The aim of this subject option at City of Bristol College is to introduce students to some of the basic ideas and theories of this area of study at degree level. It is not the study of foreign cultures but of western, capitalist culture. You will be asked to look afresh at objects that surround you.
Cultural Studies is a multi-disciplinary area of investigation that has evolved, drawing on Sociology, Psychology etc. By the end of the course you will be able to recognise when different methods of interpretation are appropriate.
‘Culture’ in Cultural Studies can be defined in broad political, aesthetic or artistic terms. We are not concerned with how good, bad, beautiful, thoughtful or even destructive a text such as a TV soap, a painting, a poster or an opera might be. Rather, Cultural Studies is suspicious of capitalism and all its products.
Its objective is to discover ‘meanings’ by examining social and historical conditions of production and consumption. A cultural text like Eastenders for example, can be understood in terms of how it reflects and constitutes (or strengthens) the values that both produce and consume it.
Cultural Studies tries to explain ways in which capitalist industrial societies - like ours - uses ‘culture’ to divide along lines of ethnicity, gender, age or class. It is concerned to shed light on how dominant groups (i.e. those with money and power) seek to maintain their hold over others.
So it might be argued, for example, that a culture of sport is a site of struggle where dominant groups - media corporations - buy football clubs to control and profit from a popular spectatorship. It may even be claimed that the purchasing power of the middle class has stolen the allegedly beautiful game from the working classes. So a Cultural Study of football might focus on how the visual texts that reference football constantly try to conceal this fact.
