living rooms, gardens and beaches, as "texts."

Jeff Lewis brought together much of the discussion on text and textual analysis in his
studies on media, culture and cultural politics. 'textual studies' is the most complex and
difficult heuristic method, requiring both powerful interceptive skills and a subtle conception
of politics and context. Texts can only bear meaning that can be 'interpreted', therefore, as
they present within a given knowledge system. This knowledge system imbues the text with
meaning. The task of the cultural analyst, therefore, is to engage with both the knowledge
system and the text, and observe and analyze the ways the two interact with one anotherand
with other knowledge systems, including the one being deployed by the analysts him-herself.
This engagement represents the critical dimensions of the analysis, its capacity to illuminate
the hierarchies within and surrounding the given text and its discourses.