Culture Study and teaching

Cultural studies or cultural theory is an academic field that explores the dynamics of contemporary culture (including the politics of popular culture) and its social and historical foundations. Cultural studies researchers investigate how cultural practices relate to wider systems of power associated with, or operating through, social phenomena. These include ideology, class structures, national formations, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and generation. Employing cultural 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. British Marxist academics initially developed cultural studies in the late 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and it has since been 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. Cultural studies combines a variety of politically engaged critical approaches including semiotics, 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 and art history and 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 of cultural hegemony and agency. Its practitioners attempt to explain and analyze the cultural forces related to and processes of globalization. During the rise of neoliberalism in Britain and the US, cultural studies became a global phenomenon. It 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, continues the work in this field today. Distinct approaches to cultural studies have emerged in different national and regional contexts.