The relationship between culture and policy has long been a major topic for media and cultural studies. With
this issue, we hope to broaden the meaning of cultural policy, from policies that are explicitly regulating
something we call the “cultural” (including media or traditional rituals or symbols) to include the practice of
policy-making and…[Read more]

This essay explains that cultural studies is, by design, too diverse and heterogeneous a project to be reduced to a single methodology. It goes on to offer a brief definition of project, and to describe four of its major characteristics: (1) its leftist politics, (2) its radical contextualism, (3) its radical interdisciplinarity, and (4) its…[Read more]

Drawing on Stuart Hall’s influential “Notes on deconstructing ‘the
popular’” [Hall, S. (1981). In R. Samuel (Eds.), People’s history and
socialist theory (pp. 227–240). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.],
this essay maps out some of the major shifts in cultural studies’
relationship to popular culture over the past several decades. It
co…[Read more]

This article introduces a special issue on the topic of Cultural Studies and Critical Literacies. The collection of articles is drawn from the central theme of the inaugural Summer Institute of the Association for Cultural Studies: to explore the implications of studying literacy by combining perspectives from cultural studies and (critical)…[Read more]

Rap superstar Eminem has become the new poster child for everything that’s dangerous about contemporary popular culture. He’s crude, juvenile, and foul-mouthed. His lyrics are violent, misogynistic, and homophobic. He’s corrupting our youth, poisoning our culture, and laughing about it all the way to the bank. Or so the story goes. This essay…[Read more]

With the public discourse around filesharing veering towards punitive extremes, our aim in this essay it to reframe the issue in two ways. First, we argue that the filesharing debates are “too economic,” insofar as they reduce a multi-faceted phenomenon to a single issue: financial loss resulting from the theft of intellectual property. Lost in…[Read more]

A critical analysis of (and intervention into) various misreadings of cultural studies.

A critical analysis of the racial politics and cultural mythologies surrounding Elvis Presley’s career and stardom.

An essay exploring the serendipitous connections (theoretical, methodological, historiographic) between three seemingly unrelated books: Deleuze and Guattari’s _A Thousand Plateaus_, Carter’s _The Road to Botany Bay_, and Marcus’ _Lipstick Traces_.