Cultural studies

For the journal, see Cultural Studies (journal).

or conjuncture. Important theories of cultural hegemony

and agency have both inuenced and been developed by
the cultural studies movement, as have many recent major communication theories and agendas, such as those
which attempt to explain and analyze the cultural forces
related to processes of globalization.

Cultural studies is a eld of theoretically, politically,

and empirically engaged cultural analysis that was initially developed by British academics in the late 1950s,
1960s and 1970s, and has been subsequently taken up
and transformed by scholars from many dierent disciplines around the world. Cultural studies is avowedly
and even radically interdisciplinary and can sometimes
be seen as antidisciplinary. As cultural studies scholar
Toby Miller has written, cultural studies is a tendency
across disciplines, rather than a discipline itself.[1] Although most practitioners of cultural studies are professional academics, Gilbert Rodman has argued in his 2015
book, Why Cultural Studies?, that the eld must be understood to include some non-academic cultural analysts and
practitioners as well as academic ones.[2] 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.

During the rise of neo-liberalism in Britain and the US,

cultural studies both became a global force/movement,
and attracted the ire of many conservative opponents
both within and beyond universities for a variety of reasons. Some left-wing critics associated particularly with
Marxist forms of political economy also attacked cultural studies for allegedly overstating the importance of
cultural phenomena. While cultural studies continues to
have its detractors, the eld has become a kind of worldwide movement that is to this day associated with a raft
of scholarly associations and programs, annual international conferences, publications, students and practitioners, from Taiwan to Amsterdam and from Bangalore to
Santa Cruz.[4][5] Somewhat distinct approaches to cultural studies have emerged in dierent national and regional contexts such as the United States, Canada, AusThe eld of cultural studies encompasses a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives and practices. tralia, New Zealand, Latin America, Asia, Africa and
Italy.
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 concentrates upon the political dynamics of 1 Characteristics
contemporary culture, its historical foundations, dening
traits, and conicts. CS researchers generally investigate In his 1994 book, Introducing Cultural Studies, Ziauddin
how cultural practices relate to wider systems of power Sardar lists the following ve main characteristics of culassociated with or operating through social phenomena, tural studies:[6]
such as ideology, class structures, national formations,
ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender and generation. Cul The aim of cultural studies is to examine cultural
tural studies views cultures not as xed, bounded, stable
practices and their relation to power. For examand discrete entities, but rather as constantly interacting
ple, a study of a subculture (such as white working
and changing sets of practices and processes.[3]
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 nancial sectors
that create policies aecting the well-being of white
working class youth in London).

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, lm/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

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
1

3 DEVELOPMENTS OUTSIDE THE UK

s/he would connect this study to a larger, progressive Dyer, Judith Williamson, Richard Johnson, Iain Champolitical project.)
bers, Dorothy Hobson, Chris Weedon, Tony Jeerson,
Michael Green and Angela McRobbie, gave shape and
Cultural studies attempts to expose and reconcile substance to the eld of cultural studies. Many culconstructed divisions of knowledge that purport to tural studies scholars employed Marxist methods of analbe grounded in nature.
ysis, exploring the relationships between cultural forms
(the superstructure) and that of the political economy
Cultural studies has a commitment to an ethical eval- (the base). By the 1970s, the work of Louis Althusser
uation of modern society and to a radical line of po- radically rethought the Marxist account of base and
litical action.
superstructure in ways that had a signicant inuence
on the work of the Birmingham School. Much of the
work done at The Birmingham School studied youth subcultural expressions of antagonism toward respectable
2 History
middle-class British culture in the post-WWII period.
Also during the 70s, the politically formidable British
As Dennis Dworkin writes,[7] a critical moment in the working classes were in decline. Britains manufacturbeginning of cultural studies as a eld was when Richard ing industries were fading and union rolls were shrinkHoggart used the term in 1964 in founding the Birming- ing. Yet millions of working class Britons backed the
ham (UK) Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies or rise of Margaret Thatcher. For Stuart Hall and his colThe Birmingham School.[8] The Birmingham School at leagues, this shift in loyalty from the Labour Party to the
the University of Birmingham thus became the worlds Conservative Party had to be explained in terms of culrst institutional home of cultural studies.
tural politics, which they had been tracking even before
in
Hoggart appointed Stuart Hall as his assistant, and Hall Thatchers victory. Some of this work was presented
[17]
the
cultural
studies
classic,
Policing
the
Crisis,
and
in
was eectively directing The Birmingham School by
Road to Renewal:
1968,[9] taking over formally as Director in 1969 when other later texts such as Halls The Hard
[18]
Thatcherism
and
the
Crisis
of
the
Left
and New Times:
Hoggart retired. Thereafter, the discipline became
[19]
The
Changing
Face
of
Politics
in
the
1990s.
[10][11]
closely associated with Halls work.
In 1979, Hall
left The Birmingham School to accept a prestigious chair To trace the development of British Cultural Studies, see,
in Sociology at the Open University in the UK, and for example, the work of Richard Hoggart, E.P. ThompRichard Johnson took over the directorship of the Centre. son, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Paul Willis, Angela
In the late 1990s, restructuring at the University of McRobbie, Paul Gilroy, David Morley, Charlotte BrunsBirmingham led to the elimination of The Birmingham don, Richard Dyer, and others.
School and the creation of a new Department of Cultural Studies and Sociology (CSS) in 1999. Then, in
2002, the University of Birminghams 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 UKs Research Assessment Exercise of 2001, though a dean from the university attributed the decision to inexperienced macho
management."[12] The RAE, a holdover initiative of the
Margaret Thatcher-led UK government of 1986, determines research funding for university programs.[13]

2.2 Cultural studies in the late-1970s and

beyond

By the late 1970s, scholars at The Birmingham School

had rmly placed questions of gender and race 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 90s. As it did so, it
both encountered new conditions of knowledge production, and engaged with other major international intellecThere are numerous published accounts of the history of
tual currents such as poststructuralism, postmodernism
[14][15][16]
cultural studies.
and postcolonialism.[20] The wide range of cultural studies journals now located throughout the world, as shown
below, is one indication of the globalization of the eld.

2.1

Stuart Halls directorship at The Birmingham School

Beginning in 1964, after the initial appearance of the

founding works of British Cultural Studies in the late
1950s, Stuart Halls pioneering work at The Birmingham School, along with that of his colleagues and postgraduate students including Paul Willis, Dick Hebdige,
David Morley, Charlotte Brunsdon, John Clarke, Richard

3 Developments Outside the UK

In the US, prior to the emergence of British Cultural
Studies, several versions of cultural analysis had emerged
largely from pragmatic and liberal-pluralist philosophical traditions.[21] However, when British Cultural Stud-

3
ies began to spread internationally in the late 1970s,
and to engage with feminism, poststructuralism, postmodernism and race in the late 70s and 1980s, critical
cultural studies (i.e., Marxist, feminist, poststructuralist,
etc.) expanded tremendously in US universities in elds
such as communication studies, education, sociology and
literature.[22][23][24] Cultural Studies, the agship journal
of the eld, has been based in the US since its founding editor, John Fiske, brought it there from Australia 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, taking British Cultural Studies with them, after Margaret Thatcher became
prime minister of the UK in 1978. A school of cultural
studies known as cultural policy studies is one of the
distinctive Australian contributions to the eld, though
it is not the only one. Australia also gave birth to the
worlds rst professional cultural studies association (now
known as the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia)
in 1990.[25][26] Cultural studies journals based in Australia include International Journal of Cultural Studies,
Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies and Cultural Studies Review.

since at least the beginning of the 1990s.[29] Cultural

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

4 Issues, concepts and approaches

4.1 Marxism, feminism, race and culture
As noted above, Marxism has played an important originating role as being one of the rst critiques of Culture - and has hence been reected in the history of cultural studies. The early Frankfurt School of Sociology
were particularly inuenced by Antonio Gramsci, and the
members of the later Birmingham School were in the
early 1970s inuenced by the structuralism of Louis Althusser. Cultural studies has since branched out from
Marxist readings of Sociology to more broad readings
which have involved Race, Gender, Ideological and identity based readings of the composition of Society, with
Post-Modernism and Post-Structuralism furthering these
readings into the artistic, psychological and philosophical
realms.

In Canada, cultural studies has sometimes focused on issues of technology and society, continuing the emphasis 4.2 Gramsci and hegemony
in the work of Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis, and others. Cultural studies journals based in Canada include In order to understand the changing political circumstances of class, politics and culture in the United KingTopia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies.
dom, scholars at The Birmingham School turned to the
In Africa, human rights and Third World issues are
work of Antonio Gramsci, an Italian thinker, writer and
among the central topics treated. Cultural Studies jourcommunist party leader of the 1910s, 20s and '30s.
nals based in Africa include the Journal of African CulGramsci had been concerned with similar issues: why
tural Studies.
would Italian laborers and peasants vote for fascists?
In Latin America, cultural studies has drawn on thinkers What strategic approach is necessary to mobilize popular
such as Jos Mart, ngel Rama and other Latin Ameri- support in more progressive directions? Gramsci modican gures, in addition to the Western theoretical sources ed classical Marxism, and argued that culture must be
associated with cultural studies in other parts of the understood as a key site of political and social struggle.
world. Leading Latin American cultural studies scholars In his view, capitalists used not only brute force (police,
include Nstor Garca Canclini, Jsus Martn-Barbero, prisons, repression, military) to maintain control, but also
and Beatriz Sarlo.[27][28] Among the key issues ad- penetrated the everyday culture of working people in a
dressed by Latin American cultural studies scholars are variety of ways in their eorts to win popular consent.
decoloniality, urban cultures, and postdevelopment the- It is important to recognize that for Gramsci, historical
ory. Latin American cultural studies journals include the leadership, or hegemony, involves the formation of alJournal of Latin American Cultural Studies.
liances between class factions, and struggles within the
Even though cultural studies developed much more cultural realm of everyday common sense. Hegemony
an interminable, unstable and
rapidly in the UK than in continental Europe, there is a was always, for Gramsci,
[30]
contested
process.
signicant cultural studies presence in countries such as
France, Spain and Portugal. The eld is relatively unde- Scott Lash writes:
veloped in Germany, probably due to the continued inuence of the Frankfurt School, which is now often said to
In the work of Hall, Hebdige and McRobbe in its third generation, which includes notable gures
bie, popular culture came to the fore... What
such as Axel Honneth. Cultural studies journals based
Gramsci gave to this was the importance of
in continental Europe include the European Journal of
consent and culture. If the fundamental MarxCultural Studies, the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies,
ists saw power in terms of class-versus-class,
French Cultural Studies, and Portuguese Cultural Studies.
then Gramsci gave to us a question of class alThroughout Asia, cultural studies has boomed and thrived
liance. The rise of cultural studies itself was

4 ISSUES, CONCEPTS AND APPROACHES

based on the decline of the prominence of fundamental class-versus-class politics.[31]

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 analysis of the ways in which 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.[32]

4.3

Structure and agency

The development of hegemony theory in cultural studies

was in some ways consonant with work in other elds exploring agency, a theoretical concept that insists on the
active, critical capacities of subordinated peoples (e.g.
the working classes, colonized peoples, women).[33] As
Stuart Hall famously argued in his 1981 essay, Notes
on Deconstructing 'the Popular', ordinary people are
not cultural dopes.[34] 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 signicance of or even romanticizes
some forms of popular cultural agency.

4.4 Post-hegemonic cultural studies?

In 2007, sociologist Scott Lash argued that power has
been radically transformed from the hegemonic mode of
'power over' to an intensive notion of power from within
(including domination from within) and power as generative force.[37]

4.5 Globalization
In recent decades, as capitalist culture 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.[38]

4.6 Cultural consumption

Cultural Studies criticizes the traditional view of the passive consumer, particularly by underlining the dierent
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 inuential in these developments.

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

A special 2008 issue of the elds agship journal, Cultural Studies, examined Anti-Consumerism from a variety of cultural studies angles. As Jeremy Gilbert noted in
his contribution to this 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
Judith Butler, an American feminist theorist whose work economic policy is to maintain consumer spending levels.
This is an era when consumer condence is treated as the
is often associated with cultural studies, wrote that
key indicator and cause of economic eectiveness.[39]
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.[36]

4.7 The concept of text

Cultural studies, drawing upon and developing semiotics,
uses the concept of text to designate not only written language, but also television programs, lms, photographs,
fashion, hairstyles, and so forth; the texts of cultural studies comprise all the meaningful artifacts of culture. Similarly, the eld widens the concept of culture. Culture,
for a cultural studies researcher, includes not only traditional high culture (the culture of ruling social groups),[40]
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

5.1

Literary scholars

everyday life, such as pubs, living rooms, gardens and development. While certain key concepts such as ideolbeaches, as texts.[41]
ogy or discourse, class, hegemony, identity and gender
Je Lewis brought together much of the discussion on remain signicant, cultural studies has long engaged with
text and textual analysis in his studies on media, cul- and integrated new concepts and approaches such as deture and cultural politics.[42] Accoridng to Lewis, 'tex- construction and postmodernism. The eld thus continits engagements
tual studies is the most complex and dicult heuristic ues to pursue political critique through
[44]
with
the
forces
of
culture
and
politics.
method, requiring both powerful interceptive skills and
a subtle conception of politics and context. Lewis own
mode of textual analysis views all phenomena as ' potential 'text' when set within a given knowledge system. Texts
can only bear meaning that can be 'interpreted', therefore,
as they present within a given knowledge system. It is this
knowledge system which 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 analyse the ways in which 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.

Academic reception

Cultural studies has evolved through the conuence of

various disciplinesanthropology, media and communication studies, literary studies, education, geography,
philosophy, sociology, politics and others. While some
areas of cultural studies have meandered into political
relativism and postmodern conceptions of the subject
and emancipation, at its core cultural studies provides a
signicant conceptual and methodological framework for
cultural, 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.[43] Thus, while some scholars and disciplines like
to dismiss cultural studies for its methodological openness and rejection of disciplinarity, its core strategies
of critique and analysis have had a profound inuence
throughout the more progressive and critical areas of the
social sciences and humanities. Cultural studies work
on forms of social dierentiation, control and inequality, identity, community-building, media, and knowledge
production, for example, have had a substantial impact.
Moreover, the inuence of cultural studies has become
increasingly evident in areas as diverse as translation studies, health studies, international relations, development
studies, computer studies, economics, archaeology, and
neurobiology, as well as across the range of disciplines
that initially shaped the emergence of cultural studies, including literature, sociology, communication studies, and
anthropology.

The Blackwell Companion to Cultural Studies, edited by

leading cultural studies scholar Toby Miller, contains essays that analyze the development of cultural studies approaches within each of a wide range of disciplines across
the contemporary social sciences and humanities.[45]

5.1 Literary scholars

Many cultural studies practitioners work in departments
of English or Comparative Literature. Nevertheless,
some traditional literary scholars such as Yale professor Harold Bloom have been outspoken critics of cultural
studies. These critics dislike cultural studies for a wide
range of reasons, including cultural studies rejection of
essentialism and its critiques of traditional Western theories of aesthetics.
Bloom stated his position during the September 2000
episode of C-SPAN's Booknotes:
[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 threefths of the tenured faculties in the Englishspeaking world, who really do represent a treason of the intellectuals, I think, a 'betrayal of
the clerks.[46]
Marxist literary critic Terry 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 as After 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.

5.2 Sociologists

Cultural studies has also diversied its own interests and Cultural studies has also had a substantial impact on somethodologies, incorporating a range of studies on media ciology. For example, when Stuart Hall left The Birmpolicy, democracy, design, leisure, tourism, warfare and ingham School at Birmingham, it was to accept a pres-

7 SEE ALSO

tigious professorship in Sociology at the Open University in Britain. The subeld of cultural sociology, in
particular, is disciplinary home to many cultural studies
practitioners. Nevertheless, there are some dierences
between sociology as a discipline and the eld of cultural studies as a whole. While sociology was founded
upon various historic works purposefully distinguishing
the subject from philosophy or psychology, cultural studies has 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 radical interdisciplinarity as the basis for cultural studies.
One sociologist whose work has had a major inuence
upon cultural studies is Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieus
work makes innovative use of statistics and in-depth
interviews.[47][48] However, although Bourdieus work has
been highly inuential within cultural studies, and although Bourdieu regarded his work as a form of science, cultural studies has never embraced the idea that it
should aspire toward scienticity, and has marshalled a
wide range of theoretical and methodological arguments
against the fetishization of scienticity as a basis for cultural studies.

from the self-proclaimed Left. We're witnessing here a profound historical volte-face. For
most of the past two centuries, the Left has
been identied with science and against obscurantism; we have believed that rational thought
and the fearless analysis of objective reality
(both natural and social) are incisive tools for
combating the mystications 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 nd an eective 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.[50]

6 Founding works

Two sociologists who have been critical of cultural stud- Hall and others have identied some core originating
ies, Chris Rojek and Bryan S. Turner, argue in their ar- texts, or the original curriculum, of the eld of cultural
ticle, Decorative sociology: towards a critique of the studies:
cultural turn, that cultural studies, particularly the a Hoggarts The Uses of Literacy
vor championed by Stuart Hall, lacks a stable research
agenda, and privileges the contemporary reading of texts,
Raymond Williams Culture and Society and The
thus producing an ahistorical theoretical focus. FurtherLong Revolution[51]
more, they assert the claim that there is both a rejection
of cross-cultural and historical relevance and a sense of
E.P. Thompsons The Making of the English Workmoral superiority about the correctness of the political
ing Class.
views articulated in cultural studies[49]

5.3

Physicist Alan Sokal

Main article: Sokal aair

In 1996, physicist Alan Sokal expressed his opposition
to cultural studies by submitting 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 practice peer review. When the paper appeared in print, Sokal
published a second article in a self-described academic
gossip magazine Lingua Franca, revealing his hoax on
Social Text. Sokal stated that his motivation stemmed
from his rejection of contemporary critiques of scientic
rationalism:
Politically, I'm angered because most
(though not all) of this silliness is emanating

7 See also
7.1 Fields and theories
Comparative cultural studies
Critical theory
Cross-cultural studies
Cultural analytics
Cultural anthropology
Cultural assimilation
Cultural consensus theory
Cultural critic
Cultural geography
Cultural hegemony

7.3

Associations

Cultural heritage

7.3 Associations

Cultural history

Association for Cultural Typhoon, Japan

Cultural identity theory

The Canadian Association for Cultural Studies

Cultural imperialism
Cultural materialism
Cultural practice
Cultural psychology
Cultural rights
Cultureme
Culturology

Cultural Studies Association of Australasia[52]

Cultural Studies Association, Taiwan
Cultural Studies Association, Turkey
Cultural Studies Association, US
ECREA European Communication Research and
Education Association, Norway
IBACS, Iberian Association of Cultural Studies,
Spain
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society, Taiwan

Gender studies

International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies (IATIS), South Korea

Heritage studies

International Society for Cultural History, UK

Literary criticism

Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association, UK

Literary theory
Media culture
Media studies
Organizational culture
Physical cultural studies

7.4 Authors
Ackbar Abbas
Theodor W. Adorno
Giorgio Agamben
Sara Ahmed

Popular culture studies

Ien Ang

Postcolonialism

Arjun Appadurai

Queer theory

Mikhail Bakhtin

Semiotics of culture
Social criticism
Social semiotics

Mieke Bal
Roland Barthes
Jean Baudrillard
Zygmunt Bauman

Sociology of culture

Tony Bennett

Translation studies

Lauren Berlant

Visual culture

Michael Brub
Homi K. Bhabha

7.2

Academic programs

List of universities with programs in cultural studies

and related programs

Pierre Bourdieu
danah boyd
Peter Burke

7 SEE ALSO
Judith Butler

Stuart Hall

Angie Chabram-Dernersesian

Donna Haraway

Rey Chow

Michael Hardt

James Cliord

John Hartley

William E. Connolly

Dick Hebdige

Tim Cresswell

Bob Hodge

Douglas Crimp

Richard Hoggart

Jonathan Culler

bell hooks

Antonia Darder

Max Horkheimer

Guy Debord

Eva Illouz

Michel de Certeau

Mizuko Ito

Gilles Deleuze

Luce Irigaray

Jacques Derrida

Annamarie Jagose

Richard Dyer

Henry Jenkins

Michael Eric Dyson

Douglas Kellner

Terry Eagleton

Laura Kipnis

John Ellis

Henry Krips

Arturo Escobar

Julia Kristeva

Frantz Fanon

Ernesto Laclau

John Fiske

Scott Lash

Hal Foster

Gilles Lipovetsky

Michel Foucault

Jean-Franois Lyotard

Sarah Franklin

Herbert Marcuse

Paulo Freire

Hayden White

John Frow

Jsus Martn-Barbero

Nstor Garca Canclini

Doreen Massey

J.K. Gibson-Graham

Alan McKee

Paul Gilroy

Angela McRobbie

Henry Giroux

Robert McRuer

Antonio Gramsci

Kobena Mercer

Lawrence Grossberg

Toby Miller

Elizabeth Grosz

Nicholas Mirzoe

Felix Guattari

Chandra Talpade Mohanty

Jrgen Habermas

Chantal Moue

Catherine Hall

Meaghan Morris

Gary Hall

Hamid Nacy

9
Antonio Negri

Cultural Critique

Griselda Pollock

Cultural Studies

Elspeth Probyn

Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies

Janice Radway

Cultural Studies of Science Education

Jacques Ranciere

Cultural Studies Review

Andrew Ross

Culture Machine

Marc Aug

dierences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies

Edward Said

European Journal of Cultural Studies

Beatriz Sarlo

French Cultural Studies

Saskia Sassen

Inter-Asia Cultural Studies

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

International Journal of Cultural Studies

Richard Sennett

Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies

Beverley Skeggs

Journal of African Cultural Studies

Edward Soja

Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies

David Harvey

Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

New Formations

Sara Suleri

Parallax

Tiziana Terranova

Portuguese Cultural Studies

E.P. Thompson

Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies (PLCS)

Tzvetan Todorov

Public Culture

Graeme Turner

Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies

Valentin Voloshinov

Social Text

Michael Warner

Space and Culture

Cornel West

Theory, Culture & Society

Raymond Williams

Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies

Paul Willis
Slavoj iek

7.5

Journals

Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities

Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media
Studies
Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies
Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies
Critical Studies in Media Communication
Cultura

8 Notes
[1] Miller 2006, p. 1
[2] Rodman, Gilbert B. (2015). Why Cultural Studies?.
Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell.
[3] Cultural studies is not synonymous with either "area
studies" or "ethnic studies, although there are many cultural studies practitioners working in both area studies and
ethnic studies programs and professional associations (e.g.
American studies, Asian studies, African-American studies, Latina/o Studies, European studies, Latin American
studies, etc.).
[4] Brub, Michael (2009), Whats the Matter with Cultural
Studies?", The Chronicle of Higher Education.

10

[5] Cultural Studies Associations, Networks and Programs,

extensive, but incomplete, list of associations, networks
and programs as found on the website for the Association
of Cultural Studies, Tampere, Finland.
[6] Sardar, Ziauddin and Van Loon, Borin (1994). Introducing Cultural Studies. New York: Totem Books
[7] Dworkin, Dennis. Cultural Marxism in Post-War Britain:
History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997), p.
116.
[8] see also Corner, John (1991), Postscript: Studying
CultureReections and Assessment: An Interview with
Richard Hoggart. Media, Culture and Society, Vol. 13,
No. 2, April.
[9] Ioan Davies, British Cultural Marxism, International
Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 4(3) (1991): 323344, p. 328.
[10] Morley & Chen (eds.) (1996). Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London: Routledge.
[11] Gilroy, Grossberg and McRobbie (eds.) (2000). Without
Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall. London: Verso.
[12] Webster, Frank (2004). Cultural Studies and Sociology
at, and After, the Closure of the Birmingham School.
Cultural Studies 18 (6): 848.

8 NOTES

[26] Turner (ed.), Graeme (1993). Nation, Culture, Text: Australian Cultural and Media Studies. London: Routledge.
[27] Sarto, Ros & Trigo (eds.) (2004). The Latin American
Cultural Studies Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
[28] Irwin & Szurmuck (eds.) (2012). Dictionary of Latin
American Cultural Studies. Gainesville: University Press
of Florida.
[29] Chen & Huat (eds.) (2007). The Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Reader. London: Routledge.
[30] Hall, Stuart (June 1986).
Gramscis Relevance
for the Study of Race and Ethnicity.
Journal of Communication Inquiry 10 (2):
527.
doi:10.1177/019685998601000202.
[31] Lash 2007, pp. 6869
[32] Edgar & Sedgewick, 165.
[33] Giddens, Anthony (1984). The Constitution of Society:
Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Malden, MA:
Polity Press.
[34] Guins & Cruz (eds.) (2005). Popular Culture: A Reader.
London: Sage. p. 67.
[35] Grossberg, Lawrence (2010). Cultural Studies in the Future Tense. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

[13] Curtis, Polly (2002), Birminghams cultural studies department given the chop, The Guardian.

[36] Butler, Judith (1997). Further Reections on Conversations of Our Time. Diacritics 27 (1).

[14] Turner, Graeme (2003). British Cultural Studies: An Introduction (Third ed.). London: Routledge.

[37] Lash 2007, abstract

[15] Hartley, John (2003). A Short History of Cultural Studies.

London: Sage.

[38] Appadurai, Arjun (1996). Modernity at Large: Cultural

Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.

[16] Hall 1980

[17] Hall, Critcher, Jeerson, Clarke & Roberts (1978). Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order.
New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc.

[39] Gilbert, Jeremy (2008). Against the Commodication of

Everything. Cultural Studies 22 (5).
[40] Bakhtin, Mikhail 1981. The Dialogic Imagination.
Austin, TX: UT Press, p. 4.

[18] Hall, Stuart (1988). The Hard Road to Renewal:

Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London: Verso.

[41] Fiske, Hodge and Turner (1987). Myths of Oz: Reading

Australian Popular Culture. Allen & Unwin: Boston.

[19] Hall & Jacques (eds.) (1991). New Times: The Changing
Face of Politics in the 1990s. London: Verso.

[42] Je Lewis (2008) Cultural Studies, Sage, London; Je

Lewis, (2005) Language Wars: The Role of Media and
Culture in Global Terror and Political Violence, Pluto,
London.

[20] Abbas & Erni (eds.) (2005). Internationalizing Cultural

Studies: An Anthology. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

[43] Lewis 2008

[21] Lindlof & Taylor, 2002, p. 60.

[44] During 2007

[22] Grossberg, Nelson & Treichler 1992

[45] Miller 2006, p. index

[23] Warren & Vavrus (eds.) (2002). American Cultural Studies. Urbana Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.

[46] Booknotes.org

[24] Hartley & Pearson (eds.) (2000). American Cultural Studies: A Reader. Oxford University Press.

[47] Richard Harker, Cheleen Mahar, Chris Wilkes (eds), An

Introduction to the Work of Pierre Bourdieu: The Theory
of Practice. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1990, pp. 68-71.

[25] Frow & Morris (eds.) (1993). Australian Cultural Studies:

A Reader. Urbana Champaign, IL: University of Illinois
Press.

[48] Bourdieu, Pierre (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of

the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

11

[49] Rojek, Chris, and Bryan Turner, Decorative sociology:

towards a critique of the cultural turn. The Sociological
Review 48.4 (2000): 629-648.
[50] A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies, Alan
Sokal, English translation of article from Lingua Franca,
1996. Physics.nyu.edu.
[51] Hall 1980
[52] About. Cultural Studies Association of Australasia. Retrieved 29 September 2015.

References
Du Gay, Paul, et al. Doing Cultural Studies: The
Story of the Sony Walkman. Culture, Media and
Identities. London ; Thousand Oaks Calif.: Sage in
association with The Open University, 1997.

Lash, Scott (May 2007).

Power After
Hegemony:
Cultural Studies in Mutation?".
Theory, Culture & Society 24 (3): 5578.
doi:10.1177/0263276407075956.
Lewis, Je (2008). Cultural Studies: The Basics
(2nd ed.). London: Sage. ISBN 1-4129-2229-1.
Lindlof, T. R., & Taylor, B. C. (2002). Qualitative Communication Research Methods, 2nd edition.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Longhurst,Brian, Smith,Greg, Bagnall, Gaynor,
Crawford, Garry and Michael Ogborn, Introducing
Cultural Studies, Second Edition, Pearson, London,
2008, ISBN 978-1-4058-5843-4
Miller, Toby, ed. (2006). A Companion to Cultural
Studies. Malden, Mass: Blackwell Publishers. ISBN
978-0-631-21788-6.

During, Simon (2007). The Cultural Studies Reader

(3rd ed.). London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-41537412-5.

Pollock, Griselda (ed.), Generations and Geographies: Critical Theories and Critical Practices in Feminism and the Visual Arts. Routledge, 1996.

Edgar, Andrew and Peter Sedgwick. 2005. Cultural

Theory: The Key Concepts. 2nd edition. NY: Routledge.

Pollock, Griselda. Psychoanalysis and the Image.

Boston and Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.

Engel, Manfred: Cultural and Literary Studies.

Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 31
(2008): 460-467.

Smith, Paul. Questioning Cultural Studies: An Interview with Paul Smith. 1994. MLG Institute for Culture and Society at Trinity College. OSF1.gmu.edu,
31 August 2005.

Grossberg, Lawrence; Nelson, Cary; Treichler,

Paula A., eds. (1992). Cultural Studies. New York:
Routledge. ISBN 0-415-90351-3.
Hall, Stuart, ed. (1980). Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 19721979. London: Routledge in association with the
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham. ISBN 0-09-142070-9.
Hall, Stuart. Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms.
Media, Culture, and Society 2 (1980).
Hall, Stuart. Race, Culture, and Communications:
Looking Backward and Forward at Cultural Studies. Rethinking Marxism 5.1 (1992): 10-18.
Hoggart, Richard. The Uses of Literacy: Aspects
of Working Class Life (Chatto and Windus, 1957).
ISBN 0-7011-0763-4
Johnson, Richard. What Is Cultural Studies Anyway?" Social Text 16 (198687): 38-80.

Smith, Paul. A Course In Cultural Studies." The

Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 24.1, Cultural Studies and New Historicism
(1991): 39-49.
Smith, Paul (2006). Chapter 19. Looking Backwards and Forwards at Cultural Studies. In Miller,
Toby. A Companion to Cultural Studies. Malden,
Mass: Blackwell Publishers. pp. 33140. ISBN
978-0-631-21788-6.
Theory, Culture and Society, 21(1), 2004.
Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of
Culture and Society. Revised edition. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1985.
Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society, 17801950. New York,: Harper & Row, 1966.

10 External links

Johnson, Richard. Multiplying Methods: From

Pluralism to Combination. Practice of Cultural
Studies. London; Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE,
2004. 26-43.

CCCS publications (Annual Reports and Stencilled

Occasional [sic] Papers) of the University of Birmingham

Johnson, Richard. Post-Hegemony? I Don't Think

So Theory, Culture and Society. 24(3): 95-110.

The Need for Cultural Studies: Resisting Intellectuals and Oppositional Public Spheres

12
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture at
Purdue University

10

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