Cultural Studies - Contemporary Cultural Studies

Contemporary Cultural Studies

Cultural Studies is now a movement or a network. It has its own degree at several colleges and universities and has its own journals and meetings. It is growing rapidly and becoming a more popular field of study. It exercises a large influence on academic disciplines especially on English studies, sociology, media and communication studies, linguistics and history. Sociologist Scott Lash has recently put forth the idea that Cultural Studies is entering a new phase. Arguing that the political and economic milieu has fundamentally altered from that of the 1970s. He writes, "I want to suggest that power now... is largely post-hegemonic... Hegemony was the concept that de facto crystallized Cultural Studies as a discipline. Hegemony usually refers to the “preponderant influence or domination of one nation over another." It has meant domination through ideology or discourse... He writes that the flow of power is becoming more internalized, that there has been "a shift in power from the hegemonic mode of 'power over' to an intensive notion of power from within (including domination from within) and power as a generative force." Resistance to power, in other words, becomes complicated when power and domination are increasingly (re)produced within oneself, within subaltern groups and within exploited people. On the same subject, American feminist theorist and author of Gender Trouble Judith Butler wrote in the scholarly journal Diacritics an essay entitled "Further Reflections on the Conversions of Our Time", in which she described the shift in these terms: "The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure. It has marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power." Institutionally, the discipline has undergone major shifts. The Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, which was descended from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, closed in 2002. Although by this time the intellectual centre of gravity of the discipline had long since shifted to other universities throughout the world. Strong Cultural Studies programs can be found in the United Kingdom, North and South America, Europe, Australia, Asia and there are a host of journals and conferences where Cultural Studies research is published and presented.