Culture and Power in Cultural Studies


Book Description

John Storey's best and most significant contributions to the field of cultural studies - together in a single volume.




Co-opting Culture


Book Description

Co-opting Culture: Culture and Power in Sociology and Cultural Studies represents a collection of new scholarship on culture from the social sciences and from work done under the rubric of 'cultural studies'. Working from the idea that Sociology and Cultural Studies have developed distinct and valuable toolkits for understanding culture, the editors have brought together a collection of essays that address the ways in which the cultures around race, sex, and gender are mediated through or intersect with politics, society, and economy. Some essays deal directly with the theoretical nature of this mediation, while others adopt these theoretical approaches to investigate specific cultural objects or communities. In doing so, these essays call attention to the particularities of form that constitute a kind of cultural logic around the objects under consideration.




Culture and Power


Book Description

Power has long been a central preoccupation of social and cultural analysis. Culture and Power focuses on power to shape a history of Cultural Studies. A critical analysis of the nature and purpose of Cultural Studies, the book assesses the development of the discipline from the work of Michel Foucault in post-war France and the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies in the 1970s to the expansion of the field in the United States and present-day concerns with culture, politics and ethics.As Cultural Studies has shifted, the concept of power has changed and become more problematic. Moving on from the celebrated 'culture wars' - and battles over language, objective knowledge and disciplinary values and meanings - Culture and Power unravels the social, ideological and political knots bound up in the concept of power. In doing so, the book charts not only the history but also the possible future of Cultural Studies.




Culture and Power


Book Description

Questions of identity and identification are among the most important evolving concerns of contemporary cultural studies. Through processes of personal identification with discursively constructed subject positions, identities emerge across a wide range of cultural practices in the course of social interactions involving the use of language and other semiotic systems manifested in cultural artefacts of various kinds. The present collection includes a selection of papers on the topic of identity and identification in cultural studies today. Incorporating theoretical contributions and practical case studies, this monograph adds to contemporary debates on identity-forging practices from various theoretical positions in different social, historic and national contexts. The chapters of this volume range from overtly theoretical discussions on the construction of identities and subjectivities in post-modernity, to examinations of the crucial role of (print) media in identity-construction and -representation processes in contemporary social formations through an insight into other key issues in cultural studies, such as gender politics and the construction of femininities, the hybridization of identities in the context of postcolonial work, and the interplay between collective identities and discourses on nation.




Culture and Society


Book Description

"Too often cultural studies discourse seems cut off from wider developments in social theory. As a sociologist with a strong cultural studies sensibility, David Oswell is ideally placed to put this right. Through a series of well-judged and historically nuanced readings of cultural, social theory and critical philosophy, this book provides just the bridge between cultural studies and wider debates that we need" - Nick Couldry, London School of Economics and Political Science David Oswell has written a comprehensive introduction to cultural studies that guides the reader through the field′s central foundations and its freshest ideas. This book: Grounds the reader in the foundations of cultural studies and cultural theory: language and semiology, ideology and power, mass and popular culture. Analyzes the central problems: identity, body, economy, globalization and empire. Introduces the latest developments on materiality, agency, technology and nature. Culture and Society is an invaluable guide for students navigating the dynamic debates and intellectual challenges of cultural studies. Its breadth and unparalleled coverage of theory will also ensure that it is read by anyone interested in questions of materiality and culture.




Culture/Power/History


Book Description

The intellectual radicalism of the 1960s spawned a new set of questions about the role and nature of "the political" in social life, questions that have since revolutionized nearly every field of thought, from literary criticism through anthropology to the philosophy of science. Michel Foucault in particular made us aware that whatever our functionally defined "roles" in society, we are constantly negotiating questions of authority and the control of the definitions of reality. Such insights have led theorists to challenge concepts that have long formed the very underpinnings of their disciplines. By exploring some of the most debated of these concepts--"culture," "power," and "history"--this reader offers an enriching perspective on social theory in the contemporary moment. Organized around these three concepts, Culture/ Power/History brings together both classic and new essays that address Foucault's "new economy of power relations" in a number of different, contestatory directions. Representing innovative work from various disciplines and sites of study, from taxidermy to Madonna, the book seeks to affirm the creative possibilities available in a time marked by growing uncertainty about established disciplinary forms of knowledge and by the increasing fluidity of the boundaries between them. The book is introduced by a major synthetic essay by the editors, which calls attention to the most significant issues enlivening theoretical discourse today. The editors seek not only to encourage scholars to reflect anew on the course of social theory, but also to orient newcomers to this area of inquiry. The essays are contributed by Linda Alcoff ("Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism"), Sally Alexander ("Women, Class, and Sexual Differences in the 1830s and 1840s"), Tony Bennett ("The Exhibitionary Complex"), Pierre Bourdieu ("Structures, Habitus, Power"), Nicholas B. Dirks ("Ritual and Resistance"), Geoff Eley ("Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures"), Michel Foucault (Two Lectures), Henry Louis Gates, Jr. ("Authority, [White] Power and the [Black] Critic"), Stephen Greenblatt ("The Circulation of Social Energy"), Ranajit Guha ("The Prose of Counter-Insurgency"), Stuart Hall ("Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms"), Susan Harding ("The Born-Again Telescandals"), Donna Haraway ("Teddy Bear Patriarchy"), Dick Hebdige ("After the Masses"), Susan McClary ("Living to Tell: Madonna's Resurrection of the Fleshly"), Sherry B. Ortner ("Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties"), Marshall Sahlins ("Cosmologies of Capitalism"), Elizabeth G. Traube ("Secrets of Success in Postmodern Society"), Raymond Williams (selections from Marxism and Literature), and Judith Williamson ("Family, Education, Photography").




Co-opting Culture


Book Description

Co-opting Culture: Culture and Power in Sociology and Cultural Studies represents a collection of new scholarship on culture from the social sciences and from work done under the rubric of 'cultural studies'. Working from the idea that Sociology and Cultural Studies have developed distinct and valuable toolkits for understanding culture, the editors have brought together a collection of essays that address the ways in which the cultures around race, sex, and gender are mediated through or intersect with politics, society, and economy. Some essays deal directly with the theoretical nature of this mediation, while others adopt these theoretical approaches to investigate specific cultural objects or communities. In doing so, these essays call attention to the particularities of form that constitute a kind of cultural logic around the objects under consideration.




Cultural Studies


Book Description

Praise for the first edition: "This is a great introduction and contribution to the subject. It is unusually wide-ranging, covering the historical development of cultural theory and deftly highlighting key problems that just won′t go away." - Matthew Hills, Cardiff University "To say that the scope of the book′s coverage is wide-ranging would be an under-statement. Few texts come to mind that have attempted such a thorough overview of the central tenets of cultural studies." - Stuart Allan, Bournemouth University This fully revised edition of the best selling introduction to cultural studies offers students an authoritative, comprehensive guide to cultural studies. Clearly written and accessibly organized the book provides a major resource for lecturers and students. Each chapter has been extensively revised and new material covers globalization, the post 9/11 world and the new language wars. The emphasis upon demonstrating the philosophical and sociological roots of cultural studies has been retained along with boxed entries on key concepts and issues. Particular attention is paid to demonstrating how cultural studies clarifies issues in media and communication studies, and there are chapters on the global mediasphere and new media cultures. This is a tried and tested book which has been widely used wherever cultural studies is taught. It is an indispensable undergraduate text and one that will appeal to postgraduates seeking a ′refresher′ which they can dip into.




Culture, Power And History


Book Description

This volume brings together theoretical meditations and empirical studies of the intersection of culture, power and history in social life. Contributors bring a diversity of critical sociological perspectives and subject matters to this important edited book.




Culture, Power, Place


Book Description

Anthropology has traditionally relied on a spatially localized society or culture as its object of study. The essays in Culture, Power, Place demonstrate how in recent years this anthropological convention and its attendant assumptions about identity and cultural difference have undergone a series of important challenges. In light of increasing mass migration and the transnational cultural flows of a late capitalist, postcolonial world, the contributors to this volume examine shifts in anthropological thought regarding issues of identity, place, power, and resistance. This collection of both new and well-known essays begins by critically exploring the concepts of locality and community; first, as they have had an impact on contemporary global understandings of displacement and mobility, and, second, as they have had a part in defining identity and subjectivity itself. With sites of discussion ranging from a democratic Spain to a Puerto Rican barrio in North Philadelphia, from Burundian Hutu refugees in Tanzania to Asian landscapes in rural California, from the silk factories of Hangzhou to the long-sought-after home of the Palestinians, these essays examine the interplay between changing schemes of categorization and the discourses of difference on which these concepts are based. The effect of the placeless mass media on our understanding of place—and the forces that make certain identities viable in the world and others not—are also discussed, as are the intertwining of place-making, identity, and resistance as they interact with the meaning and consumption of signs. Finally, this volume offers a self-reflective look at the social and political location of anthropologists in relation to the questions of culture, power, and place—the effect of their participation in what was once seen as their descriptions of these constructions. Contesting the classical idea of culture as the shared, the agreed upon, and the orderly, Culture, Power, Place is an important intervention in the disciplines of anthropology and cultural studies. Contributors. George E. Bisharat, John Borneman, Rosemary J. Coombe, Mary M. Crain, James Ferguson, Akhil Gupta, Kristin Koptiuch, Karen Leonard, Richard Maddox, Lisa H. Malkki, John Durham Peters, Lisa Rofel