The heart of cultural studies: Contextuality, constructionism and complexity

El corazón de los estudios culturales: Contextualidad, construccionismo y complejidad

This essay explains my commitment to and passion for cultural studies. I believe ideas matter, that we are better off approaching the daunting tasks of transforming the world with the best knowledge and understanding possible. And I have believed, for my entire academic career, that cultural studies matters not because it is the only intellectual practice that can tell us something about what’s going on in the worlds in which we live, but because it is a different way of doing intellectual work, and as a result, it can say and do certain things, it can produce certain kinds of knowledge and understanding, which may not be so readily available through other practices. In this essay, I try to define the common project that binds together the many different forms and formations of cultural studies. I start by telling two stories: the first, largely auto-biographical, retrospectively reads my desire for cultural studies out of my experience at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at University in the U.K.; the second will describe the project of cultural studies as the effort to produce knowledge based on a commitment to radical contextuality and constructionism, and a political engagement with the possibilities of social transformation. Explicating the conjuncture as the specifically cultural studies notion of context, I briefly show how different formations of cultural studies can be seen as responses to different conjunctural problematics.

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