Cultural Studies and Cultural Theory

2020 ◽  
pp. 132-149
Author(s):  
Roger Salerno
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Cultural Theory

scholarly journals Prosthesis and the engineered imagination: reading augmentation and disability across cultural theory, representation and product design

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raymond Holt ◽  
Stuart Murray
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Engineering Design ◽  
Systems Engineering ◽  
Technology Use ◽  
Medical Humanities ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Disability Theory ◽  
Design For All

This article argues for the value of considering the interaction of literary/cultural studies, disability studies and engineering/design studies in the ongoing development of a critical medical humanities research frame. With a specific focus on prosthesis, but also considerations of embodiment, technology and augmentation as concepts in both cultural/disability theory and engineering/design, we note how the shifting and plastic ideas of ‘the prosthetic’ as used within cultural studies have never been in conversation with scholars who work on prostheses in engineering design or the processes through which such technologies are produced. Additionally, we show that the increased use of systems engineering in the design and construction of prostheses creates fractured ideas of disabled bodies that frequently ignore both the cultural meaning and lived experience of technology use. In design and engineering, prostheses are literal objects, often made to order for a diverse range of clients and produced across different working platforms; in cultural studies, the word creates multiple resonances around both augmented bodies and non-embodied states increasingly understood in terms of assemblage and supplementarity. Working from this, we outline how questions of metaphor, materiality and systems weave through the different disciplines. The article claims that a critical dialogue between the working methods of literary/cultural studies and engineering/design, for all their obvious differences, possesses the potential to create informed and sophisticated accounts of disability embodiment. Our conclusion brings the strands of the enquiry together and points to the merits of engineering the imagination, and imagining engineering, as both a subject and method in future medical humanities research.

scholarly journals Encyclopaedic Fiction, Cultural Value, and the Discourse of the Great Divide

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Simon Cooke
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Cultural Value ◽  
Cultural Elements ◽  
Objective Quality ◽  
Great Divide ◽  
The Status ◽  
Low Culture

<p>Recent postmodern work on cultural evaluation, such as Barbara Smith's Contingencies of Value (1989), argues that cultural value cannot be treated as an inherent or objective quality of cultural products. Instead, cultural value must be understood as "value for": relative, that is, to the identities and interests of particular cultural consumers and producers. Theorists (for instance, John Frow in his 1995 study Cultural Studies and Cultural Value) have employed similar relativist logic in their analyses of the putative "structures" or institutions that supposedly give shape to Western culture-as-a-whole: "high" culture, "popular" culture, "mass" culture and so on. This "postaxiological" strain of cultural theory undermines the real-world integrity of those categories by suggesting that they (the categories) are merely contingent effects of critical / evaluative discourse. Other archetypically "postmodern" arguments in literary and cultural studies have focused on charting or advocating both the demise of the modernist "great divide" between "high" and "low" culture, and its replacement, in cultural production and criticism, with more permissive and socially egalitarian modes of interplay between "high" and "low" culture. Some critics and critically aware cultural producers have treated these two projects as though they are complementary facets of a general "postmodern" turn. Yet contesting or reversing obsolete hierarchies of cultural value does not necessarily lead critics to contemplate the status of "high"/"low" categories themselves. A meaningful refusal of the logic of the modernist "great divide" would obligate critics and producers to reflect on the contingency of those categories and their own interests with respect to those categories. Juxtaposing an "encyclopaedic" modernist text renowned for its interspersion of "high" and "low" cultural elements (James Joyce's Ulysses) with a postmodern text that seems knowingly to do the same (David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest), two case studies illustrate the inseparability of readings or narratives that are couched in "high"/"low" terms from the particular interests of cultural producers and consumers.</p>

Is it ‘the economy, stupid’? Economic relations and cultural studies: Some reflections on Jim McGuigan’s Cultural Populism

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (6) ◽  
pp. 932-952
Author(s):  
Garry Whannel
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Personal Communication ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Political Analysis ◽  
Socialist Politics ◽  
Syllabus Analysis

This article argues that in the development of media studies and cultural studies, a gap opened between textual analysis and political economy that became a damaging schism. The roots of the schism between the economic and the cultural lie in the growing influence of French structuralism, and post-structuralism from the late 1960s onwards. Jim McGuigan’s book, Cultural Populism, appeared at a time when socialist politics, political analysis and cultural theory were, both together and separately, in a degree of flux, self-reflection and loss of direction. This article outlines the nature of the split between emphasis on the cultural and the economic, the ways in which it continues to mark the field and the importance of continuing to try and hold the two together in the analytic frame. Methodologically, this article involves analysis of Cultural Populism and utilises document and archive searching, interviews, syllabus analysis and personal communication.

Black Critical and Cultural Theory

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kelechi Anucha
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Black Feminism ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Native Studies

Abstract This chapter reviews black critical and cultural theory under the following headings: 1. Introduction; 2. Cultural Studies (Kara Keeling, Queer Times, Black Futures, Jennifer C. Nash, Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality, and Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies); 3. History and Sociology (Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, and Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code); 4. Interdisciplinary Literary Studies (Therí Alyce Pickens, Black Madness :: Mad Blackness).

Getting There: Cultural Theory and the Sociological Analysis of Sport in Britain

1992 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Hargreaves ◽  
Alan Tomlinson
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
The Other ◽  
Current Work ◽  
Sociological Analysis ◽  
Theme Issue ◽  
Sociology Of Sport

In this paper we offer a rejoinder to MacAloon’s arguments in his article, “The Ethnographic Imperative in Comparative Olympic Research,” and briefly situate the other contributions in this theme issue of Sociology of Sport Journal. We argue that while MacAloon’s polemic against the so-called “cultural studies” approach raises important issues, notably the need for more soundly based empirical work, his characterization is misconceived, and that what he presents as an alternative is neither theoretically clear nor empirically well founded. We suggest that the contributions in this volume provide a better guide to the quality of current work in the sociological analysis of sport in Britain than does MacAloon’s characterization of the so-called cultural studies approach.

Science

2006 ◽  
Vol 23 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 157-163 ◽  
Author(s):  
Celia Roberts ◽  
Adrian Mackenzie
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Production Of Knowledge ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Social ◽  
Or Practice ◽  
Forms Of Life

How could social scientists and cultural theorists take responsibility in engaging with science? How might they develop an experimental sensibility to the links between the production of knowledge and the production of existence or forms of life? Critically outlining key fields in the social and cultural studies of science, we interrogate a number of approaches to these questions. The first approach tries to make sense of how science operates in relation to economic, political and cultural forces. The second analyses science as a form of embodied work or practice. The third engages with science as collaborative-collective elaboration of events, ranging across cultural theory, contemporary art and participant ethnographies. This outline sketches a vector of responsibility across this diverse range of engagements, suggesting that contemporary movements between science and other knowledges constitute ethical and political imperatives.

scholarly journals Jurnalisme sebagai Arena Pertarungan Kepentingan: Telaah Teori Kebudayaan

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 644
Author(s):  
Amirudin Amirudin
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
Theoretical Study ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Accurate Information ◽  
The Public ◽  
Social Units ◽  
Industrial Context ◽  
Game Metaphor

This paper is a theoretical study of the use of cultural theory which played to explain journalism activities that just not an activity to provide accurate information in the public space. In an industrial context, in fact journalism activities has face  any complex situasion. Now, the activities is no longer exclusively owned by journalists, but journalism  is a kind of football arena that have some interest in it. To present news, journalists must be able to absorb various interest from various trajectories. There is a game metaphor that journalists must follow, and how journalist do "practice" the game in the field of contestation, which will be explored using Bourdieu's cultural theory,Through this article, I hope, it can contribute to how anthropology plays a role in developing media studies, and vice versa, it can be a trigger for how anthropologists should begin to enter cultural studies which are not just exotic and simple social units; but also entered the study arena into more complex social units, for example in media organizations

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