---
title: "Cultural studies"
chunk: 4/6
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_studies"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:57:43.870636+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Structure and agency ===
The development of hegemony theory in cultural studies was, in some ways, consonant with work in other fields exploring agency, a theoretical concept that emphasizes the active, critical capacities of subordinated people (e.g., the working classes, colonized peoples, women). As Stuart Hall famously argued in his 1981 essay, "Notes on Deconstructing 'the Popular'": "ordinary people are not cultural dopes." Insistence on accounting for the agency of subordinated people run counter to the work of traditional structuralists. Some analysts have, however, been critical of certain work in cultural studies that they feel overstates the significance of, or even romanticizes, some forms of popular cultural agency.
Cultural studies often concerns itself with agency at the level of everyday practices, and approaches such research from a standpoint of radical contextualism. In other words, cultural studies rejects universal accounts of cultural practices, meanings, and identities.
Judith Butler, an American feminist theorist whose work is often associated with cultural studies, wrote that:

the move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure. It has marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

=== Globalization ===
In recent decades, as capitalism has spread throughout the world via contemporary forms of globalization, cultural studies has generated important analyses of local sites and practices of negotiation with and resistance to Western hegemony.

=== Cultural consumption ===
Cultural studies criticizes the traditional view of the passive consumer, particularly by underlining the different ways people read, receive, and interpret cultural texts, or appropriate other kinds of cultural products, or otherwise participate in the production and circulation of meanings. On this view, a consumer can appropriate, actively rework, or challenge the meanings circulated through cultural texts. In some of its variants, cultural studies has shifted the analytical focus from traditional understandings of production to consumption – viewed as a form of production (of meanings, of identities, etc.) in its own right. Stuart Hall, John Fiske, and others have been influential in these developments.
A special 2008 issue of the field's flagship journal, Cultural Studies, examined "anti-consumerism" from a variety of cultural studies angles. Jeremy Gilbert noted in the issue that cultural studies must grapple with the fact that "we now live in an era when, throughout the capitalist world, the overriding aim of government economic policy is to maintain consumer spending levels. This is an era when 'consumer confidence' is treated as the key indicator and cause of economic effectiveness."

=== Concept of "text" ===
Cultural studies, drawing upon and developing semiotics, uses the concept of text to designate not only written language, but also television programs, films, photographs, fashion, hairstyles, and so forth; the texts of cultural studies comprise all the meaningful artifacts of culture. This conception of textuality derives especially from the work of the pioneering and influential semiotician, Roland Barthes, but also owes debts to other sources, such as Juri Lotman and his colleagues from Tartu–Moscow School. Similarly, the field broadens the concept of culture. Cultural studies approach the sites and spaces of everyday life, such as pubs, living rooms, gardens, and beaches, as "texts".
Culture, in this context, includes not only high culture, but also everyday meanings and practices, a central focus of cultural studies.
Jeff Lewis summarized much of the work on textuality and textual analysis in his cultural studies textbook and a post-9/11 monograph on media and terrorism. According to Lewis, textual studies use complex and difficult heuristic methods and require both powerful interpretive skills and a subtle conception of politics and contexts. The task of the cultural analyst, for Lewis, is to engage with both knowledge systems and texts, and to observe and analyze how the two interact. This engagement represents the critical dimensions of the analysis, its capacity to illuminate the hierarchies within and surrounding the given text and its discourse.

== Academic reception ==
Cultural studies has evolved through its uptake across a variety of different disciplines—anthropology, media studies, communication studies, literary studies, education, geography, philosophy, sociology, politics, and others.
While some have accused certain areas of cultural studies of meandering into political relativism and a kind of empty version of "postmodern" analysis, others hold that at its core, cultural studies provides a significant conceptual and methodological framework for cultural, social, and economic critique. This critique is designed to "deconstruct" the meanings and assumptions that are inscribed in the institutions, texts, and practices that work with and through, and produce and represent, culture. Thus, while some scholars and disciplines have dismissed cultural studies for its methodological rejection of disciplinarity, its core strategies of critique and analysis have influenced areas of the social sciences and humanities; for example, cultural studies work on forms of social differentiation, control and inequality, identity, community-building, media, and knowledge production has had a substantial impact. Moreover, the influence of cultural studies has become increasingly evident in areas as diverse as translation studies, health studies, international relations, development studies, computer studies, economics, archaeology, and neurobiology.
Cultural studies has also diversified its interests and methodologies, incorporating a range of studies on media policy, democracy, design, leisure, tourism, warfare, and development. While certain key concepts such as ideology or discourse, class, hegemony, identity, and gender remain significant, cultural studies has long engaged with and integrated new concepts and approaches. The field thus continues to pursue political critique through its engagements with the forces of culture and politics.