Cultural Studies


Cultural Studies is a current research at the crossroads of the sociology of the cultural anthropology of philosophy, of the anthropology of literature, the mediology, the arts, etc.. On the one referred transdisciplinary, they appear as an "anti-discipline" highly critical dimension, particularly as regards the relations between culture and power. Transgressing the academic culture, the cultural studies approach to offer a "cross" of popular culture, minorities, dissenters, etc..

Genesis of Cultural Studies

This current research is published in Britain in the 1960s in Birmingham, in 1964, Richard Hoggart founded the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). Apart from its founder, is generally associated with this course: Stuart Hall (Richard Hoggart's successor as head of the CEB), Charlotte Brunsdon, Phil Cohen, Angela McRobbie, David Morley, Edward Thompson and Raymond Williams.

In the 1970s, cultural studies are introduced in the United States where they are correlated with the French theory, an expression used to describe the work of philosophers like Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault

Since the 1990s, cultural studies are becoming. Many currents appear in Europe: the Cultural Studies in Germany, the cultural analysis in the Netherlands, etc..

Jean-Claude Passeron is one of the first to introduce the work of cultural studies in France: it has contributed to the translation and wrote the preface to the book culture of poor Richard Hoggart. But it recently that cultural studies are beginning to take off in France, despite the appropriation of French theory from cultural studies Americans.


Expanding the scope of cultural studies

R. Hoggart examines the lives of "classes" which is dense and concrete: the emphasis is placed on the sense of intimacy, the value of the domestic group and the immediate pleasures of taste. It is discussed in this work including difficulties related to the emancipation of the models imposed by society.

If the initial research of cultural studies are primarily related to popular culture in the 1990s, this field of research widens the performance studies, to visual studies, to postcolonial studies, in gender studies ..., areas which are developed following a series of rotating cultural (cultural turns) in the humanities