| While scholars have been formally studying culture for more then a century, "Cultural Studies" has existed for less than half a century. Those in the field of Cultural Studies study culture, but the "study of culture" is a much broader term than "Cultural Studies." In other words, while Cultural Studies is one way to study culture, not every way in which scholars study culture is "Cultural Studies"-an emerging field with its own set of competing theories, concepts, and discourses. |  |
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As a field, Cultural Studies emerged during the Fifties in Britain among scholars who used the humanities to study working-class life in a way that treated working-class culture "as active, coherent, intelligible, located within history, and . . . not solely reducible to a developing set of economic conditions" (Jenks, C. Culture. London: Routledge, 1993 p. 153). While Cultural Studies has moved far beyond this beginning, as a field it has kept as a central focus the study of culture of nondominant groups and its belief that cultural politics is at least as important as material politics. While its roots are in the Fifties, Cultural Studies only began to coalesce into a field of its own in the Sixties and particularly in the Seventies as a result of the work of scholars primarily located in Britain particularly those associated with the Birmingham (England) Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (now the Department of Cultural Studies & Sociology). Today there are professors of Cultural Studies as well as degree programs in Cultural Studies all around the world. It is possibly the fastest growing field of study in higher education in the United States and in some traditional fields such as English, mass communication, and education it is beginning to have much influence on mainstream scholarship. |
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| As a field Cultural Studies tends to create more emotional response than typical fields of academic study. There are those who hate and fear it as destructive of all that is good about universities and Western culture (e.g., Alan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind ); as well as those who seem to see it as the only saving grace and only hope of the academy. Most of us would probably agree that it is neither the destroyer nor the savior, but it is an interesting and effective way to study contemporary society and its politics. It's interests are wide and unusual for universities, studying things such as skinheads, comic books, Madonna, Mohammed Ali, Marilyn Monroe, reggae, hip-hop, Seventeen magazine, Book-of-the-Month Club, TV news, Michael Jordan, and Star Trek. |
