All Major Terms from Cultural Studies

We love Foucault 🤩 As you know, Foucault was a French philosopher who applied philosophy in sociology, culture, history, literature, psychology, and other Humanities. Courtesy: http://www.the-philosophy.com/foucault-power-knowledge Foucault stressed on subjective experience.👻 Within philosophy, one area particularly of interest to Foucault is phenomenology.  Phenomenology studies the world “as it is experienced by the human being” rather than the world “as it really exists, beyond experience.”  In other words, Foucault was interested in the subjective experience of things, rather than in the thing as an objective entity. Well, what exactly did Foucault do?👀💀🔥 Foucault studied not a subject, or discourse, but studied how that discourse came into being. Take madness, for example, which is one of the first discourses he studied.  He did not study the definition of madness, the various types of madness, how they can be cured, etc in the conventional...

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...

Cultural Studies Terms 3 Bourdieu's Terms Field and Habitus So, we now know that Cultural Capital denotes your skills and tastes, your cars and other material possessions, and your University degrees. Your Cultural Capital (which you share with a group in the form of Collective Capital) takes the form of your habits, attitudes and dispositions. For example, people belonging to certain groups wear ethnic clothes like sarees, while others wear modern, Western clothes; certain people enjoy classical music, while others enjoy pop music; and some members of the same family might like vegetarian food while others enjoy non-vegetarian food... all because their Cultural Capital is different. These deeply ingrained habits and attitudes of people (that is the physical embodiment of their Cultural Capital) is called HABITUS . We often think our habits and attitudes (Habitus) are objective and natural, but they are actually subjectively and culturally developed, based on past experi...

Who is Pierre Bourdieu? Bourdieu (1930-2002) was one of the most influential sociologists of the 20th century. He was French; he taught in Algeria during the French colonial rule, and during the Algerian War, he did an ethnographic study of the Kabyle people, the largest native community in Algeria. Ethnography forms the basis of all his theoretical postulations. Courtesy: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Pierre-Bourdieu Let's first talk about the concept of Capital. Capital is the money or any resource that gets you a higher social position. And, Capital is the major reason for social inequality. Bourdieu talks about two kinds of Capital: Social Capital (WHO you know) and Cultural Capital (WHAT you know and what you have). Cultural Capital can be of three types: Embodied (qualities of the mind and the body, that is, skills, accent, artistic taste, etc) Objectified (material belongings such as cars) Institutionalised (symbols of authority and cultural...

Culture Studies Term 1 Who introduced the terms Encoding and Decoding ? Encoding and Decoding denote a communication model developed by Stuart Hall in the 1973 essay titled "Encoding and Decoding in Television Discourse". Courtesy: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/stuart-hall-and-the-rise-of-cultural-studies What theory are these terms  part of? These terms are part of Communication Theory as well as Reception Theory, that is, the theory of how an audience receives messages. In developing these terms, Stuart Hall was influenced by Semiotics, or the science of signs. Stuart Hall's theory of communication is part of Culture Studies because it shows how communication produces and reflects culture. What is Encoding/Decoding? In communication, a Sender "encodes" a message with meaning and the Receiver "decodes" the message and understands it. And what are Codes? Codes are a set of conventions used to communicate meaning. For examp...