---
title: "Cultural studies"
chunk: 1/6
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"
---

Cultural studies or cultural theory is an academic field that explores the dynamics of contemporary culture (including the politics of popular culture) and its social and historical foundations. Cultural studies researchers investigate how cultural practices relate to wider systems of power associated with, or operating through, social phenomena. These include ideology, class structures, national formations, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and generation. Employing cultural analysis, cultural studies views cultures not as fixed, bounded, stable, and discrete entities, but rather as constantly interacting and changing sets of practices and processes.
British Marxist academics initially developed cultural studies in the late 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and it has since been taken up and transformed by scholars from many different disciplines around the world. Cultural studies is avowedly, and even radically, interdisciplinary and can sometimes be seen as anti-disciplinary. A key concern for cultural studies practitioners is the examination of the forces within and through which socially organized people conduct and participate in the construction of their everyday lives.
Cultural studies combines a variety of politically engaged critical approaches including semiotics, Marxism, feminist theory, ethnography, post-structuralism, postcolonialism, social theory, political theory, history, philosophy, literary theory, media theory, film/video studies, communication studies, political economy, translation studies, museum studies and art history/criticism to study cultural phenomena in various societies and historical periods. Cultural studies seeks to understand how meaning is generated, disseminated, contested, bound up with systems of power and control, and produced from the social, political, and economic spheres within a particular social formation or conjuncture. The movement has generated important theories of cultural hegemony and agency. Its practitioners attempt to explain and analyze the cultural forces related to and processes of globalization.
During the rise of neoliberalism in Britain and the US, cultural studies both became a global phenomenon. They attracted the attention of many conservative opponents both within and beyond universities for a variety of reasons. A worldwide movement of students and practitioners, with a raft of scholarly associations and programs, annual international conferences, and publications, continues the work in this field today. Distinct approaches to cultural studies have emerged in different national and regional contexts.

== Overview ==

=== Sardar's characteristics ===
In his 1994 book, Introducing Cultural Studies, orientalist scholar Ziauddin Sardar lists the following five main characteristics of cultural studies:

The objective of cultural studies is to understand culture in all its complex forms and to analyze the social and political context in which culture manifests itself.
Cultural study is a site of both study/analysis and political criticism. For example, not only would a cultural studies scholar study an object, but they may also connect this study to a larger political project.
Cultural studies attempts to expose and reconcile constructed divisions of knowledge that purport to be grounded in nature.
Cultural studies commits to an ethical evaluation of modern society.
One aim of cultural studies could be to examine cultural practices and their relation to power, following critical theory. For example, a study of a subculture (such as white working-class youth in London) would consider their social practices against those of the dominant culture (in this example, the middle and upper classes in London who control the political and financial sectors that create policies affecting the well-being of white working-class youth in London).

== British cultural studies ==
Dennis Dworkin writes that "a critical moment" in the beginning of cultural studies as a field was when Richard Hoggart used the term in 1964 in founding the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham. The centre would become home to the development of the intellectual orientation that has become known internationally as the "Birmingham School" of cultural studies, thus becoming the world's first institutional home of cultural studies.
Hoggart appointed as his assistant Stuart Hall, who would effectively be directing CCCS by 1968. Hall formally assumed the directorship of CCCS in 1971, when Hoggart left Birmingham to become Assistant Director-General of UNESCO. Thereafter, the field of cultural studies became closely associated with Hall's work. In 1979, Hall left Birmingham to accept a prestigious chair in sociology at the Open University, and Richard Johnson took over the directorship of the centre.
In the late 1990s, "restructuring" at the University of Birmingham led to the elimination of CCCS and the creation of a new Department of Cultural Studies and Sociology (CSS) in 1999. Then, in 2002, the university's senior administration abruptly announced the disestablishment of CSS, provoking a substantial international outcry. The immediate reason for the disestablishment of the new department was an unexpectedly low result in the UK's Research Assessment Exercise of 2001, though a dean from the university attributed the decision to "inexperienced 'macho management'." The RAE, a holdover initiative of the Margaret Thatcher-led British government of 1986, determines research funding for university programs.
To trace the development of British Cultural Studies, see, for example, the work of Richard Hoggart, E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Paul Willis, Angela McRobbie, Paul Gilroy, David Morley, Charlotte Brunsdon, Richard Dyer, and others. There are also many published overviews of the historical development of cultural studies, including Graeme Turner's British Cultural Studies: An Introduction, 3rd Ed. and John Hartley's A Short History of Cultural Studies.