These are the class notes as well as notes from the Q&A from 2021/2022. I retyped some thing to make them more comprehensive from the lecture slides, and if needed, supplemented with additional notes. Key thinkers are highlighted for faster access in the Table of Content. My grade was a 8,6. Hope t...
Cultural Studies
International Studies - 2021/2022
Table of Contents
Lecture 1: Cultural Materialism: What is Culture? 7
What is Culture? 7
Why does Culture matter? 7
What is Culture? Answer: A Contested Concept 7
Two possible definitions of culture: High Culture vs Ordinary Culture 7
High Culture (Culture with a capital C) (Matthew Arnold, 19th century) 8
Culturalism/Anthropological Definition of Culture 9
Why this anthropological approach to culture in International Studies? 9
Raymond Williams (1921-1988): Cultural Materialism 9
Three levels of culture (Williams) 10
Why call this ‘cultural materialism’? 10
Q&A: Lecture 1 11
Lecture 2: Marxism + Critique of Marxism (Marxist heritage of Cultural Studies) 11
Historical Materialism (Marx) 12
Relations of Production? 12
Base and Superstructure (Marxism) 12
For Marxism, Culture is Political because: 13
As a result Culture: 13
Criticism from Cultural Studies: Against Marxism’s Economic determinism 13
Key Thinkers: Althusser and Stall 1414
What is a social formation? (Stuart Hall) 14
Ideology: Definition 14
Hegemony (Antonio Gramsci, 1891-1937) 15
Globalization: A New World Disorder 15
Lecture 2: Q&A 16
Lecture 3: Approaching Culture Like a Language (Structuralism) 18
Structuralism 18
What is structuralism? 18
Language 18
Saussure: Semiotics/Structuralism 20
Langue versus Parole 20
21
Lecture 4: Approaching Culture like a Language, Poststructuralism 26
What is Poststructuralism? (Barthes) 26
Michel Foucault: Discourse 27
What is Archeology (Foucault)? 29
What is Genealogy (Foucault)? 30
Q&A Lecture 4: 30
Lecture 5: Television, Text and Audience 31
Television and News 31
Three Models for understanding television 33
The Manipulative Model 33
The Pluralist Model 33
The Hegemonic Model 34
From Encoding to Decoding (Stuart Hall) 34
The Globalization of Television 36
Television can be considered global in the following respects 36
Bringing together the global and the local? 37
Lecture 6: Subcultures 38
Subculture - Definition 40
Cultural Studies & Juvenile Delinquency Studies 40
Homologies (Willis) 41
Homology + Bricolage: Resistance through rituals 41
The Double Articulation of Youth 41
Q&A: Lec 6 42
Lecture 7: Subjectivity and Identity 43
Histories of identity and subjectivity 43
Subjectivity and identity: Overlap and difference 43
Essentialism vs Anti-Essentialism 44
Three Concepts of Identity - Enlightenment / Sociological / Postmodern (Stuart
Hall) 45
Five major shifts - Leading to the decentered subject (Hall) 47
Michel Foucault and the Decentered Subject // Discourse 48
Lecture 8: Issues of gender, race and nation 49
Feminism 49
Three Waves of Feminism: 50
Queer Theory: Breaking down the binaries 51
2
, Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (1991) 51
Race and Ethnicity 51
Hall: Concept of Ethnicity 51
Imagined Communities (Anderson) - Construction of National Identity 52
Print-Nationalism: How the Nation was Imagined 53
Media and the Nation: The Newspaper 53
Lecture 9: Culture, Power, Knowledge (Foucault) 54
Overview CS Approaches 54
Posthumanism: general definition 54
Posthumanism: Donna Haraway and the Cyborg Manifesto 55
Examples of Posthumanism (as Haraway sees it) 55
Posthumanism, Foucault, and the Question of Agency 56
Foucault + Agency 57
Foucault‘s analysis of power: Disciplinary Power and Biopower 58
59
Lecture 10: New Media, Globalization and Convergence Culture 60
Digital Revolution and Divide 60
Digital Media 101 61
Imagined Communities in a Digital Age 62
Imagined Communities + Globalization 62
Information Bomb and Big Data 63
Information: Good or bad? 63
Filter Bubbles 64
Problem with filter bubbles 64
Convergence Culture (Jenkins, early-mid 2000s): 64
65
Lecture 11: Culture, Web Activism, and the Information Society 66
Cyberspace & Cyperutopia/dystopia? 66
Digital Dualism 68
Materiality of Cyberspace 68
Cyberdemocracy and Cyberactivism: „Twitter Revolutions“ 669
But: The Limitations of Cyberdemocracy 69
Conclusion: Internet and Democracy 70
Information Society (Theoretical Concept) 70
Information Society (or: Information Age) - Handbook 70
The Information Economy 70
Information Economy in Agriculture? 70
Manuel Castells on the Network Society (Book) 71
3
, Lecture 12: Culture, Globalization and New Media 2 71
Claim (the handbook start out on) 72
Space and Place in Contemporary Theory 72
Time-Geography - Method of Analysis 72
Space and Place 73
Urban Space: Understanding the City as a Specific Kind of Space 73
Global City Theory 7475
Privatizing Public Space 75
The Postmodern City 76
The Informational City 76
4
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