---
title: "Cultural studies"
chunk: 5/6
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"
---

== Integration of popular culture in CS and education ==
The integration of popular culture in classrooms has influenced educational practices in cultural studies. By analyzing TV series, movies, memes, and other cultural materials, educators can encourage media literacy, critical thinking, and a deeper understanding of social issues. Incorporating popular culture into education through cultural studies helps students critically engage with the world around them, fostering media literacy and critical thinking. Educators can use cultural texts to discuss societal issues, challenge norms, and prepare students for active participation in a media-dominated world. 
Popular culture can be an effective tool for critical pedagogy. Evan Faidley explores how TV shows, movies, and memes can be used in the classroom to discuss topics like social justice and identity. Shows like South Park allow students to evaluate societal norms and political issues, using a pedagogy of resistance. Cultural studies encourage students to analyze intertextuality. Patricia Duff discusses how popular culture incorporates with academic discourse to build media literacy, which helps students critically engage with the media they consume daily. Kathy Mills also highlights the importance of multiliteracies, which encourages students to utilize a variety of communication media outside of the standard text, including digital and visual media. Diane Penrod argues that incorporating popular culture in education makes learning more relevant and engaging. Teachers can help students understand difficult concepts such as gender, ethnicity, and class by using works from their own cultures. Students are also encouraged to develop critical analytical abilities, which they can use in both academic and everyday situations when popular culture is integrated into the classroom.

=== Literary scholars ===
Many cultural studies practitioners work in departments of English or comparative literature. Nevertheless, some traditional literary scholars such as Yale professor Harold Bloom have been outspoken critics of cultural studies. At the methodological level, these scholars dispute the theoretical underpinnings of the movement's critical framework.
Bloom stated his position during the 3 September 2000 episode of C-SPAN's Booknotes, while discussing his book How to Read and Why:

[T]here are two enemies of reading now in the world, not just in the English-speaking world. One [is] the lunatic destruction of literary studies...and its replacement by what is called cultural studies in all of the universities and colleges in the English-speaking world, and everyone knows what that phenomenon is. I mean, the...now-weary phrase 'political correctness' remains a perfectly good descriptive phrase for what has gone on and is, alas, still going on almost everywhere and which dominates, I would say, rather more than three-fifths of the tenured faculties in the English-speaking world, who really do represent treason of the intellectuals, I think, a 'betrayal of the clerks'."
Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton is not wholly opposed to cultural studies, but has criticised aspects of it and highlighted what he sees as its strengths and weaknesses in books such as After Theory (2003). For Eagleton, literary and cultural theory have the potential to say important things about the "fundamental questions" in life, but theorists have rarely realized this potential.
English departments also host cultural rhetorics scholars. This academic field defines cultural rhetorics as "the study and practice of making meaning and knowledge with the belief that all cultures are rhetorical and all rhetorics are cultural." Cultural rhetorics scholars are interested in investigating topics like climate change, autism, Asian American rhetoric, and more.

=== Sociology ===
Cultural studies have also had a substantial impact on sociology. For example, when Stuart Hall left CCCS at Birmingham, it was to accept a prestigious professorship in Sociology at the Open University in Britain. The subfield of cultural sociology, in particular, is the disciplinary home to many cultural studies practitioners. Nevertheless, there are some differences between sociology as a discipline and the field of cultural studies as a whole. While sociology was founded on various historical works that purposefully distinguished the subject from philosophy or psychology, cultural studies have explicitly interrogated and criticized traditional understandings and practices of disciplinarity. Most CS practitioners think it is best that cultural studies neither emulate disciplines nor aspire to disciplinarity. Rather, they promote a radical interdisciplinarity as the basis for cultural studies.
One sociologist whose work has had a major influence on cultural studies is Pierre Bourdieu, whose work makes innovative use of statistics and in-depth interviews. However, although Bourdieu's work has been highly influential within cultural studies, and although Bourdieu regarded his work as a form of science, cultural studies has never embraced the idea that it should aspire toward "scientificity", and has marshalled a wide range of theoretical and methodological arguments against the fetishization of "scientificity" as a basis for cultural studies.
Two sociologists who have been critical of cultural studies, Chris Rojek and Bryan S. Turner, argue in their article, "Decorative sociology: towards a critique of the cultural turn," that cultural studies, particularly the flavor championed by Stuart Hall, lacks a stable research agenda, and privileges the contemporary reading of texts, thus producing an ahistorical theoretical focus. Many, however, would argue, following Hall, that cultural studies have always sought to avoid establishing a fixed research agenda; this follows from its critique of disciplinarity. Moreover, Hall and many others have long argued against the misunderstanding that textual analysis is the sole methodology of cultural studies, and have practiced numerous other approaches, as noted above. Rojek and Turner also level the accusation that there is "a sense of moral superiority about the correctness of the political views articulated" in cultural studies.

=== Science wars ===