Introduction to Cultural Studies

Catalog description

Cultural Studies as an intellectual formation resists easy definition because it is considered as an interdisciplinary or even anti-disciplinary mode of inquiry into societies’ institutional, ideological, and communicative practices. As a discursive formation, it has no simple origins, it is seen to have multiple histories and yet, it refuses to be a master discourse or a meta-discourse. It does not possess a research methodology of its own but the choice of research practices depends upon the kind of questions one asks in a particular context. Given some of the historical tensions that constitute the body of cultural studies, this course will address the question of “what cultural studies really is”, the historical trajectories that underlie the formations of cultural studies in various nations, and what it means to study culture as a struggle over meaning and as field of cultural practices that reflect domination, subordination and negotiation.