Cultural studies

Cultural studies combines sociology, social theory, literary theory, film/video studies, and cultural anthropology to study cultural phenomena in industrial societies. Cultural studies researchers often concentrate on how a particular phenomenon relates to matters of ideology, race, social class, and/or gender.

Overview

In his book Introducing Cultural Studies, Ziauddin Sardar lists the following five main characteristics of cultural studies:

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• Cultural studies aims to examine its subject matter in terms of cultural practices and their relation to power.
• It has the objective of understanding culture in all its complex forms and of analysing the social and political context in which culture manifests itself.
• It is both the object of study and the location of political criticism and action.
• It attempts to expose and reconcile the division of knowledge, to overcome the split between tacit (cultural knowledge) and objective (universal) forms of knowledge.
• It has a commitment to an ethical evaluation of modern society and to a radical line of political action.