Cultural Studies

Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary field that studies culture in a broad anthropological sense — as an ensemble of practices, meanings, and power relations — erasing the boundary between 'high' art and 'mass' culture. The movement arose in Britain within the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS, 1964). It was founded by Richard Hoggart ('The Uses of Literacy'), Raymond Williams ('Culture and Society,' the conception of culture as 'a whole way of life'), and Stuart Hall (the theory of encoding/decoding, of representation). Cultural studies combined Marxism (Antonio Gramsci and the notion of hegemony), semiotics, feminism, and postcolonialism. It investigates subcultures, media, identity, and consumption. In literary studies, cultural studies expanded the object of analysis to the context of the production, circulation, and consumption of texts, bringing literature closer to the sociology of culture.