Origin Of Cultural Studies

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Once Socrates said: “The unexamined life is not worth living” (Plato, 12) while making people aware about the necessity to evaluate life through the help of self-knowledge and wisdom. He believes in necessity of life evaluation for further improvements and betterment. The underlying principles of cultural studies has traces to Socrates’ statement. Cultural studies, as the theoretical and empirical analysis of culture, investigates the way cultural practices are related to various systems of power and social-phenomena. The field considers culture as a constantly interacting and changing sets of practices and processes. Though there have been multiple attempts to define culture yet it is hard to provide an all-inclusive definition of what culture…show more content…
It was a dedicated to the study of the expansion of difference in human affairs (during an era of increasing globalisation, corporate concentration and technological integration of those affairs). An assemblage of intellectual concerns about power, meaning, identity and subjectivity in modern societies. An attempt to recover and promote marginal, unworthy or despised regions, identities, practices and media (it was a profane pursuit). A critical enterprise devoted to displacing, decentring, demystifying and deconstructing the common sense of dominant discourses. An activist commitment to intellectual politics – making a difference with ideas, to ideas, by ideas (Hartely, 13). The origin of cultural studies can be traced in two major incidents. One is the identification of the limitations of classical Marxism and the growth of New Left movement. Stuart Hall traces the origin of cultural studies in the limitation of…show more content…
For this second group of cultural theorists, cultural studies is the study of mass or popular culture, especially the mass media in a mass society. It is engrossed with cultural politics, which in this framework denotes to a fight among high or minority culture and popular or mass culture. These cultural theorists are interested in popular culture that is the struggle for a structural position within a radically unequal class society. The scholarship of cultural studies has a history of its own. The founding practitioners like Richard Hoggart (cultural studies as the democratised literary imagination) and Stuart Hall (cultural studies as the political theory of popular resistance and change) wrote about it. Stuart Hall’s successor at Birmingham, the historian Richard Johnson (cultural studies as bemused materialism) also contributed to the history. Many introductory books about cultural studies – by, say, John Storey’s Cultural Consumption and Everyday Life Cultural studies in practice (1999), Nick Couldry’s Inside Culture (2000), Chris Barker’s Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice (2000) – incorporate historical accounts into their exposition of methodology and their analytical and conceptual exegesis. Leading figures of cultural studies like Charlotte Brunsdon, Paul Gilroy, Elizabeth Wilson, Angela McRobbie, and David Morley included historical accounts in their own unfolding compositions. Though not falling in
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