The Canterbury Cultural Studies Policy Statement
This working definition was developed by the committee which drafted the proposed Canterbury programme. It was circulated for approval and comment among a number of international Cultural Studies scholars.
While Cultural Studies has had a significant and growing impact on a remarkably diverse array of sites of intellectual practice, it is still very much a minority perspective that exists on the margins of academia rather than at its centre or in the mainstream. Indeed, it locates itself primarily and self-consciously outside of the reigning orthodoxies and the still-dominant disciplinary traditions established in both the humanities and the social sciences. Cultural Studies, as we see it, is committed to examining the politicization of knowledge-producing practices, and dedicated to interrogating the idea that there can be such a thing as politically neutral knowledge. For example, Cultural Studies research into the social construction of tastes and values has helped to demonstrate that the "standards" of the traditional humanities are far from politically innocent. Similarly, critiques of "truth" and "objectivity" in the social sciences have been productive for Cultural Studies work on the politics of knowledge. Cultural Studies embraces both empirical and historical research, but resists the assumptions underlying both empiricism and traditional historiography.
Cultural Studies recognises that all cultural production occurs within particular contexts. Consequently, Cultural Studies offers a variety of conceptual tools useful for interrogating issues around biculturalism and multiculturalism in Aotearoa/New Zealand.
The emphasis on the cultures of everyday life that drives a great deal of Cultural Studies work has created space in universities for the study of cultural forms and practices that had previously been largely excluded from scholarly purview. Consequently, studies of the popular cultural practices of the industrialized West have flourished, as have new, non-fetishizing approaches to the cultures of the non-Western world. At the same time, Cultural Studies work has also been deployed in the critique of knowledge productions often deemed outside the domain of culture, such as science. The State, similarly located outside the domain of "popular culture", has also provided productive ground for work in Cultural Studies.
Cultural Studies' core theories, analytical methods and fields of critical inquiry are various, contested, and often heterodox. Among them, we would posit the following (though this is not, in any case, intended as an exclusive or exhaustive list):
- Social Semiotics
- Marxist cultural theory
- Critical approaches to ethnography
- Poststructuralism and postmodernism
- The "new cultural history" and new historicism
- Feminism and gender studies
- Critical studies of race & ethnicity
- Post- and anti-colonialism and diasporic worlds
- Queer theory
- Performance studies
- Film, media, and communications studies
- Environment and culture studies
- Critical and feminist science studies
- Cultural geography
- Technology, culture and globalization
- Disabilities: images, politics, identities
- City, place and space
The Working Party found the following definition very helpful:
"Cultural Studies is an interdisciplinary approach to the study of culture and society that responds to, and builds upon, critical analyses of traditional disciplines and epistemologies as well as upon developments specific to gender, ethnic and sexuality studies that have emerged over the last twenty-five years. Key to the Cultural Studies approach is the perception that language, gender, race, sexuality, nationality, and class organize identities, complex social relations and cultural objects. Also key is the assumption that the study of culture in all its complexity requires cross-disciplinary work."
[from a recent proposal for Cultural Studies at UC Davis, published in Cultural Studies Vol. 12, no. 4, 1998, which includes a set of papers on 'The Institutionalization of Cultural Studies'.]
This is the way in which those teaching in Cultural Studies at an Australian university identified the key ingredients of the field of Cultural studies:
WORKING CRITERIA FOR NAMED DEGREE BA (CULTURAL STUDIES)
- Cultural Studies has as its central concern 'culture' in its widest sense. Culture is understood to mean the social processes of everyday life in which meanings are produced, experienced and exchanged. The analysis of cultural meaning is located in the forms of cultural production: texts, artefacts, events; the social and historical conditions of production; and the experience of everyday life.
- Cultural Studies can appropriately utilise a range of methodologies-critical, interpretive, textual and ethnographic which engage with contemporary social theory as it interrogates the relationships between knowledge and power.
- Cultural Studies is the study of culture within its social and political formations. It examines the articulation of conditions of social and political life within such areas as identity formation and contestation, popular culture, postcoloniality, race and gender relations, language and meaning, globalization, new technologies, the large scale migration and displacement of peoples, the crisis in theories of representation, and conditions of postmodernity.