Representations of the World in Language Textbooks by Karen Risager

Author:Karen Risager [Risager, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783099542
Google: ANeGswEACAAJ
Amazon: B078JD2YVH
Barnesnoble: B078JD2YVH
Goodreads: 44090409
Publisher: Multilingual Matters
Published: 2018-01-08T00:00:00+00:00

5Cultural Studies

Introduction

When we turn to a Cultural studies reading, we enter a field that is also interested in culture and politics, but with a methodological accentuation of process and agency, historicity and subjectivity, and with a much larger area of interest in terms of different kinds of identity.

Whereas the national culture reading puts a special focus on nations and national identity, and the citizenship education reading is particularly interested in cultural diversity in the sense of ethnic and linguistic diversity, Cultural studies includes these and other identity parameters such as gender, sexuality, race, class, caste, education, tribe, clan, religion, age, generation, lifestyle, etc. Some scholars emphasise studies of identities in which certain parameters intersect, for example: poor white males, black female academics, young Muslim women, etc.

In the Cultural studies tradition, ‘culture’ is not seen as something that exists out there and can be described as norms and values, products and practices (an essentialist view). As the Cultural studies tradition accentuates process and agency, it favours a view of culture that presupposes that it is constructed in discourse (a non-essentialist view): Culture is not something that can be used to explain people’s norms and values, culture is what should be explained. For example, why does a specific discourse about ‘culture’ exist in a certain context, and what does this discourse do? A similar distinction can be found in the study of identity: The focus is not on fixed identities as group memberships, but on processes of identification of self and Other: Who identify whom in space and time and with what effects? – not only in interactions between people, but also as part of large-scale cultural processes such as the unfolding of discourses in society about race, class, gender, age, nationality, religion, language, etc. A term that is sometimes used to cover this diversity is ‘interculturality’, which in the Cultural studies context may be defined as discourses of the world that foreground diversity and encounters (Risager & Dervin, 2015).

Cultural Studies

Cultural studies began in Britain in the 1950s as an interest in the cultural practices of other groups than the ruling élite. The first important publication, The Uses of Literacy (Hoggart, 1957), shows how changes in the reading practices of the working class in postwar Britain affected individuals’ lives in many different respects in their work, family life, etc. Cultural studies was first institutionalised in the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in Birmingham in 1964, founded by Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall, and from there spread to the United States, Australia and many other places. It has developed into a very wide and differentiated field of study, but generally one can say that it focuses on the role of culture in contemporary society; on relations between culture, identity and politics; and on the forces of ideology and hegemony. It shows how the cultural practices of any group, organisation or institution are influenced by and in turn influence power relations.

A central figure in the field of Cultural studies is Stuart Hall (1992,

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