Cultural Studies

Cultural studies can be roughly identified as a transdisciplinary intellectual field focused on the relationships between culture, society, and identity. “Culture” here is conceived of in a very broad way, including the arts (both high and popular ones) as well as beliefs, discourses, and communicative practices. Media entertainment and popular culture are possibly the most common and most typical foci of interest of cultural studies practitioners, especially because of their relative exclusion from traditional curricula, but it is the whole field of cultural practices that appeals to cultural studies followers. Literary and film criticism, sociology, history, anthropology, communication research, geography, and even political theory are the main disciplinary venues from which its practitioners usually come, and from which they draw their tools, mixing them in often-innovative ways.

What makes this instable mix still identifiable as a field, albeit one with blurred and ever-changing boundaries, is a focus on the linkages between culture and power or politics. Indeed, cultural studies can be defined as a project that explicitly tries to bridge gaps between traditional disciplines to get a better, more encompassing understanding, its theorizing and critiquing of culture intended as a crucial terrain of political and ideological contestation. The political dimension of cultural production and consumption is the main object of cultural studies as an intellectual endeavor, where the commitment to emancipation and democracy has been a driving assumption in the field from its inception in postwar Britain. From this perspective, cultural studies is best understood not just as an academic discipline or a special approach to the study of culture, but as a political-intellectual project with a final objective to construct a better (i.e., more equal and democratic) society moving from an engaged analysis of the cultural dimensions of social life.

What cultural studies practitioners usually do is take an element of culture and explore, analyze, and interpret the varied ways in which it is received, internalized, interpreted, re-created, or represented by different social groupings, variously qualified and identified in terms of class, age, gender, ethnicity, race, sexuality, and so on. One of the typical stakes in this intellectual strategy is to show how any of these cultural representations could be interpreted and used in ways that may be counter to the original producer's or creator's intent, usually well-positioned in the social and political structure. This “cultural populism” inscribed in the original project of cultural studies has been one of its strengths, but also, at the same time, one of its weakness, especially when stretched to the point of making any use or consumption of a cultural item into a potentially subversive act of micropolitics. The political implications of the approach, as well as their potential ambivalence, are indeed apparent: although it can be read as a subversive endeavor from the perspective of dominant agencies as it helps to deconstruct their wished representations by revealing their power intentions, at the same time it could be a powerful tool in the hands of an agency wishing to construct its product (be it a commodity, an image, or an agenda) so that it is received and therefore consumed by the proper population segments.

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