Understanding Cultural Studies

October 20, 2009 by Tara Brabazon

Introduction

It has been fifty years since Richard Hoggart published The Uses of Literacy. This book captures one of the many origins of Cultural Studies. In the subsequent half century, hundreds of thousands of students have completed courses and degree programmes in the anti-discipline discipline. They have been taught semiotics and subculture, punk and pop, discourse and deconstruction. The stories from the Birmingham Centre have become narratives of resistance and social change.

Yet most first year students were not born when the Sex Pistols played the Roxy Club or Stuart Hall headed the Centre. They were born as Margaret Thatcher was leaving office and George Bush Senior had failed to be re-elected for a second term. Their childhood and adolescence were framed by Bill Clinton’s indiscretions and Tony Blair’s rebranding of the British Labour Party. Popular music was fragmented, sampled and digitized. Public broadcasting was shredded through the plurality of subscription services. Women took issue with obesity, shoe shopping and size zero, and new rituals – of hoodies, piercing and body branding – became the resistance of the disconnected.

Recognizing the scale of these generational, social, political and economic changes, what is the relevance of Cultural Studies to contemporary undergraduate students? The need to explain, justify and update the (anti)discipline for a new community of scholars has provided the rationale for this current proposal.

Understanding Cultural Studies has a single goal. The text offers a clear guide to undergraduate students through ‘the how and the why’ of the field. It is necessary that students have an answer to the often-asked tutorial question: ‘why are we learning this?’ It is also important that students have a clear guide of how to enact the methods and practices of cultural studies. These answers and applications are provided through careful and modern examples, translating the famous and historic case studies from the Cultural Studies of the past to ensure relevance and understanding for Cultural Studies students in the present.

This monograph is currently being written and will be published by SAGE in 2011.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Politics

1. Con/text

2. Screen

3 Sound

4. Bodies

5. Subculture

6. Identity

7. Urbanity

8. Mobility

9. Terrorism

Conclusion: Literacy

Permalink