The Importance Of Cultural Studies

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cultural studies becomes available as a resource to educators who can then teach students how to look at the media (industry and texts), analyze audience reception, challenge rigid disciplinary boundaries, critically engage popular culture, produce critical knowledge, or use cultural studies to reform the curricula and challenge disciplinary formations within public schools and higher education. For instance, Shane Gunster has argued that the main contribution cultural studies makes to pedagogy "is the insistence that any kind of critical education must be rooted in the culture, experience, and knowledge that students bring to the class room."(Intellectuals, and Cultural Studies,P.253). While this is an important insight, it…show more content…
Myoshi's interest in cultural studies emerges from an ongoing project to theorize the regulatory and emancipatory relationship among culture, power, and politics as expressed through the dynamics of what he calls pedagogic expediency. Such a project concerns, in part, the diverse ways in which culture functions as a contested sphere over the production, distribution, and regulation of power, and how and where it operates both symbolically and institutionally as an educational, political, and economic force. Drawing upon a long tradition in cultural studies work, Myoshi takes up culture as constitutive and political, not only reflecting larger forces but also constructing them; in this instance, culture not only mediates history but shapes it. Myoshi wants to explain that culture is the primary terrain for realizing the political as an articulation and intervention into the social, a space in which politics is pluralized, recognized as contingent, and open to many…show more content…
He writes: "What permanent education valuably stresses is the educational force of our whole social and cultural experience. It is therefore concerned, not only with continuing education, of a formal or informal kind, but with what the whole environment, its institutions and relationships, actively and profoundly teaches. Permanent education also refers to the field in which our ideas of the world, of ourselves and of our possibilities, are most widely and often most powerfully formed and disseminated. To work for the recovery of control in this field is then, under any pressures, a priority."
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