Page 39 - Culture and Cultural Studies

38 CULTURE AND CULTURAL STUDIES

about our world. Thus, theoretical concepts are tools for thinking. This process has
maintained a high-profile position within cultural studies. Theoretical work can be
thought of as a crafting of the cultural signposts and maps by which we are guided.
Cultural studies has rejected the empiricist claim that knowledge is simply a matter of
collecting facts from which theory can be deduced or tested against. Rather, theory is
always already implicit in empirical research through the very choice of topic, the focus
the research takes, and the concepts through which it is discussed and interpreted. That
is, ‘facts’ are not neutral and no amount of stacking up of ‘facts’ produces a story about
our lives without theory. Indeed, theory is precisely a story about humanity with implications
for action and judgements about consequences.

SUMMARY

Cultural studies:
v is a plural field of contesting perspectives which through the production of theory has
sought to intervene in cultural politics;
v explores culture as the signifying practices of representation within the context of
social power;
v draws on a variety of theories, including Marxism, structuralism, poststructuralism
and feminism;
v is eclectic in its methods;
v asserts the positionality of all knowledge, including its own;
v coheres conceptually around the key ideas of culture, signifying practices, representation,
discourse, power, articulation, texts, readers and consumption;
v is an interdisciplinary or post-disciplinary field of enquiry which explores the production
and inculcation of maps of meaning;
v can be described as a language-game or discursive formation concerned with issues
of power in the signifying practices of human life.

Above all, cultural studies is an exciting and fluid project that tells us stories about our
changing world in the hope that we can improve it.

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