For anyone entering into college who don’t know what they want to study, I suggest cultural studies. It’s not taught everywhere… but you can take a gander around my blog (adailyriot) and a few blogs provides as well as this article to learn what its’ all about.
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Cultural Studies is a relatively new academic phenomenon, having emerged in the 1960s as an ‘anti-disciplinary’ discipline—a project that explicitly sought to bridge gaps between the study of Literature, History, Sociology, Anthropology and Communication. Marxist in its orientation, it was and is an intellectual endeavor aimed at understanding, theorizing, critiquing and otherwise taking seriously the role of culture as a crucial terrain of political and ideological contestation. Cultural Studies is probably best understood as the politically committed, theoretically informed, radically self-reflexive and historical-materialist analysis of cultural processes and practices, where the commitment to imagine a more humane, more democratic societyhas always been a guiding assumption in the field from its early formations in post-war Britain. In this sense, Cultural Studies is not just an academic discipline and a particular approach within the wider of field of the study of culture (one with implicit, but distinctive epistemological assumptions and ways of working); it is also a political project that seeks to construct what Larry Grossberg calls a “radical political history of the present.”
Cultural Studies understands culture in a very broad way, as a way of life and a ‘way of struggle’, including all the practices and phenomena of all kinds—media representations; media and literary texts; consumer culture; youth subcultures; performance and display practices, as well as other aspects of popular culture and everyday life. That is why, it would be impossible to define Cultural Studies by looking at the kind of objects it studies. While it is true that actually existing Cultural Studies work has tended to concern itself with a very limited number of cultural objects and issues, a fact which has contributed to the vagueness of Cultural Studies as a project (as in the conflation of cultural studies with popular culture studies), Cultural Studies cannot be defined by a particular kind of object or set of objects; and as Grossberg puts it, “[Y]ou can do cultural studies of almost anything” (246). In the same way, Cultural Studies cannot be defined by reference to a specific set of methods, despite the fact that certain methods, such as semiotics, have come to be associated with most of actually existing work in cultural studies, a fact that has ultimately limited the scope and range of the whole field. In other words, Cultural Studies is not an object-driven or method-driven discipline. It is driven, instead, by a set of methodological/epistemological moves. Here are five interrelated epistemological assumptions that inform more robust work in Cultural Studies:
The Need for Political Commitment and the Analysis of the “Social Whole”
Because Cultural Studies understands culture politically, the notions of ‘social totality/whole’, and, in more dominant versions, that of ‘articulation’ are central in Cultural Studies. The significance of an event, phenomenon, or practice—be it ideological, political, economic, or cultural—cannot be properly assessed outside a dialectical understanding of its place in society as a whole. Cultural Studies examines cultural phenomena in the context of their social whole (which, here, refers to the concrete unity of all interacting spheres of social life), that is, by pursuing their hidden interactions and interconnections in real life. This way we are in a better position to understand how social, economic, and political forces act on cultural production, distribution, and reception; and how cultural forces, in turn, act on the social, economic, and political.
The Need for a Multiplicity of Methods and Interdisciplinarity
In most Cultural Studies, there is a realization that traditional disciplinary methods have their merits and limits, but that they work better when they are deployed together in the analysis of cultural phenomena and processes. No single method is complete; and to get as close as possible to a better and more complex understanding of cultural practices and processes, combining methods becomes indispensable. As Johnson and company put it, “a multiplicity of methods is necessary because no one method is intrinsically superior to the rest and each provides a more or less appropriate way of exploring some different aspect of cultural process” (Johnson et al. 42). And it is in this nuanced sense that Cultural Studies is also interdisciplinary. But while Cultural Studies understands culture in a broad way, as a way of life and encourages interdisciplinary perspectives and strategies, it, at the same time, demands a rigorous engagement with cultural texts, practices, and forms of all kind.
The Need for Self-Reflexivity
As Cultural researchers, we are ‘inside’ our object of study. We approach our topics with a particular cultural biography. Gramsci notes somewhere that the starting point of critical reflection—in this case, research—is the consciousness of who one is. Far from being a negative source of research bias, knowing our partialities enables us to correct our biases. Self-reflexivity puts our work in perspective, highlighting its merits, as well as its limits.
The Need and Commitment to Theory
As Larry Grossberg puts it, “Cultural Studies is always theoretical. It is absolutely committed to the necessity of theoretical work, to what Karl Marx called the detour through theory.” It is not committed to theory for theory’s sake; it is rather interested in how theory and theoretical work can be deployed to better understand and transform specific historical conjunctures, contexts, and formations.
The Need to Think Historically and Spatially
Cultural research activity is also always temporally located; it takes place at a certain historical moment/conjuncture. The time dimension is an essential perspective in cultural theory and practice. It not only greatly enhances the subtlety with which cultural phenomena is explored, but helps us to recognize the historical content and specificity of our work (including the theoretical categories we work with), as well. Cultural research activity is also always spatially located: It takes place somewhere. Issues of space and place are inherent in every research project, and recognizing the particularities of the places we study and where we study them could be enlightening.
