Country backwater to virtual village? Rural studies and ‘the cultural turn’

This article explores the interface between cultural studies and soci ology, as expressed through four scenarios which construe the 'debate' in particular ways. Two of these - 'cultural studies succession' and 'postmodernist conjuncturalist cultural studies' - unapologetically seek to dismiss sociology in favour of cultural studies, whilst a third - 'socio logical revenge' - appears to turn the tables entirely. A fourth and more productive scenario dwells synthetically on the 'cultural turn' across the whole 'field' of the social and human sciences. All four postures dis cussed are found to share two problematical features. The first of these is that although rhetoric/discourse is crucial in the construction of iden tities, including disciplinary identities, over-rhetorical manifestos readily generate critical doubts about their consistency and appropri ateness. Second, the focus in the four scenarios is chiefly on disciplinary homes, fields, or turns rather than, as it perhaps should be, on substan tive theses or ideological positions within these.

Social Research after the Cultural Turn explores the contested meanings and diverse practices of social research in the context of contemporary theoretical debates in cultural and social theory. It addresses fundamental questions facing those working in the social and human sciences today. What are the possibilities, and challenges, for social research after the 'cultural turn'? How have the epistemological and political contexts of social research changed? Can we still define a distinct sphere of 'the social' to research? What distinguishes social research from cultural studies and the humanities? What methodologies might critical social research employ, and in what registers should it operate? Social Research after the Cultural Turn brings together leading scholars from a range of disciplines and interdisciplinary fields - including gender and feminist studies, psychosocial studies and psychoanalysis, religious studies, history, development studies, law, critical race and post-colonial studies, and sociology.

This article addresses the (inter)disciplinary parameters and political possibilities of Sport Studies by providing an overview of the state of Sport Studies after the cultural turn. The cultural turn is defined as the influence of linguistic models on cultural analysis and the associated impact of poststructuralism and critical theory on the social sciences. I argue that the cultural turn, especially as developed within the academic field of Cultural Studies, resulted in the elevation of culture as central rather than epiphenomenal to our understandings of how society works. Drawing on the work and ideas of Stuart Hall, I warn against decontextualized forms of cultural analysis, that privilege discourse analysis and descriptive content analysis. Instead, an argument is made for more critical conjunctural analyses, broadly defined as the analysis of socio-economic forces that shape power relations within a given social field during a particular period of time. The article then maps six key forces reshaping the current conjuncture. Sport, I argue, is entangled in complex ways with these emerging and changing formations, and in some areas, sport is at the forefront of the cultural-ideological revolutions taking place. As a key site of meaning making, a powerful space where bonds of attachment are forged, a space of fantasy and play, and a place for identity construction and human creativity, I show how sport is now central to current struggles to remake the world system into a more humane, less toxic and more egalitarian space.

Identifies the main methods of researching culture. Demonstrates how theory can inform and enable the practice of research. Explores the ways in which research practices and methods both produce and are produced by knowledge. Looks at the implications of the 'cultural turn' for disciplines other than cultural studies. The Practice of Cultural Studies will be an essential text for students of cultural studies and a useful guide to others studying culture in a range of disciplinary contexts across the humanities and social sciences.

For those of us engaged in the feminist project of seeking to understand social relations, social formations and subjectivities, the cultural turn has posed radical challenges and opened up new ways of thinking. If the terrain that I am calling ‘feminist social research’ – a transdisciplinary space of theoretical and empirical inquiry into the contemporary and historical sphere of the social – rapidly expanded through the 1970s and 1980s, its development soon became ineluctably enmeshed with the deconstructive, post-structuralist questioning of modernist social science and the turn towards culture inaugurated by writers such as Roland Barthes (1972), Clifford Geertz (1975), Jacques Derrida (1976), Marshall Sahlins (1976), Raymond Williams (1977) and, perhaps most significantly, Michel Foucault (1967, 1970, 1972, 1973). Over the past 30 years, across much of the critically orientated social sciences there has been a fundamental epistemological reorientation, from an emphasis on explanation and causation to a focus on practices of interpretation, in which culture is placed centre stage, and social arrangements, events, material artefacts, belief systems, and research data about all of these, are treated as texts. A new emphasis on the entanglement of power and knowledge, the problematisation of the relationship between the researcher and the researched, and the fundamentally political issue of representation, of speaking for others, provoked a new self-reflexivity within disciplines and amongst individual researchers. In this context, Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School (e.g. Hall and Jefferson, 1976; Hall et al., 1978) initiated the new field of cultural studies, drawing on, but also transcending, its roots in Marxist theory and sociology. Alongside the expansion of cultural studies, across the Anglophone academy feminist, lesbian and gay, queer, post-colonial and critical race scholarship has proliferated, both forming the new ‘interdisciplines’ that cross the boundaries between the social sciences and the humanities, and impacting – to a greater or lesser extent – upon the traditional core disciplines of the social sciences. In each of these new areas, the study of culture has been seen as inextricably bound up with the analysis of the social, and the possibility of social explanation has been placed in question. A body of cultural theory that explores social, political, economic and psychic life, and their spatial and historical dimensions, through the lens of culture, has grown out of the new interdisciplines and across the transformed disciplines of the humanities and social sciences. As a result, the distinctive focus and task of critical social research has become profoundly uncertain.

Questions posed by Carolyn Steedman prompted this article on what cultural studies wants from history. Two larger arguments frame some answers. The first concerns ‘transdisciplinarity’, a new context for cultural studies, created by the ‘cultural turn’ in humanities and social sciences more generally. The second addresses the need to distinguish history as a discipline from a wider range of approaches that grasp the ‘historicity’ or ‘temporality’ of human life. The work of the hermeneutic philosopher, Paul Ricoeur, helps to identify this difference and engages with the double character of historical work: part empirical study, part ‘fiction’. The article itself can be read as a narrative about history and cultural studies – a story of debts and differences, polemics and splits, convergences and renewed dialogue. The article urges us to recognize the implications for historical cultural studies of moves towards ‘culturality’ in history.

Debates in development theory have recently swung back to taking seriously the relationship of culture to development, especially in the face of manifest failures of conventional approaches to economic growth and social transformation. This has happened at a moment when, especially within anthropology, the concept of culture itself is undergoing critical examination, and when cultural studies has emerged as a major challenge to anthropology's self-defined specialisation in the social-scientific analysis of culture. Few attempts have been made, however, to relate cultural studies and development studies, despite the fact that the relatively recent ‘cultural turn’ in the social sciences has derived largely from the currently fashionable status of cultural studies and its multidisciplinary nature. This paper explores this relationship and suggests that a cultural studies approach, despite its weaknesses, potentially revitalises the significance of culture in relationship to development.

ABSTRACTReferences to the so-called ‘participatory turn’ have become pervasive in the social sciences. In the broad field of culture, media and communication studies, the participatory turn is mostly studied in a single site or scholarly sub-discipline. In contrast, this article provides an overarching view of the participatory turn in culture, media and communication studies by tying together isolated references to participation in political communication, development communication, media studies, celebrity studies, Internet studies and youth culture. This comprehensive view is specifically anchored by the intersection of public participation, identity and self-expression, and focuses on how people publicly express and work on their identities. In the process of describing the participatory turn in culture, media and communication studies, different forms of self-expression are identified. It is argued that even though some of these forms are noisy and narcissistic, they are meaningful to the individual who creates them. Some of these forms offer opportunities to voice opinions that might otherwise not be heard in the public sphere. Most significantly, public self-expression affords the ordinary person the power to (re-)imagine the self in the wake of the many changes the world faces due to globalisation and hegemonic power relations.

Culture studies’ have emerged as a broader sub-discipline in the contemporary sociological literature. I have outlined here certain theoretical practices suggesting certain points of departure /divergence from classical sociological theorization, and attempted to locate `social’ in the cultural terrain. Both within (in all sub areas of sociology) and across the disciplines (interdisciplinary) this trend has been observed. Cultural perspectives are now taken as an alternative to mainstream theorization of the structure and process.With the cultural turn, the emphasis in social sciences has been more on process rather than on structure in accounting the everyday routine, in understanding of the past and present, social action and social order. There are various theories that focus on temporal meta-narratives of transition and there are various modes locating `social’ in the culturalist frame. Social theories that give emphasis on the process give emphasis on everyday context and lifeworld problematizing the links between discourse spaces, andin sociology’s particular relationship with the empirical world. Many of these theoretical projects are classified as `praxiological’. Studies involving discourse as a key theoretical concept in recent years are more active and interesting areas of application in the international and global context. It shows a shift in emphasis in the reading of the current practices, and sociology’s intellectual history. In sociology, cultural theories stretch from Claud Levi Strauss to Althusser to Michel Foucault , Pierre Bourdieu and others such as Alfred Schultz, Harold Garfinkel, Nikolas Luhman, Jugen Habermas’s theory of communicative action, Anthony Gidddens’s theory of structuration, Judith Burtler’s performative gender theories , Bruno Latour’s science studies, Charles’ Taylors’ neo-hermeneutical model of embodied agency, Theodore Schatzki’s theory that focused on practice concept. There is now a large and influential body of work primarily concerned with the interpretation of cultural and economic power, processes and practices. For instance, Bourdieu’s master concepts -- habitus, capital and field—are incorporated increasingly in the organizational analyses. His relational approach to the study of organization has made much influence in the organizational studies. It both reframes existing thinking about organizations and indicates new directions for research in organizations.The growing interest in post structuralism, in anti –essentialist ontology, relationalist and contextual view of identity politics, and in the discourse theory there is now a sharp contrast with the mainstream theorization. The structuring the discursive space, that enables the researchers to critically map out the political terrain of the global, generates new questions for research (for instance, what has been excluded by dominant discourses can be brought to the surface). Different problematics now call for different research strategies. Various theories that focus on temporal meta-narratives of the transitions (i.e. from feudalism to capitalism and then to socialism and beyond, theories of modernity and post modernity) are also conceived as a set of parallel temporal transitions from tradition to modernity to post modernity. That way, the post-modernity as a culturist project can be represented as the latest stage in the master logic of historical development. Furthermore, the concept of globalization represents an important shift in the transition towards cultural theorization. Now the questions revolve around the socio-cultural processes and the forms of life which are emerging as the transition from national to global is superimposed on the change from an industrial to post industrial and informational order.

The study of gender, as it pertains to sport and physical cultures, began with the study of female athletes in the 1960s. With the increased participation of women in sport, scholars in North America and Western Europe began to study female athletes as they challenged the patriarchal ideology upon which sport was based, provoked questions about ideas concerning femininity and masculinity, and eventually raised questions about the basic nature and purpose of modern sport. In the humanities and social sciences, researchers began to explore the subject of the female athlete from a variety of disciplinary perspectives in sports studies, most notably in sport history and sport sociology. With the inclusion of gender in the research in the 1980s, the focus shifted away from the female athlete to a critique of culture and sporting culture. The “cultural turn” in the humanities and social sciences in the 1980s was concurrent with changing perceptions of gender as scholars embraced interdisciplinary and later transdisciplinary perspectives to further examine sport and to incorporate the concept of physical cultures. It is in this historical context that the shifting, crossing, and transforming of gender boundaries can be situated and understood as critical to the ongoing research concerning gender. Indeed, the focus on physical cultures – rather than sport – suggests yet another “turn” in the research and a point of view that seems worthy of consideration.

The ‘cultural turn’ has transformed scholarship on ‘race’ and racism, and community, culture and identity. There has been a proliferation of new transnational disciplinary methodologies, conceptual languages, research agendas and academic and political communities. It has produced significant paradigmatic shifts, and the emergence and circulation of a discernible set of discourses that stand at the intersections of sociology, anthropology, criminology, cultural studies, law, literary studies, psychosocial studies and urban studies. These theoretical paradigms have not, however, simply replaced earlier understandings and they are not entirely separate from them. This chapter deploys some of these discourses that stretch across the social sciences and arts and humanities and builds upon existing anti-essentialist theorisations of cultural identity to develop a view of a disharmonious subject who is composed of different, dissonant, potentially incommensurable selves. It critiques theorisations of an independent, individual subject who is located within a bounded, homogeneous community and culture characterised by specific values and particular ways of life that is repeatedly deployed in contemporary discussions of British citizenship, ‘the failure of multiculturalism’ and ‘self-segregating communities’. It further argues, as Gilroy (1993) notes above, that particular understandings of a fluid and endlessly wandering or unfolding cultural identity cannot adequately theorise persistent racial inequities, nor can it capture the experiential sense of a ‘natural’, continuous, autonomous and spontaneous self. Finally, this chapter begins to address psychoanalytically informed understandings of a subject whose daily practical life comes into existence within a bounded familial space or site.KeywordsCultural IdentityPolitical CommunityHistorical MomentPhysical VulnerabilityRacial DefectThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Changing Welfare, Changing States disentangles the various answers to these questions, inviting us to think differently about the remaking of the relationships between welfare, state and nation. Informed by the `cultural turn' in the social sciences, the book reflects a commitment to the importance of rethinking social policy at a time when social, political and intellectual certainties have been profoundly unsettled. Key features of the book include: } a thought-provoking approach - encourages students to 'rethink' welfare states. } broad coverage - engages with a range of approaches to the study of welfare states, drawing on social policy, politics, sociology, anthropology and cultural studies. } contributes to key debates on: globalization, neo-liberalism, changing forms of governance and conflicts over citizenship in the contemporary remaking of welfare states. Written by a leading academic in the field, the book has a flowing narrative and clear structure that makes it accessible to and popular with students and academics alike. It is an invaluable resource for undergraduates and postgraduates in the field of social policy and will also be of interest to students and researchers in related disciplines such as sociology, politics, anthropology and cultural studies.

The article analyzes the phenomenon of the "cultural turn" in a series of fixed methodological turns in the social and humanitarian knowledge of the last decades. Appeal to this trend in different research fields makes it possible to discover the cultural direction of scientific search, which can be linked to the emergence of a special subject area of culturology. In turn, the emerging cultural research in its domestic experience is difficult to determine with the specifics of its research task. Moreover, it was the "cultural turn" in the social and humanitarian sphere in the West that was realized by its own research project. "Cultural studies" (the Birmingham (UK) Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies or The Birmingham School), which is an interdisciplinary research area that includes feminism, poststructuralism, post-modernism, post-colonialism, aspects of Marxism and humanism in the study of the process of creating values, values, identities. Difficulties in culturology self-determination of their theoretical originality in the study of culture in the context of the culture-centeredness of various subjectmatter branches do not reduce, but, on the contrary, increase its research potential for an integral examination of culture. However, the success of the scientific contribution of culturology in understanding the primary importance of culture in sociocultural processes is seen in the productive use of culture achieved in subject-oriented social analysis as diverse practices. Thus, culturology joins those studies that today increasingly pay attention to "practices" as a field in which it seeks a solution of pressing anthropological and socio-cultural problems. Today's request for an understanding of social processes, which in its complexity, the more so, does not fit into a predetermined human dimension, actualize a review of the understanding of society in the light of living human interaction. Then the multilayeredness, the diversity of the phenomenon of culture, the awareness of its various types will contribute to the discovery of culture as a living life of people fixed in living experience, defining it as a situationally manifested meaningful order of action.

Editorial: Home rules

<div class="abstract" data-abstract-type="normal"> <span class='bold'>The place of France and French/Francophone Studies in the development of ‘War and Culture Studies’</span> France provides a particularly complex and fascinating object of analysis for any investigation into the impact of war on modern and contemporary cultural production and cultural history, having been at war for almost fifty years of the twentieth century. This impact is characterised by radically different experiences and memories of the two world wars, and further complicated by enduring legacies of those wars, and of subsequent, brutal colonial wars. An understanding of the impact that the experiences of these different types of war have made on French cultural, social and political identity is essential for the broader analysis of developments in France throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries, and indeed its role in European and global affairs. The study of France, then, has played a pivotal role in the development of ‘war and culture studies’ in the UK over the last two decades or so for a number of reasons that are explored in this chapter. What do we mean by ‘war and culture studies’? This chapter first considers more generally the ‘cultural turn’ in war studies in recent decades, and then looks specifically at the work of the Group for War and Culture Studies (GWACS) and its contributing scholars in developing a particular approach to the relationship between war and culture during conflict and its aftermath in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. </div>