Cultural Studies Tradition Research Articles

Ruthless Democracy: A Multicultural Interpretation of the American Renaissance

In Ruthless Democracy, Timothy Powell reimagines the canonical origins of identity by juxtaposing authors such as Hawthorne, Melville, and Thoreau with Native American, African American, and women authors. Taking his title from Melville, Powell identifies an unresolvable conflict between America's multicultural history and its violent will to monoculturalism. Powell challenges existing perceptions of the American Renaissance--the period at the heart of the American canon and its evolutions--by expanding the parameters of American identity.Drawing on the critical traditions of cultural studies and new historicism, Powell invents a new critical paradigm called multiculturalism. Moving beyond the polarizing rhetoric of the culture wars, Powell grounds his multicultural conception of American identity in careful historical analysis. Ruthless Democracy extends the cultural and geographical boundaries of the American Renaissance beyond the northeast to Indian Territory, Alta California, and the transnational sphere that Powell calls the American Diaspora. Arguing for the inclusion of new works, Powell envisions the canon of the American Renaissance as a fluid dialogue of disparate cultural voices.

Leisure, Culture and Lifestyle

This paper examines the place of the concept of lifestyle in leisure studies in the light of three recent publications. In Leisure and Contemporary Society Ken Roberts (1999) concludes that lifestyle is not a key concept for leisure studies because it has not replaced factors such as age, gender and social class in providing individuals with a sense of identity. In Leisure and Culture, Chris Rojek (2000) reviews the distinctive features of the dominant theoretical paradigms of leisure studies/leisure sociology over the last thirty years, and suggests that, while cultural studies has had a major influence on leisure studies, in practice it has been preoccupied with class. He therefore suggests that a renewed focus on culture could provide a way forward for leisure studies/leisure sociology. Steven Miles (2000), in Youth Lifestyles in a Changing World, argues that the concept of subculture, traditionally used in studies of youth, has been compromised by its association with the structural, neo-Marxist paradigms of the cultural studies tradition of the 1980s and 1990s, and that therefore the term lifestyle is a more suitable concept for studying the lives of young people today. In the light of these and other recent contributions to leisure theory, the paper therefore argues that the concept of lifestyle remains a useful concept which can make a significant contribution to the development of leisure studies.

Recognition and Difference

Are there any cultural universals left? Does multiculturalism inevitably involve a slide into moral relativism? This timely and insightful book examines questions of politics and identity in the age of multicultures. It draws together the contribution of outstanding contributors such as Fraser, Honneth, O'Neill, Bauman, Lister, Gilroy and De Swann to explore how difference and multiculturalism take on the arguments of universalist humanism. The approach taken derives from the traditions of cultural sociology and cultural studies rather than political science and philosophy. The book takes seriously the argument that the social bond and recognition are in danger through globalization and deterritorialization. It is a major contribution to the emerging debate on the form of post-national forms of civil society.

Feminist Media Ethnography in India: Exploring Power, Gender, and Culture in the Field

This article is a self-reflexive account of one postcolonial feminist media scholar’s research among young middle-class women in urban India who read Western romance fiction. Urging feminist scholars to pay attention to the politics of representation of audiences in media studies, the article explores power imbalances in the field that arise due to social constructions of gender, ethnic, class, and sexual identities. The article reflects on failures, successes, and dilemmas experienced during the research process to show that feminist media ethnographies are embedded within discourses of power. By examining the multiple positionalities occupied by the researcher in relation to people encountered in the field, this account challenges binary distinctions between categories such as Self/Other, native/Westerner, and insider/outsider. In concluding, the article underscores the implications of research by non-Western feminist scholars in their own cultures for postcolonial feminist ethnography, feminist media ethnographies, and for media reception research on globalization in the cultural studies tradition.

British Cultural Studies: An Introduction

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.

Culture et communication

The irresistible march of transnational media has given rise to widely experienced problems concerning autonomy and identity. The research tradition of cultural studies offers a very appropriate and distinctive way of analysing these questions, especially by means of a critical ethnography of reception. The tendency in some recent reception research to celebrate the popular as a source of resistance to the hegemonic is criticized.

Incorporation of Resistance?: Towards an Analysis of Women's Responses to Sexual Oppression in Sport

A feminist critique of sport in the cultural studies tradition is argued for in this paper. As a first step the paper examines the ideological positions adopted in existing research on gender issues in sport. This analysis identifies the ways in which different kinds of research accommodates to, and is incorporated within or challenges masculinist definitions of sport. The assumption is that by understanding the dynamics of different strategies to male defined sport and their consequences, it may be possible to challenge the orthodoxy and develop anti oppressive sporting practices and structures.

Raymond Williams, 1921-1988: A Cultural Analyst, a Distinctive Tradition

Working “outside the institutional bases of communication studies, ..outside and in a critical relation to the normal defining paradigms of the discipline, ..be built, virtually single-banded, the foundations for the distinctive tradition of British media and cultural studies and remained until his death by far its most distinguished and influential exponent.”

The Ambiguities of Conformism: Academic Students in FE

The paper examines the way in which some students in non-advanced further education (NAFE) make sense of and understand that experience. This is placed in the context of the current significance of NAFE. No general attempt is made to comprehend the total range of student orientations, but the paper ‘closes in’ on the experience of particular students. It adopts a qualitative approach, informed by the cultural studies tradition which asserts that we should take seriously what people say without losing sight of structural relations. This approach gives insights into both cultural productions and the specific forms that students utilise in making sense of their college experience. The cultural forms point back towards the school, forward to the world outside education, and draw on cultural resources of family, race, class and gender. It is part of the paper's project to discuss these cultural processes and consequently heavy reliance is placed upon material derived from student accounts. Student accounts concern cultural responses to educational experiences of college, forms of curriculum and teacher relations. Whilst within these responses lie moments of creativity there will also be continuities and disjunctures with other cultural forms. The paper focuses on so-called conformist students and illustrates the pre-emptive nature of such a description. Detailed consideration of students accounts reveals a more complex and contradictory picture. The paper stresses the significance of subjectivity in relation to cultural forms and argues that it is through these that we can grasp the connection between processes of ‘reproduction’, ‘resistance’ and ‘accommodation’.

Interdyscyplinarny charakter kulturoznawczego pojęcia kultury

Two tendencies determine the use of the concept of culture within Polish cultural studies: the tendency to understand culture in a generalized, comprehensive way and the tendency to narrow it down, to particularize it. The former tendency is visible, among other things, in the concept of culture adopted by the main founding traditions of Polish cultural studies: the Wrocław tradition established by Stanisław Pietraszko and the Poznań tradition introduced by Jerzy Kmita. The latter tendency is inherent in these conceptions of cultural studies that take as their object different fragments of culture for example contemporary culture, or artistic culture. The problem of interdisciplinarity presented in the paper is asked in the context of the notion of culture specific for cultural studies. The paper investigates, whether and in what sense the concept of culture is interdisciplinary. Do cultural studies researchers employ a specific notion of culture shared by them and suitable therefore to perform the function of integrating cultural studies as the domain of interdisciplinary studies? Which notionof culture – the general or the particular one – can serve the purpose better?