Studies & Degrees in Cultural Studies
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Cultural Studies is a discipline which is primarily concerned with cultural practices and their various meanings. Being quite a new discipline itself, it is still made up of many schools of learning with varying opinions on how cultural practices, popular culture and the production of objects affect each other. The first scholars of Cultural Studies, on the other hand, chose to apply the Marxist methods of analysis to explore the relationship with said cultural practices of a certain people and the political economy where that set of cultural practice is based on. Scholars of Cultural Studies who base their finding on Marxism then place much emphasis on that can be had in the control of the production of cultural products. Nowadays, there is much shift in the emphasis from the power behind the production to the people who consume the products themselves and how they react to these objects.
What students of Cultural Studies do, therefore, is study and seeks to understand the relationship between the way that people do certain things, the objects they use and the meaning they give to these practices. This means that a scholar and researcher of Cultural Studies should be concerned not only with the culture of the majority and popular culture but also with the everyday practices of people and the meanings they attribute to them. In fact, it can also be said that students have expressed great interest in the latter subjects recently instead of focusing on the culture of the ruling social group. Another different approach to the discipline of Cultural Studies is to study it alongside comparative literature. Students of this discipline know well that Cultural Studies is a field that interests much debate among its scholars as well as a subject that requires much self-revision.
The term “Cultural Studies” was coined by Richard Hoggart in the 1960s. Hoggart is the founder of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), which later gave birth to the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. Since the department closed in 2002, the discipline of Cultural Studies has already taken root in various other universities.
This discipline combines different subjects like literary theory, anthropology and sociology among others to understand and classify cultural phenomena based on the economical standing of different societies. Another subject of great interest among students of this study is how an individual’s ideology, social class, race or gender affects their reactions to said cultural phenomena. The existence of subcultures within a mainstream set of practices, the way that people’s culture reflect the social and political standing of the place they live in, the differences between cultural knowledge and universal knowledge and even the evaluation of society as it is now can all be said to be topics that a student of Cultural Studies would be concerned with.
Because of this understanding of society and its interrelation with economy, scholars of this particular field usually work as policy analysts for program/project administrations after finishing with their studies.