What is Cultural Studies?
Cultural Studies provides a space for scholarly dialogues that draw on theory and methods from several disciplines: anthropology, history, literary studies, philosophy, political economy, and sociology. But whereas the traditional disciplines tend to produce stable objects of study, research in cultural studies attempts to account for cultural objects under conditions constrained by power and defined by contestation, conflict, and change. That is, cultural studies grapples with the volatility of cultural happenings. Cultural studies also emphasizes self-reflexivity: an awareness that scholars and their scholarship are themselves caught up in the social currents and in the global circulation of meanings being studied. In taking up questions from this perspective, cultural studies both draws on and develops key strands of contemporary cultural theory: semiotics, deconstruction and poststructuralism, dialogics, subaltern and postcolonial studies . . . . The field also draws on and develop
