Beginner's Guide....: Cultural Studies : Four Goals

Hey, Fellas!! Today we are going to deal with Cultural studies and its four goals as it is in our Masters's third-semester syllabus.

“I'm no prophet. My job is making windows where there were once walls.”

What is Cultural Studies?

Cultural study is an interdisciplinary field that examines the political dynamics of contemporary culture including popular culture and its historical foundations. Cultural studies researchers generally investigate how cultural practices relate to wider systems of power associated with, or operating through, social phenomena. These include ideology, class structures, national formations, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and generation. Employing cultural analysis, cultural studies view cultures not as fixed, bounded, stable, and discrete entities, but rather as constantly interacting and changing sets of practices and processes. The field of cultural studies encompasses a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives and practices.

Cultural studies were initially developed by British Marxist academics in the late 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and has been subsequently taken up and transformed by scholars from many different disciplines around the world. Cultural studies is avowedly and even radically interdisciplinary and can sometimes be seen as anti-disciplinary. A key concern for cultural studies practitioners is the examination of the forces within and through which socially organized people conduct and participate in the construction of their everyday lives.

Cultural studies combine a variety of politically engaged critical approaches drawn including semiotics, Marxism, feminist theory, ethnography, post-structuralism, postcolonialism, social theory, political theory, history, philosophy, literary theory, media theory, film/video studies, communication studies, political economy, translation studies, museum studies, and art history/criticism to study cultural phenomena in various societies and historical periods. Cultural studies seek to understand how meaning is generated, disseminated, contested, bound up with systems of power and control, and produced from the social, political, and economic spheres within a particular social formation or conjuncture. The movement has generated important theories of cultural hegemony and agency. Its practitioners attempt to explain and analyze the cultural forces related to and processes of globalization.

Cultural studies became a global movement during the rise of neoliberalism in Britain and the US. They attracted the attention of many conservative opponents both within and beyond universities for a variety of reasons. A worldwide movement of students and practitioners with a raft of scholarly associations and programs, annual international conferences, and publications carry on work in this field today. Distinct approaches to cultural studies have emerged in different national and regional contexts.

Now after basic knowledge of Cultural Studies let us try to solve some of the questions given in the G- Class as our task.

1) Your understanding of power in Cultural Studies?

According to Foucault, all knowledge is possible and takes place only within a vast network or system of power relationships that allow that knowledge to come to be, in order for statements accepted as “true” in any context to be uttered, and in order for what counts as knowledge to be generated in the first place. For example, scientific knowledge may be produced only as the result of well-funded academic institutions, for-profit corporations, and/or governments, each of which is rife with its own visible, and often invisible, power relations, economies, and strata.

Foucault, however, argues that power and knowledge are inextricably linked, such that it doesn’t make sense to speak of one without the other. Hence, power and knowledge are conjoined into a single concept, which he calls “power/knowledge.”

2) Why Media Studies is so important in our digital culture?

BECAUSE THE MEDIA GO TO GREAT LENGTHS TO STUDY YOU!

What is the Role of Media in Society?

Role of media in society: Today media become a part of everyone’s life. Media plays a major role in today’s society, now media become food to strengthen or weaken society.

Purpose of Media

The purpose of media is to give information about current news, gossip, Fashion, and the latest gadgets in the marketplace of the people. The role of the media has to be one-way trading and marketing of products, and prejudices. It gives geographical knowledge about how people are divided. The media claimed to be governed by righteousness and equity for the common man to the rich man.

Media is about