Cultural Turn

The phrase cultural turn is commonly evoked in academic discourse to refer to a series of interrelated developments in the humanities and the social sciences that have occurred since the 1960s that have more or less radically changed the shape, aims, and practice, and possibly even audiences, of the humanities and social sciences. Most noted among these developments have been the emergence and global spread of a new intellectual formation called cultural studies, the impact of philosophical debates as (post)structuralism and postmodernism on both the humanities and the social sciences, and the constitution of new specialties inside traditional disciplines, or even new ways of conceiving of them, such as cultural history, cultural geography, the sociology of culture, or cultural sociology. As an intellectual movement, a ...