All Major Terms from Cultural Studies

What is Trauma Studies? Trauma Studies is a relatively new area in Cultural Studies that explores the impact of the disruptive experience of trauma on individuals and societies by analyzing its psychological, cultural and literary significance. What theories are involved? Trauma Studies bring together psychological approaches with poststructuralism, postcolonialism and other socio-cultural theories. When did Trauma Studies begin? Trauma Studies began in the 1990s drawing upon Sigmund Freud and his contemporaries like Joseph Breuer (who co-authored Studies on Hysteria with Freud),  Jean-Martin Charcot (who for the first time studied the relationship between trauma and mental illness), his student Pierre Janet , Hermann Oppenheim , Abram Kardiner (who studied war trauma), Morton Prince , etc., and their work on hysteria. What does Trauma Studies explore? How identity and memory are affected by trauma. How the individual's conception of the external world and social ...

We have already discussed Stuart Hall's concepts of Encoding and Decoding in an earlier blog post. That story does not end there. Courtesy: https://images.app.goo.gl/9G9VHXPxJQhxFG8QA A Later Model The Encoding-Decoding Model of Communication was later developed by Stuart Hall into the concept of Circuit of Culture which connects Communication and Cultural Capitalism.  This theory asserts that the the creation and propagation of Culture involves five processes: production, consumption, identity, regulation, and signification. What are these Processes? Production refers to making or inventing cultural products, reproducing and distributing them—and paying for all this labour. An example would be Television shows. Consumption refers to buying the products (subscribing and watching particular shows), using them, becoming  part of these products and the culture they represent—and paying for all this. Identity refers to all the agents involved with producing, ...

Cultural Studies Term 5 Who coined this term "Intersectionality"? The term Intersectionality was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, professor of law and social theorist in her 1989 paper “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” Courtesy: https://www.ywboston.org/2017/03/what-is-intersectionality-and-what-does-it-have-to-do-with-me/ Now, what does Intersectionality mean? According to this theory, social identities are overlapping and intersecting and this often affects how we live in the society.  In other words, the various identities of one person (such as race, gender, sexuality and class) are not independent of one another, but intersecting. This intersectional identity determines the person's role in the society. Courtesy: https://www.ywboston.org/2017/03/what-is-intersectionality-and-what-does-it-have-to-do-with-me/ How does Intersectionality af...

Arjun Appadurai is a major theorist in globalization studies. His work comes within Marxist Cultural Studies. Courtesy: https://www.arjunappadurai.org/ How does he explain Globalization? Globalization has led to a borderless economy that has brought in huge changes in cultures. Though the world seems borderless now, it is far from being homogenous or united.  Appadurai holds that when money, people, culture, etc "flow" or get exchanged in this globalized world, it results in a "Disjuncture". Disjuncture means disjointed in nature, lacking in harmony. So, what Appadurai means is that even when there is a growing interrelationship and interdependence between various elements in the globalized world, there is also an increasing disjuncture between them. This he discussed in his most famous work, the essay "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy". The Scapes Appadurai holds that people perceive their globalized realities in term...

We have already talked about Williams' early works Culture and Society , "Culture is Ordinary" and The Long Revolution . Now, his later works. Communications In 1962, Williams' fascinating book Communications was published. It studies the different forms of communication in Britain in the 1960s, namely, printing, photography, film, radio, television and computers.  Why does he do that?  To show how the various forms of communications continually conduct and negotiate reality (thus debunking the idea that reality is something that already exists). The Country and the City The Country and the City was published in 1973. Here Williams examines the twin concepts of the countryside and the city that were prevalent in England from the 16th century. Why would he do that? To show how these concepts came to symbolize social and economic changes under industrialization and capitalism. Keywords The book Keywords (1976) takes up fundamental concepts and categories of...

Let's talk about Raymond Williams Raymond Williams was a major theorist of the New Left movement. And the New Left denotes the liberal political approach of the 1960s and 70s in the West that engaged in issues like civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, etc. Raymond Williams laid the foundations of the interdisciplinary field of  Cultural Studies . Want to know a bit about his life? Raymond Williams was born in a working class family in Wales in 1921, just as modernism started. He studied at Cambridge, joined the Communist Party, and fought in  the II World War. By the time he died in 1988, he had become one of the greatest theorists of the century. Courtesy: https://raymondwilliams.co.uk/about/ Do you know his first major work? Inspired by T.S. Eliot's essay Notes Towards a Definition of Culture (1948), he wrote the famous book Culture and Society (1958). Williams wrote this book  at a time when "culture" was regarded  as something that is s...