Cultural Studies in Relation to Curriculum Studies

Cultural Studies as a General Academic Field

Taken as a formalized academic field, cultural studies does not refer to the study of the traditional arts and their associated creative processes, although some work within cultural studies may take the traditional arts as its object of analysis. Nor does cultural studies refer simply to describing the function of cultural artifacts and practices within a particular society. Rather, cultural studies refers to a wide range of theoretical and empirical studies connected by a general commitment to understanding culture as a system of representational practices whereby social meaning is produced and reproduced, communicated and interpreted, asserted and opposed. Borrowing theoretical insights and methodologies from across disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, scholarship that falls under the general rubric of cultural studies often takes as its objects of study the representational practices of everyday life and popular culture, for example, the stylistic dimensions of youth subcultures, the various forms and messages of mass media, and the various expressions of consumer capitalism. Although its themes are diverse, cultural studies tends to focus on a number of interrelated, dynamic concepts, particularly representation, hegemony, and identity.

A key assumption for work in cultural studies is that individual and social identities do not exist outside of the representational systems through which such identities are constructed and expressed. [Page 171]The politics of representation refers to the struggle to control the symbols, discourses, images, practices, and representations that define who, what, and how individuals are, should be, and can be. Studying and critiquing the politics of representation in relation to the construction of subordinate and marginalized identities represents a key objective of cultural studies scholarship. By questioning the notion that identity is reducible to an essential, stable, and unified social category that lies outside the representational systems that give identity meaning, cultural studies scholarship often highlights the ways in which identities are socially derived, historically contingent, and culturally expressed.

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