A neglected history: Richard Hoggart’s discourse of empathy

This commentary arose from discussions and presentations held at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies' 50 years on (CCCS50) conference. Held at the University of Binningham on 24-25 June, the conference examined the legacy that the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies fostered since its inception in 1964. Despite the closure of the centre in 2002, the maverick research tracks that were created then are still followed now. This is a rather disturbing return to the scene of the crime (deepened by Stuart's recent death). Here in Birmingham, cultural studies was founded and then closed down. Perhaps this is the parabola of the intellectual shutdown presently underway in Western academia, where knowledge is increasingly packaged as information to be rendered transparent to the metaphysics of the market. In an epoch characterised by the ethical bankruptcy of neoliberalism sustained in a political positivism that denies the idea of justice and implicitly refuses to cultivate a critical citizenship what John Berger not so long ago called 'economic fascism'--then the freedoms that once permitted critical thought and led to cultural studies are today clearly on very difficult ground. The fundamental premise that I have personally inherited from cultural studies and the heady days at Birmingham in the 1970s is that of operating with the idea of critical work as a cut or wound that cannot be healed. This would subsequently resonate in my encounters with Foucault and Fanon, along with feminism and critical thought in Italy. I would suggest, obviously completely against the grain of the present-day neoliberal organisation of higher education and its managerial and market-orientated protocols, that this means to transform inherited intellectual fields and disciplines into ruins, rather than simply to fine-tune and renovate them: the cut, the crisis, the critical interrogation is constant. This also means that doing anthropology, fieldwork, sociology or historical research--crossing and contesting their languages and premises--can never be the same again. As it travels into other geographies, sustained in translation and confronting the indecipherable that registers the complexities of historical differences, this wound can only deepen in order to accommodate other narratives and other needs. But the critical configuration of cultural studies in transit and translation can also return to re-invest its so-called origins and sources with further interrogations. (These unsuspected consequences of travelling theory were famously rehearsed by Edward Said.) So, in my case, referring to the locations of analysis is to consider the transit, transformation and translation of cultural studies in a non-Anglophone space and series of practices. This is to suggest connections leading to both a resonance and dissonance seeded outside the North Atlantic axis. What interests me here is the re-routing of cultural studies in a southern European and Mediterranean context. It inevitably leads to asking often recognisable questions while simultaneously drawing upon diverse cultural, conjunctural and critical lexicons. This particular exit from an Anglo-American world historically dominated by empiricism has not occurred so much through the fetishisation of theory (another Anglo-American phenomenon), as by cutting into the sedimented inheritance of European humanism and the inevitable undoing (after Nietzsche, after Freud) of the abstract Kantian categories and Hegelian dialectic that presume reason is truth and truth is reason. As James Baldwin would have put it, or Frantz Fanon or Assia Djebar for that matter, critical possibility is not produced by deliberate rationality, rather it is dependent on coming to terms with the past that cruelly configures our present. Here, where I tend to run the inheritance of cultural and postcolonial studies into what 1 today practise as Mediterranean studies, let me very rapidly offer two perspectives. …

This essay offers some reflections on the heritage of cultural studies prompted by a conference held at Birmingham University in June 2014. The conference, called CCCS50, was mounted as part of a two-year research project into the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) which is (state) funded by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council. It was scheduled to mark 50 years since the founding of the CCCS by Richard Hoggart in 1964. Speakers at the conference included many who had studied and taught at the CCCS and the later Department of Cultural Studies, and there were ancillary events such as an art exhibition at the nearby Midlands Arts Centre and a photographic exhibition elsewhere in the university. The unhappy history of the relationship between Birmingham University and Cultural Studies (the university had shut down all cultural studies teaching in 2002, as well as consistently under-resourcing it) was a shaping presence during the conference. This and the deaths, in 2014, of both Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall, affected participation in, attendance at, and the tenor of, the proceedings. The author, who studied at CCCS in the 1970s, and has previously written about this experience, explores some of the contradictions of the event for those who found themselves being made history.

Wrestling with Angels

One of the more striking, if under-appreciated, aspects of publishing in cultural studies ' early days was its provisionality. It is worth remembering that the chief publishing organ of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was not called Cultural Studies, or something similarly definitive, but rather Working Papers in Cultural Studies. By today's standards it would likely be considered 'grey literature', because the work appearing there announced itself as, on some level, in process. This essay offers a detailed history of cultural studies' early publication practices, particularly those associated with the Centre. Its purpose is to provide insight into the modes of scholarly communication through which the nascent field established itself in the 1960s and '70s. Equally, its purpose is to use this history as a means for taking stock of the field's apparatus of scholarly communication today. Cultural studies, the authors argue, might do well to open a space once again for less finished scholarly products - work that is as much constitutive (i.e., about community building) as it is instrumental (i.e., about conveying new research).Keywords cultural studies, working papers, grey literature, scholarly communication, Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural StudiesThis essay focuses on the writing and publication practices that developed in and around the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies from the time of its founding in 1964 until the cessation of the journal Working Papers in Cultural Studies, arguably its chief publication, in the late 1970s. Through our engagement with these practices, we want to develop an approach to the question 'what is cultural studies?' that is historical, speculative, and above all, materialist. It is historical insofar as it revisits the 'moment' of Birmingham, albeit from the perspective of its serial publications. It is speculative to the extent that we hope to build upon these historical traces and make some arguments for the ways in which textual production in cultural studies might be reformulated to allow for more productive engagements with the contemporary conjuncture. Finally, our approach is materialist because we want to de-emphasise the conceptual and biographical aspects of the work that took place at the Centre - the content, as it were - and to draw attention instead to the varied functions of that work vis-a-vis its form.1What this amounts to, essentially, is 'a trip below decks into the boiler room which was to become Cultural Studies', as Stuart Hall has described it.2 Beyond all the rows, beyond all the major works and their intellectual history lies a more mundane but no less important story to be told about Birmingham, and about cultural studies more generally.3This is a story about the instruments with which, and the infrastructure through which, cultural studies developed at the Centre and seeped out into the world. At its heart is the category 'grey literature', a term we borrow from library and information science to refer to pamphlets, conference proceedings, reports, white papers, newsletters, self-published journals, and other types of fugitive publications that lack high production values, the endorsement of blind peer review, or both. Grey literature may be academic, but its authority is typically in doubt. Also central to our story is process, or rather a range of methods for writing, duplicating, and publishing that came to be condensed under the heading of'working'. Our argument is that the success of the Birmingham Centre is attributable not only to the intellectual content of the work produced there in the 1960s and '70s but also, and in no small part, to the grey literature in and through which those ideas circulated.Given how the present moment is marked by debates and struggles at the intersection of knowledge production, intellectual property and labour, reconstructing this earlier moment might help to remind those of us currently working in cultural studies that the modes of research, writing and publication that are dominant today (namely, those that favour the single author and the discrete, properly credentialed text) were not always the only, or even primary, ones that mattered. …

Paul Gilroy is a central figure in British cultural studies. From There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack to Darker than Blue, his work has consistently interrogated what the political means for cultural studies, particularly with an eye toward making the world anew at some point in the near future. Indeed, Gilroy’s work suggests that the construct of the “political,” for cultural studies, has at least two interrelated meanings, both future-focused: (1) the political involves one form of investigation as a mode of entering into the conjunctural analysis; and (2) the political is also a nod toward black futurities as a mode of forever transforming said conjuncture. First, as noted by Stuart Hall, the cultural studies scholar has the responsibility to “necessarily abstract” from the conjuncture to begin an analysis. What this means is, whereas disciplinary scholarship focuses on the cultural, social, economic, or the political as set boundaries, the cultural studies scholar can begin with the political, in the first instance, and this may (or may not) lead to an investigation of the social, economic, or cultural elements of the conjuncture. This is an inherent element of the interdisciplinary approach of cultural studies. For Gilroy, nationalism and fascism are political constructs that he begins with, in the first instance. These political constructs, then, disproportionately lead to questions of racism and colonialism, which are disproportionately left out of the larger British cultural studies project. Gilroy’s career outlines a position that arguably has changed very little in contemporary British cultural studies: that white men are largely the gatekeepers of what constitutes cultural studies, many of whom completely ignore race in their theorizations of nationalism and fascism, even when it serves as an absent presence. Further, this liberal position of cultural studies requires intervention. Thus, second, and as noted by Lawrence Grossberg, the political for cultural studies also assumes that one’s work should do something in the world; it should seek to forever transform the conjuncture. In short, cultural studies is not just a theoretical exercise, but it is about telling a “better story” that can lead to transformation in the world. Indeed, Gilroy’s treatise on “racelessness,” often considered a nod toward colorblindness, is actually his attempt to speak the world anew. Put differently, Gilroy’s project has always been concerned with “routes” toward a new construct of humanism to disrupt Western engagements with the human. Despite its potential for white liberalism, then, Gilroy views cultural studies as uniquely positioned to speak the world anew, to challenge the solidity of the Western human and its connections to the Western nation. This, for Gilroy, requires rethinking the future, not through Karl Marx’s communist future, but Frantz Fanon’s decolonial future. In short, black futurities are everyone’s future.

DOES AN AFRICAN cultural studies exist? If so, is it a unified field of study? What links does this domain / domains--or perspectives within it/them--have with the First and Second World metropoles? A perusal of the World Wide Web identifies an explosion of African sites in 1996, mainly from South Africa, in which these questions are occasionally asked, but only partially resolved. (1) The UNISA Web site, for example, has valiantly listed the rather vexing and tense interchange between Christo van Staden (1996, 1997) and Arnold Shepperson (1996) which occurred in Communicatio over African intellectual and discussions of cultural studies. Questions on the historical lineage of cultural studies offer one trajectory of current discussion (McNeil 1997). Another offers an alternative account of (Wright, 1998:39). Handel Wright's decentring of the seminal influence of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (BCCCS), was published in the first issue of the European Journal of Cultural Studies. Wright is a Kenyan and educationist working at the University of Tennessee. He locates early forms of cultural studies in Russian culturology of the 1920s, the Harlem Renaissance, the Negritude Movement of the 1930s and the Kamiriithu community project in Kenya in the late 1970s. These, and other unnamed cultural studies are present, he argues, in the absence of Africa in of the field. Wright might have added that even those initiatives which are `named' are often ignored by different constituencies competing for the soul of cultural studies. Wright's cites Manthia Diawara's (1992) notion of as a central component of an African cultural studies. This orientation separates Wright's approach from cultural studies solely as an academic discipline. It also perhaps asserts a unity and area--specificity where one does not really exist. However, if community-based performative acts are indeed a criterion of African approaches, then some Southern African interventions should be listed amongst these precursors to cultural studies (Baxter, 1992; Dalrymple, 1987; Hoosain, 1984; Steadman, 1985; Kerr, 1995; Journal of Communication Inquiry, 1988). Some of these Other, non-British origins (Wright 1988:39) were elaborated from local South African frames of reference and performance with regard to labour issues and class struggle (eg. Sitas, 1984; Von Kotze. 1988). Others rearticulated a kind of culturalist Marxism, mixed with cultural theory and materialist semiotics, into not only analysis of local contexts, but also into strategies for political action. Many of these differently-inflected applications linked the academy to the community, rather than necessarily assuming the dichotomy between the head and the hand as Wright has noted of the Western, and especially the US, experience. Unlike the UK, USA, and Kenya, various kinds of cultural studies in South Africa can claim an affirmative application in terms of praxis and the trajectory of history, with regard to both the micro- and macro-levels of ideological engagement. As currently unnamed applications, Wright might like to see them moved to the `named' within international genealogies of the field. It is not my intention here to make a claim for South African cultural studies--of which there are many kinds--but to revisit the debate from specifically African perspectives. A brief history of cultural studies may be in order. Contemporary Cultural Studies was the name popularised by BCCCS in the mid-1950s as an oppositional academic orientation. The field spread globally from there both geographically and disciplinarily. Its penchant for theoretical incorporation by disciplines ranging from history, geography, literature, and politics to accounting is legion. (2) Most of the ensuing studies were about power relations, social and class struggles, and the ways in which meanings are made and contested in discursive contexts of meaning formation. …

This article explores the under-stated, shadowy but nevertheless significant role of psychoanalysis in the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at Birmingham University in Britain, whose development it reviews from the latter’s inception in 1964. It notes an early distance between the emerging social and political focus of Cultural Studies, and what were perceived to be the individualist and liberal perspectives of Freudian psychoanalysis in Britain. It points out that psychoanalytic perspectives and methods came to have a significant role in its later writing, as the Centre engaged with issues of gender and race, complementing its earlier focus on social class. It was through the Lacanian rather than British object relations tradition that psychoanalytic ideas were first taken up and incorporated into the CCCS’s complex Gramscian analyses of cultures, ideologies and ‘conjunctures’. The idea is proposed that Stuart Hall’s and the CCCS’s conception of culture as a source of creativity and agency, as well as of repression, is, however, consistent with the approach to meaning and symbolism of the British analytic tradition, and that there is scope for a further conjunction of these approaches.

Film scholars have argued that the British social realist films of the late 1950s and early 1960s reflect the concerns articulated by British cultural studies during the same period. This article looks at how the social realist films of the 1970s and early 1980s similarly reflect the concerns of British cultural studies scholarship produced by the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies during the 1970s. It argues that the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies’ approach to stylised working-class youth subcultures is echoed in the portrayal of youth subcultures in the social realist films Pressure (1976), Bloody Kids (1979), Babylon (1980) and Made in Britain (1982). This article explores the ways in which these films show us both the strengths and weaknesses of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies’ work on subcultures.

The Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) (1964–2002) was a maverick interdisciplinary research‐based unit within the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. It had a profound effect on sociocultural analysis, the spread of interdisciplinarity, and the engaged intellectual practices of academics in the humanities and social sciences that registered well outside the field of cultural studies. Founded by Richard Hoggart (renowned author of The Uses of Literacy ), the CCCS produced many well‐known researchers in its interdisciplinary field, the best known being Stuart Hall, who succeeded Hoggart as director. The work of the Centre was characterized by a radical, New Left‐influenced anti‐elitist approach to culture and ideology, focusing, for example, on subcultures, the media, and the state. Although it closed in 2002, the extraordinary ripple effect of the CCCS on interdisciplinary, reflexive social theory within and beyond Britain, and cultural studies is undeniable.

Cultural studies has developed as a significant new academic discipline at the end of the 20th century. An important spawning ground for contemporary cultural studies was the intellectual ferment surrounding the British new left of the 1950s and 1960s. Associated with such figures as Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, cultural studies sought to link working-class culture to domination and social liberation. Although linked with socialist politics, cultural studies was among the new left currents that rejected some of the old left's tendency toward economism. It also revealed an openness to a range of complex cultural and social issues that the left had placed less emphasis upon in previous generations. In the 1970s, led by Stuart Hall and the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, British cultural studies produced innovative studies of mass media and ideology. Since then cultural studies has spread rapidly across the globe and it has been especially well received in the English-speaking world, including the United States. Today cultural studies exerts a prominent influence in departments of communication, literature, film, American studies, modern languages, and some social sciences.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Reviewed by: Cultural Studies in the Future Tense by Lawrence Grossberg Eric Weisbard Cultural Studies in the Future Tense. By Lawrence Grossberg. Durham: Duke University Press. 2010. Cultural studies here is no vague term but the specific approach pioneered by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the 1970s under the leadership of Stuart Hall and encapsulated in such important books as Resistance Through Rituals, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, and The Black Atlantic. Lawrence Grossberg, though he only studied briefly at Birmingham, has long been the preeminent American champion of its methods, co-editing the immense 1992 compendium Cultural Studies and since 1990 the journal Cultural Studies. This book undertakes an impossible mission: to clarify the meaning of cultural studies for those now treating it as a grab bag of methodological options, contrast its origins with the very different moment we now find ourselves in, and seed a future for the field. At the core of it all is conjunctural analysis, the notion that one should apply theory to observable material so as to find the fracture points in social formations: their “problematic.” Cultural studies claims no grand victories, just highly contingent interventions. Grossberg values an “interdisciplinary and antidisciplinary” (15) scholarship, characterized by “modesty” rather than “imperializing discourse” (18–19). His repeated goal is to help us tell better stories—well, “produce better conjunctural stories” (101). Yet Grossberg is not shy in his claims, locating a centuries-in-the-making “liberal modernity” (69) that was already under siege in the 1970s and has since been decisively called into question by other visions of the modern. One of the real strengths of this book, unreplicable in a short review, is the author’s ability to gloss the massive literature of modernism, modernity, and modernization in service of his own synthesis. Our own conjuncture, Grossberg argues, entails a kind of “embedded disembededdness” (91) that fractures what should be social totality into economic, cultural, and political domains of apparent separation. This, rather than globalization or neoliberalism, is the beast we are up against. Grossberg in response wants to see conjunctural stories told about economics: the conversation about “value” (158), in a shifting space of actual and virtual capitalism, that economists and popular pundits refuse. He wants cultural studies of culture itself decoupled from much of what passes as media studies and Hall’s notion of “decoding,” reframed to better recognize what Joseph Nye calls culture’s “soft power” use [End Page 141] in empire and emotional and sensory valences. (To put it one way: cultural studies in the classic years loved punk rock; can it confront gaming?) And, in a chapter he endearingly confesses to be his “least satisfying” (4), he struggles to envision a cultural studies for politics that could be less theory driven and more able to address the complexities of the political in connecting the state, the body, and everyday life. What is the moral of this reckoning with conjunctural modernities? We are left with a graphic meant to represent the “stratifying machine” of the multiply modern (280). Time and space are the two axes. On this grid, overlapping, events of the moment get a circle; everyday life a pentagon; institutional space a rectangle; change and history a triangle. A final shape, a splotch, like a substance in a microscope slide, sits on top of the others: that is articulation, the way we mediate or belong to the real. It is all almost ostentatiously unclear. Early on, Grossberg writes: “Cultural studies attempts to strategically deploy theory (and empirical research)” (25). It would be good to see this important scholar reverse those terms, taking research—the illustrious development of a particular example—out of the parenthetical. Eric Weisbard University of Alabama Copyright © 2013 Mid-America American Studies Association

The media has played a significant role in disseminating feminist ideas and politics over the last two decades. Early studies in the field often suggested that all media coverage was anti-feminist and criticized cultural texts for degrading women by constructing conventional and subordinate subjectivities that reinforced patriarchal values. This view conceives as an enemy and stems from a belief that all media is corrupt and unable to construct anything but the most dominant stereotypical images. Since the last decade, as work in cultural studies and post-structuralist theory demonstrates, however, the whole notion of corruption masks the ways in which industries and political struggles work in the late twentieth century. All texts, knowledge, and political practices are constructed within competing social, political, and economic contexts of industries. As some feminist researchers acknowledged in the 1970s, it is not enough to dismiss as merely serving the complementary systems of capitalism and patriarchy, they argued that popular can also be seen as site where meanings are contested and where dominant ideologies can be disturbed (Gamman and Marshment 1). Following this argument, I would further argue that allows ways of disseminating feminist ideas and theories without placing them in total opposition to contemporary culture. To demonstrate the possible ways in which feminist discourses can engage with the popular, I will proceed in two stages: first, an overview of the development of feminist critique within cultural studies, which challenged the early work done by the pioneers of cultural studies; second, an examination of some cultural texts, aiming to show that feminist discourses have been incorporated into and commercial discourses to the extent that they help discard the myth of female passivity. This interaction with the has opened up a space for women to represent a female point of view in a male-dominated sphere. I would argue that some cultural forms allow ways and provide an outlet for women's voices which might then serve as a basis from which to develop feminist politics among shifting definitions of feminism. Among a range of cultural forms, I have chosen to examine a particular one, the women's magazine, to illustrate my argument. Two Turkish women's magazines are the focus of the examination. Emergence of Feminist Critique of Popular Culture within Cultural Studies Feminism and have had an ambiguous relation, and as Morag Shiach puts it, the terms are not parallel: one designates a political space, the other an object of study (331). Yet Shiach points out that popular culture is a broad term which carries within it a series of debates about political legitimacy, class identity, and cultural value, which inform the theoretical framework and the methodological procedures of cultural studies. She finds these associations problematic for and states that 'popular culture' as an institutional space, and as a political concept, embodies definitions of class identity, historical change and political struggle which are often blind to the questions of feminism (331). This view was also dominant in the early works of cultural studies scholars. In order to understand the terms in which feminist critics have intervened in these studies, it is important to start with the history of cultural studies. In relation to culture, the pioneering work of cultural studies, such as Richard Hoggart (The Uses of Literacy), Raymond Williams (Culture and Society), or E. P. Thompson (The Making of the English Working Class) emphasizes distinctive ways of theorizing cultural hierarchies, which select cultural forms that exclude or marginalize women, and describe them as representative of the typical working-class condition (Shiach 335). Their work played a significant role in shaping the work of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, whose analyses of as a site of resistance appeared to form the institutional and academic understandings of in the 1970s. …

Articulating the "Counter" in Subculture Studies

Is a comprehensive introduction to the British tradition of cultural studies. Turner offers an accessible overview of the central themes that have informed British cultural studies: language, semiotics, Marxism and ideology, individualism, subjectivity and discourse. Beginning with a history of cultural studies, Turner discusses the work of such pioneers as Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, E. P.Thompson, Stuart Hall and the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. He then explores the central theorists and categories of British cultural studies: texts and contexts; audience; everyday life; ideology; politics, gender and race. The third edition of this successful text has been fully revised and updated to include: * How to apply the principles of cultural studies and how to read a text * An overview of recent ethnographic studies * Discussion of anthropological theories of consumption * Questions of identity and new ethnicities * How to do cultural studies, and an evaluation of recent research methodologies * A fully updated and comprehensive bibliography.

A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both . —James Madison Since the rise of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham England in the 1960s as well as in subsequent versions of cultural studies throughout the world, there has been a long-standing tradition of taking on the big issues of the era. The Birmingham School took on the assaults against working class culture by American and mass media culture. In this conjuncture, British cultural studies stressed the need for media literacy and critique, learning to read newspapers, TV news, advertisements, TV shows and the like just as one learns to read books (see Kellner, 1995). The project helped generate a media literacy movement, expanded the concept of literacy, and introduced a new, powerful dimension of pedagogy into cultural studies. Later, in the 1980s, British cultural studies took on the rise of Thatcherism and the emergence of a new rightwing conservative hegemony in Britain, by explaining how British culture, media, politics, and various economic factors led to the emergence of a new conservative hegemony (see Hall & Jacques, 1983). Larry Grossberg (1992), Stanley Aronowitz (1993), myself (Kellner & Ryan, 1988; Kellner, 1991 & 1995), and others engaged in similar work within the U.S. throughout the Reagan era of the 1980s, applying cultural studies to analyze the big issues of the time. Indeed, one of my major focuses of the past two decades has been the use of cultural studies and critical social theory to interrogate the big events of the time: The Persian Gulf TV War (Kellner, 1992), Grand Theft 2000: Media Spectacle and a Stolen Election (Kellner, 2001), From September 11 th to Terror War (Kellner, 2003b) on the September 11 th terrorist attacks and their exploitation by the Bush administration to push through rightwing militarism, interventionism, unilateralism and a hard-right domestic agenda, including the Patriot Act (Kellner 2003b), and Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy (Kellner, 2005), which demonstrated how the Bush administration consistently manipulated media spectacle during its first term and in the highly contested and controversial 2004 election. In my books Media Culture (Kellner, 1995) and Media Spectacle (Kellner 2003a), I use cultural studies to critically interrogate major phenomena of the day like Reagan and Rambo, Madonna and pop feminism, rap and hip hop, cyberpunk and the Internet, McDonald's and globalization, Michael Jordan and the Nike spectacle, and other defining cultural phenomena of the era. Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary, trans-disciplinary, and counter- disciplinary approach that can be used to address a wide range of cultural phenomena from advertising to political narratives (see Kellner, 1995; 2003a). A