Cultural Studies

What are cultural studies?”

“Staurt Hall noted that the centre of cultural studies had given rise to two independent methodological branches. The “culturist” school, which drew its inspiration from sociology, anthropology, social history, and the writings of Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson, saw culture as a complete way of life and struggle that could be understood through meticulous concrete (empirical) descriptions that captured the homologies of everyday cultural forms and material life. By drawing on linguistics, literary criticism, and semiotic theory, and by paying close attention to the writings of Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, and Michel Facault, the “(post) structuralist” line “conceived constitutions and ideological consequences.”

“In the English-speaking world, cultural studies became a distinct academic field between the 1960s and 1990s as a result of a general trend in universities toward two types of interdisciplinary analysis.”  “Women’s studies and ethnic studies, which frequently began as divisions of English or communications departments”, developed concurrently but were formalised as centres and institutes rather than departments.