Cultural Studies (Critical Pedagogy)

Category: Theoretical approaches

Cultural studies, or critical pedagogy (not be confused with the critical pedagogy approach created by Brazilian philosopher Paolo Freire), as it is sometimes called, is an interdisciplinary field that originated with sociologists affiliated with Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Richard Hoggart founded the Center at the University of Birmingham (where he was a professor) in 1964. Cultural studies unite different intellectual traditions: the Frankfurt School of critical theory, the French structuralist and poststructuralist, and the Chicago School. Cultural studies study the connection between society, politics, identity, and culture, in all of its forms. Critical pedagogy is a both theoretical and political project that attempts to understand and change the power structures that rule everyday life, especially in cultural institutions in education and the media. Change can be achieved by empowering people to avoid manipulation and display critique, resistance, and struggle to implement democratic ideas through a “long revolution.”.

In his works, Richard Hoggart opposed mass culture, while defending the culture of the working class, which he perceived as a force that could serve to mobilize and organize the fight against inequality in capitalist societies. He saw cultural studies as a project to help educate and organize the working class so that it could make a difference. In The Uses of Literacy (1957), he studies the neighborhoods, pubs, and family relationships of the British working class to determine how the class's culture has changed under the influence of popular literature, consumerism, and Americanization (Hollywood, rock 'n' roll, etc.).

Stuart Hall another author associated with cultural studies, studied many cultural forms: popular music, commercials, women's magazines, youth subculture, fashion, movies, and television. He studied the relationship between politics and these cultural forms. Hall's theory was mostly influenced by Gramsci's study of the influence that culture has on politics. Another field of study, which he focused on in the late 1970s, is the rise of authoritarianism in British politics. At the heart of these studies is the way the state has treated immigrants of African or Caribbean descent. The increase in the share of this group of immigrants in the general population has led to a conservative reaction in public and politics. This reaction was reflected in the formation of racially based ghettos. Thatcherism was the culmination of a conservative and authoritarian reaction in British politics. As a leftist, Hall believed that the left should focus on thinking about the future and ways to overcome the conservative reaction.

Paul Gilroy received a doctorate in cultural studies from the University of Birmingham. His work is interdisciplinary and ranges between literary criticism, sociology, critical historiography, cultural studies, and musicology. He has contributed to many areas, and his works always deal with the complex interrelationships of modernity, race, state, nationalism, and culture. Gilroy opposes views that view race as a biological or cultural category. Gilroy states that the emergence of a specific "race" is an ongoing process in which groups of people are defined and organized around the idea of race, with resistance to racism, and the political organization of people that are grouped into a "race", playing a major role. Racism in Britain, after the Second World War, focuses on the issue of cultural differences between members of other races in relation to the British and their culture. The culture of other races is presented as foreign and anarchic.

Gilroy emphasizes that cultures are constantly in the process of changing, so the music made by people of Afro-Caribbean origin was a mixture of original African musical influences and responses to racism and oppression. The later acceptance of that music by the general population is proof of the constant changes that are taking place in the field of culture. Gilroy found that black communities in Britain were presented to the public either as victims or as problems, while they were increasingly regulated by an increased police presence and the criminalization of the inhabitants of those communities.

He believes that the concept of the diaspora is very important for understanding the position of black people in Britain. The idea of the diaspora is associated with slavery and forcible removal from Africa. Diaspora culture preserves the memory of the past, which is reflected in the music and literature of British black people. In the twenty-first century, multiculturalism emerged, shaped by the desire of corporations to profit from it. Black athletes and musicians are increasingly more present in the British public and popular culture, but successes in sports have led to the codification of the black body as a superman – black people are perceived either as great athletes or as brutal, non-human criminals. Gilroy also opposes the discourse of anti-racism, which overemphasizes racial differences, because it overlooks the mixing of racial, ethnic, class, and other identities. Gilroy hopes that the workers can unite with members of racial minorities, to jointly fight against exploitation and racism.

Raymond Williams is a Marxist-oriented sociologist of culture. In his early works Culture and Society 1780-1950 (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961a), he was the first one to deviate from the classical way in which the relationship between culture and society was observed in British social sciences. With the classical approach, culture is seen as what is produced only by the elite, which meets some high standards, and which should be defended from the pernicious influence of the masses. Williams rejected this approach to culture, and taking Edward Tylor's definition of culture as a starting point, he argued that all forms of beliefs, customs, and cultural products that are part of people's daily lives should be studied, no matter which group or class creates these cultural patterns.

The culture of the elite and the culture of ordinary people should not be analyzed in isolation from each other, but it is necessary to study their mutual relations and the points where they intersect. To define such an approach to culture, he introduces the concept of "structure of feelings" which refers to the relationship between two types of culture and life in a society or a period. Although Williams was inspired by Marxism, he criticizes the classical Marxist approach to culture, where culture is only a consequence of relations in the economic structure (base). He believed that there was a relative autonomy of culture. This approach is evident in his analysis of working-class culture in Britain. Since the workers did not have the opportunity to create literary or artistic works individually, they created their culture in collective conditions - in trade unions, cooperatives, and workers' parties. In The Country and the City (1973), Williams examines the relationship between rural and urban social life in British literature and social thought.

Paul Willis studied many topics: education, consumer culture, socialization, music, leisure, and youth culture. In the book Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (1977), Willis studies how cultural values shape pupils' attitudes toward education and work. The fieldwork of this study was conducted in Birmingham. Willis opposed the hypothesis that children from working-class families, due to academic failures, recognize their intellectual limitations, and then, as a result, they accept jobs with limited chances for career advancement. He spent a long time with a group of white boys from working-class families.

He came to the conclusion that they understood very well the system of authority that exists in the school, but that they actively fought against it, and one of the ways of fighting was constant conflicts with teachers. They saw school as a hostile system that they could manipulate. The hostile attitude they had towards the authoritarian system at school, with constant attempts to provoke and manipulate, they kept latter on, because they had the same attitude towards work. They were happy to have a paid job, but did not expect to get any pleasure or sense of accomplishment from the work, nor did they have the desire to pursue a career. Remaining in the class of parents, for these children, was a product of cultural reproduction, because the subcultural pattern, which was accepted during childhood, continued to operate when entering the labor market. In this group of boys, Willis also found extremely macho behavior - expressing aggressive masculinity by using sexist language concerning girls, establishing a very clearly defined framework of acceptable behavior for boys, and harassment and physical aggression toward homosexuals.

Authors: Ang, Ien; Gilroy, Paul; Hall, Stuart; Hoggart, Richard; Illich, Ivan; Kellner, Douglas; Virilio, Paul; Williams, Raymond; Willis, Paul. Brunsdon, Charlotte; Dyer, Richard; Fiske, John; Hedbige, Dick; McRobbie, Angela; Morley, David; Thompson, Edward Palmer.

Books:

Gilroy. There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Nation and Race (1987);

- The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993);

- Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures (1993);

Hall. The Popular Arts (1964);

- Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse (1973);

- Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-war Britain (1976);

- On Ideology (1978);

- Policing the Crisis (1978);

- Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies (1972–1979) (1980);

- 1880–1930: Crises in the British State (1985);

- „The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees.”, in Journal of Communication Inquiry (1986);