Wiktionary
n. A diverse field of study which examines representation of culture through a variety of academic theory.
Wikipedia
Cultural Studies is a bimonthly peer-reviewed academic journal covering research on the relation between cultural practices, everyday life, material, economic, political, geographical, and historical contexts. The editor-in-chief is Lawrence Grossberg ( University of North Carolina). It was established in 1987 and is published by Routledge.
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. 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 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 different disciplines around the world. Cultural studies is avowedly and even radically interdisciplinary and can sometimes be seen as antidisciplinary. 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.
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 which attempt to explain and analyze the cultural forces related to processes of globalization.
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 field has become a kind of world-wide 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. Somewhat distinct approaches to cultural studies have emerged in different national and regional contexts such as the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Latin America, Asia, Africa and Italy.
Usage examples of "cultural studies".
Her Federation cultural studies curriculum had taught that Andorians took their familial responsibilities—.
The first was to set his computer to work gathering any available information on all faculty and staff of the cultural studies department at the State University.
Comparative cultural studies have now demonstrated beyond question that similar mythic tales are to be found in every quarter of this earth.
I have asked for experts in cultural studies to assist me in determining how the desert people are able to survive so well, when your Harkonnens suffer so many losses.
It is a practice of which even many of those involved in cultural studies are ignorant.
Of course, it had taken considerable efforts in translations and cross-cultural studies to explain the word peace to all the several species.
The structure has been dug down into the whole of the hill and houses a large staff of humanoid people, oily and pale and without hair -- they are moles and look like it, with huge square yellow teeth and mouths of fire -- all of whom are in charge of keeping track of and retrieving its contents, a mixture of records, dossiers, quotations, historical documents, timelines, fragments, cultural studies -- the most glorious and banal and bloody memories.
I seek only to explain in part the kindly favoritism extended to me by a monarch who values cultural studies.
At university, she was now talking of studying creative writing, or perhaps dropping the literature thing entirely and swapping over to cultural studies, whatever the hell that was.