Cultural Studies Unit 1

 Cultural Studies Unit 1

Hello, I am Emisha Ravani, Writing this blog as a part of thinking activity which is given by Dr. Dilip Barad sir in a context of the first unit of Cultural Studies  Here you can have a look for teacher's blog. This topic is quite difficult to understand to me though I am trying to discuss here in a brief. When I heard the word Cultural Studies at a very first time during my bachelor program at that time I assumed that cultural studies would be easy cause it is clearly says the name only that study of cultures! But it is containing very multiple stuffs here! It is like hard nut to creak!

The critical analysis of the texts and practices of everyday life in contemporary society: an interdisciplinary enterprise involving both the humanities and the social sciences. – Oxford

First the cultural studies is not popular cultures. Cultural studies focus on the contemporary cultures. It is interdisciplinary field it takes all kind of different ideas from every area. In short it is one which has multiple disciplines to study.

Let’s have a look towards it’s history

It began as a product of the British New Left, influenced in particular by Williams and neo-Marxist sociologists such as Stuart Hall, Bourdieu and Foucault, and also by feminism, structuralism, poststructuralism, semiotics, postcolonialism, queer theory, and initially psychoanalytic theory. It can be seen partly as a reaction against Leavisite cultural elitism and the Frankfurt school's bleak stance on mass culture.

Its emergence as a discipline is marked by the establishment of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) or the Birmingham school at the University of Birmingham in the UK in 1964. Primary concerns of cultural studies include: ideological processes, social and historical context, subcultures, representation, identity, and cultural politics.

Cultural studies theorists see culture as a site of struggle. Critics in the established disciplines have attacked it for eclecticism, lack of focus, or cultural populism but it has nevertheless gained international recognition as a discipline, and it has particularly highlighted the value of the close and reflexive study of cultural forms in the specific contexts of their production, use, and interpretation.

Your understanding of Power in Cultural Studies

Generally, we get the meaning of power is that,

-power to do something

-power over somebody or something

-power in your hands

But almost power can be exercised by political power in actual senses. In a democracy we the people give the power to government through elections. In a dictatorship state power emerges from threat of force, not the consent of the governed. Their dictatorship starts with peer to peer by changing the laws by their accordance and also behave in a soft kind way to change or attack the psychology of people to rule over them. Even they seized power over people’s intellectuals so they can break the thinking actions of people against them.

There are the things we can understand to get proper understanding of power. Let’s see that,

1.Physical force

2.Welth

3.State Action

4.Social Norms

5.Ideas

6.Numbers

Power is never static. It is the thing which is constantly going there to there. Power is like water. It flows over and over.