Ambiance

What’s the Matter With Cultural Studies?

September 23, 2009 at 12:39 pm (By Randy)

Writing for the Chronicle Review, Michael Bérubé asks the question, What’s the Matter With Cultural Studies?

Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (1978), the Birmingham collection that predicted the British Labour Party’s epochal demise, is now more than 30 years old. In that time, has cultural studies transformed the disciplines of the human sciences? Has cultural studies changed the means of transmission of knowledge? Has cultural studies made the American university a more egalitarian or progressive institution? Those seem to me to be useful questions to ask, and one useful way of answering them is to say, sadly, no. Cultural studies hasn’t had much of an impact at all.