Summary
Contents
Subject index
David Oswell has written a comprehensive introduction to cultural studies that guides the reader through the field's central foundations and its freshest ideas. This book: - grounds the reader in the foundations of cultural studies and cultural theory: language and semiology, ideology and power, mass and popular culture;- analyzes the central problems: identity, body, economy, globalization and empire;- introduces the latest developments on materiality, agency, technology and nature.Culture and Society is an invaluable guide for students navigating the dynamic debates and intellectual challenges of cultural studies. Its breadth and unparallelled coverage of cutting-edge theory will also ensure that it is read by anyone interested in questions of materiality and culture.`Too often cultural studies discourse seems cut off from wider developments in social theory. As a sociologist with a strong cultural studies sensibility, David Oswell is ideally placed to put this right. Through a series of well-judged and historically nuanced readings of cultural, social theory and critical philosophy, this book provides just the bridge between cultural studies and wider debates that we need' - Nick Couldry, Redaer in Media, Communications and Culture, London School of Economics and Political Science
Body: Between Nature and Techonology
Body: Between Nature and Techonology
Much contemporary thinking on identity talks about the situated and embodied nature of the self. In this chapter I want to consider the question of the body not only in relation to the human body, but more broadly in the context of recent work within social and cultural theory, cultural anthropology, science and technology studies and sociology that investigates the body somewhere between nature and technology. Cultural studies, as with other disciplines, has favoured an understanding of culture as the leading critical edge against the conservatism of essentialist notions of nature, technology and the body. Thus, for example, to talk about people or things as having ‘natural’ qualities or features has often been thought of in ...
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