POPULAR CULTURE http://www.sage-ereference.com/view/sociology/n82.xml?

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Popular Culture
Popular culture is a malleable concept. It can be thought of as folk culture produced by people as an expression of their values and modes of existence, and it can be the opposite, an ideologically laden product imposed by an elite class in a display of power and social control. Popular culture can be an ordinary part of everyday life as well as a site of intellectual and political struggle. It can be a participatory form within a community (actual or virtual) that engages the most populous mainstream in society, and it can be a mode of entertainmentan almost universal feature of most known societies. Wall painting, body decorating, singing, and gladiatorial sports from the ancient world can all be regarded as forms of popular culture, as can Rembrandt's cottage industry products and Shakespeare's seventeenth-century theater. Items for inclusion in the category of popular culture are now so diverse that no single definition contains them. Thus, popular culture refers to any demotic form that appeals to the populace at large, and as such, it can function as a social bond and folk culture that is expressive of the people. In its early form, from the sixteenth century, the popular also implied the lowly, vulgar, and common (Storey 2005:262). Popular culture can simultaneously refer as well to a mass media dedicated to spreading propaganda and political repression. In the modern era of industrial capitalism, it is an element in a vast commercial enterprise that both coopts forms of rebellion and sustains an intellectual, creative class that might also be opposing it. When Andy Warhol declared that modern art is what you can get away with, he demonstrated the frangibility of the boundaries around art; in much the same way, the products of popular culture now exert similar category pressures, bringing emphasis to the problem of representation in the popular mainstream, of who is being addressed by the products, and who is the populace in popular. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the range of phenomena potentially covered by the term popular culture is such that its study is necessarily interdisciplinary and of interest not just to sociologists but also to a variety of area specialists in fields such as American studies (from which the Journal of Popular Culture has its origins), anthropologists, historians, and literary scholars. It has also generated new academic disciplines, including cultural studies, leisure studies, media and communication studies, and youth studies. It has been a focus of research and teaching in gender studies, where the question of how femininity and masculinity are socially and culturally constituted gives priority to issues of representation and everyday cultural practice. The coexistence of these new research and teaching disciplines with the older subfields in sociology from which some of them, at least in part, emerged (e.g., sociology of popular culture, sociology of cultural production, sociology of everyday life, sociology of education, sociology of gender, sociology of sport, and sociology of consumption) and with the more established disciplines of anthropology, history, and literature makes the field of popular culture crowded and, at times, contested.

THE FUTURE IS THE PAST

The legacy of the ancient Greeks, of Plato and Aristotle, and the aesthetic products of the Renaissance have been largely eclipsed by the scientific revolutions of the seventeenth century onward. This has had the

effect of separating the arts from science, creating dual cultures and knowledge systems that sometimes seem unrelated, and a consequence of the separation has been a quest for a science of human behavior and society. Yet such measures are elusive. A sense of progress is largely based on a belief that there are measurable trends in social organization and administration that build on the achievements of earlier societies. Estimates of the value of popular culture as contributing to the improvement and civilizing of society become implicated in these debates. For instance, those elements of popular culture that encourage greater liberalism in the circulation of knowledge and more democratic social practices can be used to signify increased levels of human progress. With the busy commercialism of the eighteenth century and the profound changes it brought to mechanics and technology, there was a comprehensive renovation of the individual's everyday experiences. Ideas now circulated widely through coffeehouses in London, Paris, and Venice; clubs and philosophical societies sprang up in provincial towns; the closed and elite position of the artist and patron had begun to change; commercial theaters flourished, as did dealers in engravings, paintings, silverware, and furniture. Publishers, merchants, and shopkeepers became part of an intellectual revolution that made the social meaning and status of art objects of fresh interest to the urban dweller. City life was not just about surviving dense living quarters and compromised hygienic conditions; it also involved the emergence of a middle class and the commercialization of taste and the arts. The material and technical changes of the modern world brought new ways of thinking about and experiencing pleasure, which in turn directly influenced what we now understand as popular culture and its capacity to shape society. Sociology's engagement with popular culture was framed in the first instance by the opposition between community and society, through which the discipline organized understanding of the transition from feudalism and agriculture to capitalism and industry. Popular culture produced by ordinary people (the folk) was part of the charm of community; popular culture produced as a commodity for the masses was part of the attenuated lifeworld of society. These oppositions of community/society and folk/mass are imbued with nostalgia for enduring social relationships and traditional cultural practices that have been embedded in a hierarchically ordered rural lifeworldthe fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions swept away, as Marx and Engels (1930:1736) put it, by capitalism's constant revolutionizing of production. In the nineteenth century, with the advent of technologies for mass communication, mapping the terrain of popular culture involved adding further layers and permutations to the meaning of the term, which could no longer be restricted to culture produced by the people. The association of popular culture with widely recognized celebrity figures, material icons, and forms of social knowledge that are widely distributed through mass societies was under way by the early twentieth century with the expansion of communication technologies (film, radio, photography) and their increasing commercialization. Through the second half of the twentieth century, revolutionary developments in electronic and information communication technology allowed for increasingly rapid distribution of this culture across the globe. In effect, this lifts popular culture out of a local context (where it was situated prior to the nineteenth century) and relocates it on a global stage. The cultural industries (e.g., the Hollywood film studios and transnational telco networks) with their vast technological reach have made popular culture a defining feature of what Marshall McLuhan (1964) termed the global village. Both sociology and popular culture in its massproduced form were products of the same historical conjuncturenamely, the industrial revolution and its associated social, cultural, and political upheavals. The language of social fragmentation and moral disintegration that underpins discussion of the relocation of rural populations into industrial cities thus framed interpretation of their commodified leisure pursuits as less worthy than the folk traditions that preceded them. According to Raymond Williams (1961:17), the

idea of culture as it emerged in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was conceptualized as a transcendent sphere of noninstrumental value from which the increasingly rationalized, commodified, and environmentally polluted lifeworld of industrial capitalism could be judged. Whether from Herder's (2002) understanding of folk culture or Matthew Arnold's (1935) sense of high culture as a bulwark against anarchy, culture was positioned in opposition to the masses. This was a neat ideological reversal in which the historical actors who suffered most in the transition to capitalist modernity were deemed responsible for its sometimes impoverishing cultural consequences. As bearers of mass culture, uprooted peasants, remade as urban workers and a swelling underclass, were positioned as barbarians within the gatesa threat not only to social and political order but to civilization itself.

MASS SOCIETY BECOMES POPULAR CULTURE

The sociology of popular culture separates from the sociology of the mass society at the point where the relationship between high culture and popular culture loses its simple homology with class division and assumes a more complex symbiotic relationship that generates new definitions of taste. The creation of the mass audience from the 1920s, largely through the popularity of Hollywood films, solidified yet another cultural fissure, extending the one created between 1890 and 1930 by the avant-garde of Rimbaud, Joyce, and Picasso. The separation of high, mass, and avant-garde tastes made it clear that cultural messages of any kind cannot be dissociated from the social conditions from which they arise. The popularity of contemporary forms such as the cinema, sitcom TV, and fashion magazines seems to advance the ideological appeals of materialist capitalism. The Frankfurt School, in particular, championed much of the avant-garde as the conscious minority who were resisting the standardization that came with the mass production and consumption of products from the American culture industries. The sociology of popular culture in its contemporary form draws on the early work of Raymond Williams (1961), who redefined culture to include a new layer of meaningnamely, the structure of feeling. Williams rightly pointed out that how people thought and felt about themselves and others played a singularly important role in shaping everyday culture. It was not sufficient to study social institutions, such as the family, and the organization of production; it was also necessary to understand how members of society communicated, acquired ideas and tastes, expressed views, and felt engaged in society. By definition, whatever is popular has a large audience and is well received by huge numbers of people. In the twenty-first century, the popular is most often produced by professionals (such as journalists, musicians, and filmmakers) to appeal to global audiences that traverse various local cultures. In this context, questions about the nature of popular culture that relate to its production and audience (e.g., the question of whether popular culture is produced by the people for themselves as a kind of folk culture) represent viewpoints more useful prior to the eighteenth century. Thereafter, popular culture has been understood as those ideas and entertainments that win the attention of a mass audience, and as such, it is a manufactured form of entertainment and idiomatic knowledge often characterized as being inferior to other, more highbrow or elite forms. It can then be imbued with sinister intentions; for instance, it can be thought of as a tool in a political armory designed to be a form of entertainment that is made easily available to keep the masses distracted and diverted. Embedded in these views are assumptions that culture originating from the lower social orders, or appealing en masse to a mainstream, is both less interesting than highbrow culture and more heavily freighted with ideology. It also assumes that popular culture can be understood and interpreted properly from the vantage point of those in an elite intellectual position. Yet popular culture is not a homogeneous form; it has contradictions within itself as well as a range of diverse forms. A new manner of thinking about popular culture was provided by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies,

established in 1964 under the leadership of Richard Hoggart, who had lovingly documented the working class culture of his youth in The Uses of Literacy (1958). Hoggart's approach was in direct opposition to the perspectives expressed by T. S. Eliot (1948) and F. R. Leavis (1948), who argued for a top-down approach to the civilizing influences of culture. Hoggart's construction of the working class and its cultural practices and preferences was a major factor in defining the populist agenda of popular culture in the British context. He made explicit the link between the study of popular culture and representations of class and the distribution of privilege. He asserted the importance of art and culture as the means by which much of the individual's quality of life was revealed. Learning to read objects and practices in a critical manner was the key to understanding society. The dominant elite classes had expressed their own views through a monopoly over culture, and these values had been taken for granted. Now with the establishment of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, the canonical elite forms of high culture were transposed into sites of cultural struggle as new modes of seeing were being developed. Across the Atlantic, other social analysts and theorists were at work reshaping views toward the popular and, in so doing, changing the sociological landscape of everyday modern life. In the first half of the twentieth century and into the 1960s, the study of popular culture in sociology can be located in terms of three broad traditions. Within Parsonian structural functionalism, emphasis on system maintenance gave popular culture one of two functions: value integration or tension management. Popular events and practices were judged according to the effectiveness of their contribution to one or the other of these outcomes. Within Marxism, the location of popular culture in the ideological superstructure carried similar implications. For instance, if the ideas of any age are the ideas of the ruling class, then a shift in the popular, from forms of expression and practices embedded in the lifeworld of the folk to forms of amusement and entertainment produced under industrial conditions as commodities for sale to the masses, has the politically serious consequence of positioning popular culture as a means of rendering the dominant system of class relations palatable to subordinate groups. The idea of the popular being resistive had not yet formulated itself within this perspective. With symbolic interactionism and the Chicago School, the notion of subculture did focus attention on social actors and the construction of meaning and, thus, marked the beginning of a more complex way of understanding the individual's real or immediate social experience. Such perspectives promised to incorporate the quirkiness of the private and the diversity of individual value positions into the sociological project (Truzzi 1968). Had this been a more successful maneuver, it might well have anticipated much of the success enjoyed by the subdiscipline of cultural studies some three decades later. However, the specter of social fragmentation and moral decline hovered over early studies such as Paul Cressey's (1969) study of commercialized recreation and the inner city, The Taxi-Dance Hall, and this aura persisted into the mid-1960s, thus positioning popular culture more as a social problem, as evidenced by the inclusion of Howard Becker's (1963) study of dance musicians in Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance and Herbert Gans's essay on popular culture in America in the edited collection Social Problems: A Modern Approach (Becker 1966).

CONTEMPORARY POPULAR CULTURE

One of the defining moments in the sociology of popular culture was the relocation of scholars from the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research to temporary accommodation at Columbia University in New York in the mid-1930s. As exiles from Nazi Germany, they had seen a popular movement that was morally corrupt and rancid; thus, their critical engagement with American popular culture was framed by an acute sense of the capacity of radio and film to mobilize audiences to support wrong-headed causes such as fascism. In the United States, they argued, the technologies of mass communication served the interests of

capitalism. In coining the term culture industry (Jay 1973:216) to describe the non-spontaneous, reified, phony culture churned out as entertainment by Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley, they shifted the terms of debate on the politics of the popular from mass taste to the conditions of its production. Popular culture was deemed an ideological misnomer for the products of a profoundly undemocratic industry characterized by centralized control, distance between audience and performers (the star system), standardization, instrumental orientation, and affirmation of existing social privileges. In contrast to conservative critics of mass culture, who argued that democracy leveled taste to the lowest common denominator (e.g., de Tocqueville 1966; Ortega y Gasset [1948] 1968), the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School framed the problem in terms of capitalist social and economic relations and technological rationality. They saw the culture industry as extending capitalist domination into all areas of life,

subordinating in the same way and to the same end all areas of intellectual creation, by occupying men's sense from the time they leave the factory in the evening to the time they clock in again the next morning with matter that bears the impress of the labor process they themselves have to sustain throughout the day. (Horkheimer and Adorno [1947] 1979:131)
Whether the product was cars or culture, the technology of mass production was inseparable from the rationale of domination underpinning the coercive nature of society alienated from itself. Automobiles, bombs and movies, they argued, keep the whole thing together (Horkheimer and Adorno [1947] 1979:121). While the Frankfurt School critique of the culture industry was of a piece with the arguments on mass society being put forward by David Reisman's (1964) The Lonely Crowd and C. Wright Mills's (1959) The Power Elite, it was less than palatable to a generation of sociological and cultural theorists who had grown up with television and regarded rock n roll as an instrument of opposition and liberation (Gedron 1986:19). Their commitment to the resistive force of rock n roll was particularly strong if their reading of the Frankfurt position extended no further than Adorno's ([1941] 2002) quarrelsome essay On Popular Music or his offensively ethnocentric essay On Jazz (published under the pseudonym of Hektor Rottweiler). This interpretation of Adorno's essays on popular music and jazz so offended them that they read no further. Yet Herbert Marcuse's (1964) OneDimensional Man presented a similarly bleak view of the capitalist domination gained through the broad appeal of entertainment and consumer goods, but as he was writing in the 1960s, after living 30 years in California, he was not writing from the position of social dislocation and culture shock that must have colored Adorno's views on American culture. While Adorno was reviled as a cultural elitist, Marcuse's concepts of co-option and repressive tolerance became part of the language of the New Left. Marcuse (1964) lamented the infusion of the consumer ethic into the popular imagination: People recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment (p. 24). His argument that the irresistible output of the entertainment and information industry is part of a commodity culture that serves to bind the consumers, more or less pleasantly to the producers, and through the latter to the whole (p. 12) is faithful to the spirit of Horkheimer and Adorno. Yet at the same time, his thesis that radical students and blacks were bearers of the revolutionary mission from which consumption had seduced the working class gave de facto recognition to a new cultural politics in which popular music, underground comics, and films were capable of expressing and mobilizing opposition to capitalism, albeit in commodity form. The Frankfurt School thesis on a culture industry uniformly affirmative of capitalism was destabilized by the advent of the New Left, whose members listened to Bob Dylan and The Doors, read Karl Marx, and reframed the Hollywood movies of the 1930s and 1940s as classics celebrated by directors of the French nouvelle vague.

A sociology of popular culture based on rejection of the mass society model emerged in the 1960s, as the first generation to grow up with television and rock n roll arrived at university and graduate schools. This was a period of expansion in higher education and the extension of access to students from the working class, many of whom were the first in their family to attend university. While the emotional dynamics of social mobility are complex, and there is no necessary connection to be made between being from the working class and identifying with its taste culture (Gans 1974:68), nonetheless, a space was being made in which a new twist in the social significance of popular culture was about to take shape. This new generation of students was also eager to consume the popular culture of its own making. It did not accept the theoretical approach to popular culture, which defined one's own tastes and practices as inferior, and the idea that popular music served to pacify the masses did not generate much enthusiasm; indeed, this was particularly unconvincing given the equation of rock music with youth rebellion. The new generation of students in the early 1960s overturned the theories about industrialized popular culture and the mass society. The depiction of society as a vast mass of alienated and atomized individuals, who were undifferentiated from one another and unable to overcome a nameless loneliness, was about to be swept away. Reisman's (1964) depiction of modern America in The Lonely Crowd was replaced with the communities of Woodstock. Feminism, gay liberation, identity politics, and race debates shattered the sense of homogeneity that permeated the economic expansionism of the suburban 1950s and set in motion the mannerisms of thinking that would arrive at French poststructuralism and postmodernism and threaten the Anglo-American discipline of sociology with theoretical eclipse. One obvious consequence of the social, cultural, and political movements that defined the 1960s as a transformative decade was a new relation between popular culture and the academy. While earlier generations of sociologists had approached popular culture from the outside, and by implication from above, the post-1960s generation were more likely to share its codes and values. Popular culture was in that sense normalized as part of everyday life rather than positioned as a problem to be interrogated for signs of social pathology. Changes in technologies of production were also implicated in rejection of the mass culture approach, which made less sense as Fordist conditions of mass production and consumption were rendered obsolete by new electronic and information technology that made it possible for producers of all manner of goods to cultivate niche and subcultural markets. Work associated with the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies exemplifies this shift in focus. There was a sense in which both the critique of mass culture and the culture industry thesis can be read as denigrating popular taste and, by implication, the people who have it. It might therefore be argued that dismissal of the Frankfurt School critique as an elitist defence of high culture is fuelled by a sense of class injury (Sennett and Cobb 1972) that produces selective (mis)readingpassing over barbed remarks about art galleries and classical music and taking umbrage at the perceived insult to ordinary people and their pleasures. Yet there were significant similarities between the Frankfurt and Birmingham traditions, as Douglas Kellner (1995) astutely noted, in terms of a shared interest in how culture and consumption served to integrate the working class into capitalism. But whereas the Frankfurt School's culture industry thesis allowed no scope for resistance, the Birmingham School adopted Gramsci's concepts of hegemony and counterhegemony to position popular culture as a site of struggle between the forces of hegemonic domination and counterhegemonic resistance. Stuart Hall's (1980) influential essay Encoding/Decoding argued that people are active readers of media texts, decoding messages in one of three ways: (1) a dominant or preferred reading, which accepts the intended message; (2) a negotiated reading, in which some elements of a message are accepted and others opposed; and (3) an oppositional reading, which is opposed to the way the encoder of the message intended it to be read. Watching television was thus

redefined as an active process involving the production of meaning rather than the consumption of capitalist ideology, and viewers could no longer be written off as couch potatoes or cultural dopes. In the same way, Birmingham School studies of subcultures (e.g., Hebdige 1979; Willis 1978) involve what Miller and McHoul (1998) aptly describe as a shift from culture as a tool of domination to culture as a tool of empowerment (p. 14) with subordinate groups appropriating commercial popular culture for their own ends, which invariably entail resistance to the dominant order. The emergence of another contiguous field, the sociology of consumption, has added further dimensions to the study of popular culture. In this vein, John Fiske (1989) draws on Michel de Certeau's (1988:127) understanding of consumption as a form of secondary production to extend the argument on appropriation so that popular culture can be seen as being produced by its consumers. In his view, popular culture in industrial societies is contradictory to its core because it is produced and distributed as a commodity by a profit-motivated industry, but at the same time, it is of the people, whose choices determine whether or not the products of the culture industry are popular. In support of his position, Fiske (1989) points to the number of films, records and other products that the people make into expensive failures (p. 23) and maintains that as a living, active process of generating and circulating meanings and pleasures within a social system, popular culture cannot be imposed from without or above but indeed is made by the people. From this point of view, what the culture industries produce is a repertoire of texts or cultural resources for the various formations of the people to use or reject in the ongoing process of producing their popular culture (p. 24). It might be argued that in the absence of power to define the repertoire of cultural resources from which popular culture is produced, consumer choice is a poor substitute for cultural democratization. As Kellner (1995) observed, The texts, society, and system of production and reception disappear in the solipsistic ecstasy of the textual producer, in which there is no text outside of reading (p. 168). Moreover, uncritical valorization of oppositional reading, resistance, and audience pleasure leaves out important questions of power and value in relation to forms of cultural expression in which one group's resistance involves another's oppression.

THE HEART OF THE MATTER

The maturation of popular culture as a proper field of sociological enquiry has seen a massive growth in its range of topics, from an analysis of the greeting card (Papson 1986) to football crowds and museum attendance (Bennett 1995), from gender advertising (Goffman 1972) to radio broadcasting and teen magazines (Johnson 1979; McRobbie 1991). As well as providing fascinating case studies of popular practices, this type of scholarship also alerts us to an underlying political agenda, and from sociological readings of such popular practices, we can identify systematic instances of social injustice, exclusion, and prejudice. Popular forms such as top 40 dance music, street fashions, skateboarding, Internet chat rooms, and blogging reveal complex social relationships and group identifications. Chris Jenks's (2005) sociology of culture brings the rigors of theory to illuminate how the contemporary urban experience can be understood as a shifting ground where the institutions of power and social order have been substantially destabilized by various innovations and, in particular, the impact of new technologies in communications. Subsequently, it becomes more apparent that studies in popular culture can be portals to understanding the postmodern experience in a wider sense. It is not the case that popular culture is automatically about the simplest and most banal or only about the fashionable and fresh. For instance, the serialized production of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) (1995) attracted at least 10 million viewers and subsequently has been broadcast in over 40 countries. The publisher of the novel sold 430,000 copies in the year following the television screening of the serial. Such an example of a popularized book, traditionally categorized as part of highbrow or elite culture, identifies new directions

for studying the popular. In this instance, it points to the possibility that canonical products (Austen, Shakespeare) that are assumed to be part of an elite cultural field can be read differently and thus become expressions of rebellion and resistance to dominant conventions and manners of thinking. Reading against the grain and subverting the form can be modes through which we establish what we like and hence use the cultural form to reveal ourselves. Accordingly, the popularity of Pride and Prejudice might well indicate a form of refusal of the social disruption being associated with increased globalization during the 1990s. It could be argued that its depiction of local village life was a repudiation of the blurred boundaries and oceanic liberations that were washing over us with the advent of the Internet and instantaneous global communications. Austen's sympathetic view of provincial life, in contrast to the sophistication of London society, may well have appealed to the modern masses, who were experiencing an unnerving sense of destabilization brought about by the vertigo induced by mass communications and the accompanying collapse of temporal and spatial divisions. From the BBC version of Austen's novel in the mid1990s to the parodic film Bride and Prejudice in the Bollywood genre in the twenty-first century, there are numerous examples of how items of traditional elite culture can be reformulated into popular versions and thereby come to support a continuous and often querulous reading of the world. The works of Austen, Shakespeare, and Mozart have been so repositioned, with the consequence that it is worth asking, Have these forms been co-opted into a nostalgic diversion that promotes the pleasures of domestic life? And can this be regarded as a disguised form of social control? Does such repositioning reveal the processes of bowdlerization that are so often apparent in popularization? Or, conversely, is the expanding category of popular culture a sign of maturation in the cultural capital of modern societies as products of our elite heritage are introduced and absorbed into mainstream life? The impossibility of providing definitive answers that would allow us to take a firm stand either for or against popularizing appropriations of canonical texts lends support to Eva Illouz's (2003) argument that what she calls pure critiquethe tradition of cultural criticism that holds popular culture to account in relation to a clearly articulated political or moral standpointis no longer an option. At the same time, she sees the systematic ambivalence of postmodernism as contrary to sociology's critical vocationits necessary engagement with the question of which social arrangements and meanings can enhance or cripple human creativity or freedom (p. 207). Given the collapse of metanarratives through which cultural critics presumed to know in advance what texts ought to say and how, Illouz advocates the development of impure critique, which engages with cultural practice from the inside instead of counting the ways in which popular culture promotes (or fails to promote) a given political agenda. She argues that as in psychoanalysis, critical understanding in the sociology of popular culture ought to emerge from a subtle dialogue that challenges reality by understanding it from within its own set of meanings (p. 213). One such approach to the meaning of popular culture is provided by Mikhail Bakhtin's (1984) study of carnival, which represents popular culture as a vision of the world seen from below. Carnival is a festive form of political critique of existing social hierarchies and modes of high culture. It can transform the world into a site of pleasure where the significance of economic alliances, political forces, and social conventions can become inverted and thus made into sources of parodic humor and entertainment. Bakhtin locates carnival most often in an urban setting, where there are opportunities for contestation and where it finds application to a variety of contemporary festivities such as street parades, county fairs, sports events, bicycle races, and walkathons. Such popular activities flourish in the more complex society of the town, where commerce and the marketplace bring together individuals with different experiences and cultural consciences. From this mix of strangers, there is opportunity for outbreaks of the unpredictable, inadvertent, and humorous, which in turn produce varied forms of popular entertainment. Ordinary individuals are given access to a global media and subsequently perform themselves. Heroes of the day

emerge and become instant celebrities. Contemporary popular culture in the West has been dominated by a celebrity culture that elevates individuals into icons of practice: Greta Garbo, Marilyn Monroe, Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol, Bart Simpson, Jerry Seinfeld, Michael Jordan, and so on become archetypes of modern values. They are instruments in the production of popular culture, and at the same time, they function as hinges or switching points where mainstream values can be derailed and rerouted. Through their (often unintentional) personal influence, we can see the networks through which the arts, music, cinema, bookselling, publishing, television, and magazines are interleaved. The spate of reality television programs has most recently introduced an intensified selfreflexivity into popular culture that echoes certain practices from the Renaissance, when carnivale drew attention to the fragility of status and the social order and showed how easily it could be inverted. The globally popular reality TV program Big Brother, for example, can be seen as carnivalesque, in that it generates a widespread interest in the banal and ordinary, which in turn is revealed to be much more diverse and contested than expected. Thus, in the heterogeneous spaces of the metropolis, individuals with different cultural experiences and values are brought together in clashes of language, speech patterns, behavioral habits, and conventions. When this occurs, the spectator or viewer is made a witness to difference and, in turn, is consequently made more self-aware. These displays of contrasted styles of conducting business, thinking about the world, and living in it build a foundation for forms of entertainment and culture that are engaging, entertaining, and socially creative and have a wide popular appeal. In a parallel manner, when Georg Simmel (1900) analyzed metropolitan life in the early decades of the twentieth century, he identified stock characters such as the dude who slavishly followed fashion, the rich property owner who had delusions of grandeur, and the downtrodden poor and social castoffs who were bestialized, and he used these stereotypes to characterize the carnivalesque qualities of contemporary social life. Such stock characters mirror many of those presented in popular television and mainstream cinema for example, the unpredictable, lunatic politician; the incompetent judge; the hen-pecked husband; the quack medical doctor; the sexually wayward priest; the simple-minded corporate executive; and the incompetent boss. These types become figures of fun for an audience that laughs at the incompetence of those who generally hold greater economic power and social prestige. Such entertainments, like competitive sports, supposedly function as safety valves in a society where values are thought to be held in common and where instances of dysfunctionality and schadenfreuden (common in television sitcoms) work to restore the social balance and reaffirm social cohesion. In contrast, such interpretations of popular culture as sources of self-management and self-critique can be refigured to show that some forms of the popular function in oppositional ways, such as being expressions of resentment and hostility to others. For instance, displays of mayhem and rebellion in popular entertainments can act as challenges to authority and thus articulate hostility and repugnance toward the stranger and lower orders, such as women, Jews, gypsies, dogs, and cats (Darnton 1986). Certain forms of popular culture appear to demonize those who are different or who have less social status. In this way, popular culture is essentially conservative, acting to maintain the imbalance between a privileged elite and the masses. This darker, sometimes sinister side of popular culture characterizes the differences and expressions of resistive contra-subcultures, such as those found in religious cults, music groups, bikies, drug users, and nomadic feral surfers, as collectively repugnant.

END THOUGHTS
The field of popular culture is much traversed by classifications and categorizations. It has become a site where politics and aesthetics mingle freely. The old distinctions of high and popular, elite and mass

cultures are destabilized by the recognition that the arts are a form of political mobilization. From this perspective, distinctions in tastes are no longer just preferences intimately linked to biographical circumstances but also practices that reflect social and political viewpoints. Shakespeare and opera can thus be presented as high culture or adapted to popular and street forms, which raises the question, What circumstances and interests are at work in shifting specific art forms into new expressive locations? How do these reevaluations occur and what viewpoints are being presented through them? When, for instance, did opera and the live theater move from the popular into the elite category? Is the categorization of music, poetry, painting, sculpture, and dance as the fine arts, as distinguished from craft and the mechanical arts, still convincing, particularly when we think of dance as hip hop and sculpture as welded plates of steel and fused concrete? Montesquieu, in Diderot's ([1774] 1984) Encyclopdie, argued that the fine arts were distinguishable because they produced sensations of pleasure. With this definition, he asserted a marriage between aesthetics and the emotions. Immanuel Kant (1800) elaborated this point in Kritik der Urteilskraft by suggesting that beauty and the arts corresponded to definitions of truth and goodness. Subsequent debates on the nature of the sublime resonate through studies of culture, but importantly, these are relatively recent issues linked with other developments in the sciences, commerce, and technology. After all, it was not until the eighteenth century that high culture became an acceptable category, separate and distinguishable from more banal popular forms. It was a concern of the eighteenth century, and it remains a concern now, that distinguishing between commercial culture and popular culture is difficult. For those concerned with the loss of regional and provincial cultural forms, such as folk dancing and singing, or styles of food preparation, we could now read the risks to some indigenous cultures. The modern cultural form produced from artifice and overrefinement threatens to overshadow the indigenous art form, making it seem a quaint and narrowly focused object. The pursuit of wealth through commerce produces an environment in which age-old skills and ways of seeing are easily surpassed. A nostalgic primitivism that upholds the noble savage is as much a part of popular culture as are the overproduced techniques for selfimprovement, do-it-yourself kits, and commercialized signs of status and snobbery. In short, to understand popular culture, it is necessary to unravelat the individual levelthe connections between economic acquisition, pleasure, and social distinction and the desires associated with the fashionable life, along with the growth of audiences who seem variously willing to purchase entertainment, pleasure, and status. At the structural level, popular culture has become such an economic powerhouse that it has political consequences. In the mid-twentieth century, the House UnAmerican Activities Committee provided a vivid instance of the political power attributed to the culture industries, and again a similar debate erupted in the last decades of the twentieth century, when the National Endowment for the Arts came under scrutiny by the American government and radical artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Karen Findlay were accused of corrupting the morals and minds of their audiences. Popular culture as a series of practices has had a tempestuous past ever since its economic and political dimensions have been uncovered. So it was in the sixteenth century, when the Parisian printing apprentices murdered the totems of the aristocracy in the great cat massacre (Darnton 1986), and so it continues with current debates about the causal relationship between video games and the subsequent violent behavior of their audiences. Scholars of popular culture from the various disciplines of anthropology, sociology, history, literary studies, media, and so on function as analysts of art forms and the history of aesthetics as much as of political movements and social insurgency. The position of popular culture in the modern world is now inextricably linked with international politics and the global economy, and this makes it an irresistible focus for sustained sociological attention.

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JOANNE FINKELSTEIN Victoria University, Australia BERYL LANGER La Trobe University, Australia JOANNE FINKELSTEIN BERYL LANGER

Further Reading
Adorno, Theodor. [1941] 2002. Essays on Music (introduction by R. Leppart). Berkeley: University of California Press. Arnold, Matthew. 1935. Culture and Anarchy. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Becker, Howard. 1963. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. London, England: Free Press. Becker, Howard , ed. ,1966. Social Problems: A Modern Approach. New York: Wiley. Bennett, Tony. 1995. The Birth of the Museum. London, England: Routledge. British Broadcasting Corporation. 1995. Pride and Prejudice (mini series). Directed by Simon Langton. London, England: BBC. Cressey, Paul. 1969. The Taxi-Dance Hall. Patterson, NJ: Smith. Darnton, Robert. 1986. The Great Cat Massacre. New York: Basic Books. de Certeau, Michel. 1988. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by S. Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. de Tocqueveille, Alexis. 1966. Democracy in America. New York: Harper & Row. Diderot, Denis. [1774] 1984. Encyclopdie. New York, Pergamon. Eliot, T. S. 1948. Notes towards a Definition of Culture. London, England: Faber & Faber. Fiske, John. 1989. Understanding Popular Culture. Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman. Gans, Herbert. 1974. Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste. New York: Basic Books. Gedron, B. 1986. Theodor Adorno Meets the Cadillacs. Pp. 1731 in Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, edited by T. Modleski. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Goffman, Erving. 1972. Gender Advertisements. London, England: Macmillan. Hall, Stuart. 1980. Encoding/Decoding. Pp. 1021 in Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 197279, edited by S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe, and P. Willman. London, England: Hutchinson. Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London, England: Methuen. Herder, J. G. 2002. Selections: Philosophical Writings. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Hoggart, Richard. 1958. The Uses of Literacy. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books. Horkheimer, Max and Theodor Adorno. [1947] 1979. Dialectic of Enlightenment. London, England: Verso. Illouz, Eva. 2003. Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery: An Essay on Popular Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Jay, Martin. 1973. The Dialectic Imagination. London, England: Heinemann. Jenks, Chris. 2005. Culture. London, England: Routledge. Johnson, Lesley. 1979. The Cultural Critics. London, England: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Kant, Immanuel. 1800. Critique of Practical Reason. London, England: J. M. Dent. Kellner, Douglas. Communications vs. Cultural Studies: Overcoming the Divide. Communication Theory vol. 5 no. (2) pp. 16278 1995. Leavis, F. R. 1948. Education and the University: A Sketch for an English School. London, England: Chatto & Windus.

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Marcuse, Herbert. 1964. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. London, England: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 1930. The Communist Manifesto. London, England: Lawrence. McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London, England: Routledge & Kegan Paul. McRobbie, Angela. 1991. Feminism and Youth Culture. Basingstoke, England: Macmillan. Miller, Tony and Alec McHoul. 1998. Popular Culture and Everyday Life. London, England: Sage. Mills, C. Wright. 1959. The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press. Ortega y Gasset, Jose. [1948] 1968. The Humanization of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Papson, Stephen. From Symbolic Exchange to Bureaucratic Discourse: The Hallmark Greeting Card. Theory, Culture and Society vol. 3 no. (2) pp. 99114 1986. Reisman, David. 1964. The Lonely Crowd. New Haven, CT: Yale. Sennett, Richard and Jonathan Cobb. 1972. The Hidden Injuries of Class. New York: Knopf. Simmel, Georg. [1900] 1990. The Philosophy of Money. Translated by T. Bottomore. London, England: Routledge. Storey, John. 2005. Popular. Pp. 26264 in New Keywords, edited by T. Bennett, L. Grossberg, and M. Morris. Oxford, England: Blackwell. Truzzi , ed. , Marcello , ed. 1968. Sociology and Everyday Life. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Williams, Raymond. 1961. Culture and Society, 17801950. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books. Willis, Paul. 1978. Learning to Labour. London, England: Saxon House.

Entry Citation:
FINKELSTEIN, JOANNE, and BERYL LANGER. "Popular Culture." 21st Century Sociology. Ed. . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2006. 214-22. SAGE Reference Online. Web. 25 May. 2012.

http://www.sage-ereference.com/view/foundations/n289.xml?rskey=patdvq&result=2&q=popular %20culture

Popular Culture
Before students ever set foot in a classroom, they have accrued an understanding of teachers and teaching. That is, children come to school already having consumed images and ideas about education. Popular culture (mediated texts like television, films, magazines, music, comic books, etc.) partially informs such a cumulative text. Since ideas about schooling are socially constructed, popular culture influences the knowledge people (adults and children) have about schooling. Popular culture mediates the sociocultural context from which schooling is understood. This means that analyses about schooling must include questions of how popular culture helps inform these understandings. This entry examines how the investigation and inclusion of popular culture is important to our knowledge about schooling.

The Role of Culture

Popular culture texts are often utilized as part of people's leisure activities. They are generally texts that amuse or entertain. People, including students, seek out texts as willing consumers. They read magazines, watch television and movies, and listen to music of their choice. Some view the texts as harmless

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entertainment, while others argue the different texts comprise a larger institution, often synonymous with media, that works to uphold society's values. This is one of the main reasons educators have become concerned with popular culture as a site of education. Ideological messages are communicated through representations, thus popular culture becomes a teaching tool. People learn about the world, including schools, through these representations. For example, a child may learn about gender roles from watching Disney films, most of which illustrate traditional and confining gender stereotypes. Through media, people also have access to worlds with which they may not be familiar. For example, many Americans learn about the Middle East only through mediated representations, having never traveled or lived there. People also learn about themselves through the consumption of texts. For example, many students, questioning their sexual identities but having no experience outside of the heterosexual world, may learn what it means to be gay through texts like Will & Grace or Brokeback Mountain. Popular culture is a teacher and the lessons taught are not always consistent with educators' beliefs about what students should learn. People also construct vivid understandings about schooling through popular culture texts. One way people come to know schools, teachers, and students is through viewing the ways they are portrayed on television or in Hollywood films. For example, through watching films like Dangerous Minds or television programs like Boston Public, people may conclude that urban schools are dangerous places and kids of color within urban schools are in desperate need of saving by White teachers. Films like Clueless and Ferris Bueller's Day Off may suggest that White upper-middle-class youth are self-absorbed, consumed by the desire for popularity and material goods, and that their teachers are easily duped by their adolescent antics. Through media, people also hear how unprepared and unprofessional teachers really are, and they are taught the dominant discourses surrounding what makes a good teacher. This is ideological knowledge filed away in consciousness. Unless these images get interrupted by personal and/or professional experiences in schools, people construct negative images of the education system because there are few positive images portrayed in popular culture.

Popular Culture and Academia

Popular culture has not always been welcomed into academia. Part of this is due to the binary that exists between academic versus popular knowledge. Many cultural theorists believe the reason for this is that popular culture had long been viewed as a lower form of culture compared to artifacts like theater and opera. The Frankfurt School theorists engaged in critical communication studies in the 1930s and, with the help of Theodor Adorno, coined the term mass culture . This term actually reified the binary between high and low culture. Though followers of the Frankfurt School analyzed mass culture within the context of the cultural industry in which the artifacts were produced, many critics now believe that Adorno and others viewed the culture industries as too adept at mass deception. Instead of envisioning consumers as capable of resistance, the Frankfurt School viewed them as easily duped by the industry. They conceptualized mass culture as an ideological tool, which existed to legitimate the status quo. The Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was the next large academic focus on popular culture. It came out of the U. K. in the early 1960s and approached popular culture from a multidisciplinary perspective. The intent of those affiliated with British cultural studies (BCS) at the time was to subvert the binary that existed between high and low culture and to do that, they rejected the term mass culture . Cultural critics now charge BCS with analyzing popular culture texts from a narrow perspective. Although participants in BCS conceptualized texts as either dominating consumers or enabling resistance,

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many critics now claim there was too much of a focus on class and a lack of focus on race and gender. As a discipline, cultural studies has been and continues to be dynamic, that is, changing in response to social, political, and historical contexts. In the 1970s feminist scholars and Black scholars challenged the discipline to look at the ways gender and race, like class, must inform any study of culture. This raced and gendered influence continues to be seen in cultural studies texts that examine popular culture today. This focus has expanded to also include notions of ability, sexuality, and all other features of identity.

Popular Culture and Critical Pedagogy

Cultural studies work, by necessity, is interdisciplinary. This has enabled educational theorists to make links between popular culture and schooling. The discussion of popular culture and critical pedagogy has examined questions about the relationship between knowledge and power. In the early 1990s, there was a move to include the study of popular culture in the development and practice of critical pedagogy. Many argued that critical pedagogy must include popular culture as a site of inquiry and schools should be conceptualized as instructional sites as well as cultural sites. Schools were places that produced subjects and subjectivities. One of the ways students constructed knowledge was through learning from popular culture. It was believed that if educators could acknowledge popular culture as a site of learning, they could link learning school knowledge to students' everyday lives. Since part of critical pedagogy is working toward a democratic society while empowering students, understanding how students constructed knowledge through practices outside of school could only assist educators in the empowerment of students. The relationship between popular culture and schooling is complex, particularly as it relates to pedagogy. Since popular culture is most often reflective of youth culture, school systems, including both administrations and teachers, and youth, often clash over its incorporation in school social and academic settings. In schools, a familiar stance is one of opposition to popular culture sharing academic space. Students are often chastised for or forbidden from participating in popular culture in schools where certain genres of music, I-pods, body art, trendy magazines, and words on T-shirts are banned and labeled as destructive and distracting. This judgment made by schools on the popular cultural choice of students is often met with resistance since many students see these expressions as integral parts of their identities. At the same time, teachers seeking to include popular culture in the classroom will choose texts they deem proper, which students may or may not find relevant or representative of their lives, and this too is often met with resistance. This resistance informs how children perform their role as students. It dictates when they decide to listen, cooperate, and learn and when they dismiss a teacher's knowledge and academics as irrelevant to their social world. Critical pedagogues believe teachers can learn to embrace and utilize popular culture and its multiple forms of expression without judgment. Doing so changes the nature of authority in the classroom as students become experts and knowledge holders and the teachers become learners. Educators may have to accept that they can never be the experts in this arena. Due to its dynamic nature, once a popular culture form enters the realm of teacher knowledge and pedagogy and is made acceptable in school settings students lose interest and move on to the newest, latest, and coolest forms of expression.

Consumption
The field of cultural studies has also examined the processes of consumption as a cultural site. The discipline explains that this phenomenon is not just about economics but also incorporates desires, identities, and dreams. These desires and dreams are fueled by popular culture texts that shape and reflect what items kids think are cool and what brings status. They direct the trajectories of consumer culture.

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As a result of their relationships with both the items and the popular culture representations, kids are often accused of materialism. This materialism, and the means by which students go about acquiring desired material goods like the latest pair of designer jeans, the most up-to-date technology, or the hottest new sneakers, is looked upon as detrimental to academic progress since it is claimed that the focus on school work is often overshadowed by preoccupations with material items. This engagement with consumer culture is highly contested across class, genderd, and racial lines. Students from low-income families are often berated for their preoccupation with items they cannot afford. Students of color are often represented as criminal in their attempts to secure items, since a dominant discourse presumes they steal from their classmates and others. Internalizing these representations results in a preoccupation on the part of schooling systems with character education and security measures designed at reigning in these consequences of consumption practices and mitigating the influence of popular culture.

Representation and Marginalization

Some educational theorists questioned not the linkage between critical pedagogy and popular culture but the means to obtain it. These theorists claimed much of the work on critical pedagogy neglected the potential contradictions between various political movements and subsumed everything under a White, working-class, male perspective. This critique occurred while a growing field of cultural criticism was emerging. Many cultural critics, concerned with the ways ideology was transmitted through popular culture forms, turned their attention to critiquing the power of the few representations that existed of marginalized groups like African Americans, Latinos, and gays and lesbians. Critiques about representation of marginalized groups have been important because of the ways the dominant society utilizes popular culture as a means for us to learn about ourselves and others. At first, critiques focused on the lack of representation and/or the negative stereotypes embedded within the representation. Soon, attention turned to how audiences make sense of the representations and how that sense making informs their understandings about themselves and others. This attention to meaning making by the discipline revealed that audiences are active participants in popular cultural discourses, not empty vessels waiting to be filled or cultural dupes led only by what they see and hear.

Media Literacy
Media literacy is the teaching about the power of textual representation. Before teachers can help students to become critical consumers of popular culture, they must first educate themselves. The move toward media literacy in schools takes two approaches. The first approach views media in a critical way. It conceptualizes popular culture as an ideological tool (similar to the Frankfurt School) but works to teach students how to be critical consumers and uncover the embedded ideology within a text. This type of media literacy grew out of Stuart Hall's conceptualization of three reading strategies a viewer may utilize to make sense of a popular culture text. The reading positions, dominant, negotiated, and resistant, are directly related to the reader's social position in relation to dominant ideology. A dominant reader, because of his or her position in society, is often blind to dominant ideology and, therefore, much of the ideological messages and negative stereotypes produced by racism, sexism, classism, and heterosexism remain invisible. Media literacy in this approach seeks to assist students in uncovering the ideology and critiquing the negative stereotypes as part of a larger project toward social justice. The second approach is similar to the critical pedagogy stance but also has similarities to the BCS approach. Here popular culture is viewed as an integral part of students' lives. By validating students'

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consumption of popular culture, educators are validating student-constructed knowledge. This approach also views popular culture as a space of resistance. Students may learn about themselves and others but are also able to speak back to the messages they garner. This type of media literacy takes the stance that popular culture is capable of more than being an agent of ideological domination. Instead, it is viewed as an authentic part of the student's experience. Educators must understand what students know and learn from the popular culture texts they consume. By valuing this student knowledge, educators are viewed as helping to further democracy and emancipation, in other words, a media literacy version of liberatory education. Jennifer Esposito Cerri Annette Banks

Further Readings
Adorno, T. A. (1991). The culture industry: Selected essays on mass culture. New York: Routledge. Buckingham, D. (Ed.). (1998). Teaching popular culture. London: UCL Press. Daspit, T. , ed. , & Weaver, J. A. (Eds.). (1999). Popular culture and critical pedagogy: Reading, constructing, connecting. New York: Garland. Ellsworth, E. (1997). Teaching positions: Difference, pedagogy, and the power of address. New York: Teachers College Press Frber, P. , ed. , Provenzo, E. F., Jr. , ed. , & Holm, G. (Eds.). (1994). Schooling in the light of popular culture. Albany: State University of New York Press. Fiske, J. (1989). Reading the popular. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Giroux, H. A. , & Simon, R. I. (1989). Popular culture: Schooling & everyday life. New York: Bergin & Garvey. Grossberg, L. , ed. , Nelson, C. , ed. , & Treichler, P. (Eds.). (1992). Cultural studies. New York: Routledge. Hall, S. (1996). Critical dialogues in cultural studies. New York: Routledge. Kellner, D. (1995). Media culture: Cultural studies, identity and politics between the modern and the postmodern. New York: Routledge. Storey, J. (1996). Cultural studies and the study of popular culture: Theory and methods. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Entry Citation:
Esposito, Jennifer, and Cerri Annette Banks. "Popular Culture." Encyclopedia of the Social and Cultural Foundations of Education. Ed. . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2008. 602-06. SAGE Reference Online. Web. 25 May. 2012.

http://www.sage-ereference.com/view/communicationtheory/n288.xml? rskey=patdvq&result=3&q=popular%20culture

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Popular Culture Theories

The study of popular culture calls attention to the importance of folk culturefolk stories, ballads, folk theater, and so onand to various aspects of consumer culture. The topic has generated a great measure of interest among scholars, who have produced a number of important theories and conceptualizations. In order to understand the significance of popular culture, we need to have a sense of the importance and complexity of the concept of culture. The eminent British cultural theorist Raymond Williams once remarked that the word culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. This is because the term culture admits of a plurality of interpretations and consequently is not easy to pin it down. Williams proposes three definitions of culture. The first is that it signifies a general process of intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic development. According to the second, it points to a particular way of life, whether of a specific people, period, or group. The third definition emphasizes the works and practices of intellectual and artistic activity. The three definitions are, of course, interconnected; from our current perspective of popular culture, the second definition seems most appropriate. Popular culture constitutes a major meaning-making site for most citizens, and hence the way sophisticated theorists have sought to conceptualize popular culture merits close attention. This entry briefly summarizes several bodies of theory emerging in the study of popular culturecultural studies, structural and poststructural ideas, Marxist thought, postmodern theory, feminist theory, ethnography, and others.

Cultural Studies Approaches

Let us first consider scholars and theorists associated with cultural studies. It is an interdisciplinary mode of inquiry that originated in Britain in the 1960s and spread to many other parts of the English-speaking world. Alternative forms of cultural studies have emerged in non-English speaking countries as well, including, for example, French- and Spanish-speaking parts of the world. Early theorists of cultural studies, such as Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson, and Stuart Hall, paid sustained attention to diverse forms of popular culture. Williams has written illuminatingly on the ways in which technology and cultural discourses meet in television programming, while Hall has focused on the complex ways of decoding television and the role of ideology in shaping television culture. Drawing on the pioneering work of these thinkers, scholars of cultural studies have uncovered the layers of significance of popular culture. Scholars such as John Fiske, Lawrence Grossberg, and John Storeysome taking their cue from the eminent French thinker Michel de Certeauhave sought to demonstrate the important ways in which popular culture opens up spaces of resistance in everyday life.

Structural and Poststructural Approaches

The second group of thinkers that I wish to briefly consider can be termed structuralists and poststructuralists. Briefly, structuralism looks for meaning in the structures of language and discourse. In rejecting the idea that unified and coherent meanings are to be found in texts, post-structuralism has a complicated relationship with its predecessor. On the one hand, poststructuralism is an extension of the interests and concerns of structuralism, that of exploring meaning; on the other hand, it is a rejection of the idea that meaning can be discovered in texts apart from the contexts in which they are produced and read. What is interesting to note is that some of the most powerful thinkers who became identified with poststructuralism were, early in their careers, associated with structuralism. Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault immediately spring to mind. Barthes's collection of short essays included in his book Mythologies, which dealt with various aspects of French popular culture, had a profound impact on the study of

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popular culture. Structuralist thinking has been employed in diverse ways in examining popular-cultural texts. This is most clearly evident in the domain of popular cinema. Will Wright, in his book titled Sixguns and Society, makes use of the structuralist approach to the analysis of myths deployed by the eminent structuralist anthropologist Claude Lvi-Strauss to analyze Hollywood Western films. Poststructuralist thinkers go beyond structuralism and focus on the contextsocial, political, ideologicalas a crucial element in the meaning-making process. The work of Michel Foucault has been pressed into service productively in exploring popular-cultural productions, while Jacques Lacan's focus on language, desire, and subjectivity have opened up interesting and fruitful pathways of inquiry into popular culture.

Marxist Approaches
Another approach to popular culture is that of Marxist thinkers. Although there is a diversity of opinion operating under the general rubric of Marxism, the Frankfurt School represents an important branch. Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Max Horkheimer were leading lights of the Frankfurt School. They saw popular culture in negative terms, closely linked to what they termed cultural industries. They saw the products of cultural industries as standardized, trivial, and manipulative and saw that these had a depoliticizing impact on the working classes. However, there are other thinkers who were inspired by Marxist thinking who saw things differently. For example the influential Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci saw popular culture as an instrument of hegemony, which focuses on how the power of one group is exercised through coercion and consent over other groups. A number of scholars, inspired by the writings of Gramsci, have sought to project popular culture as a site in which ordinary people struggle to negotiate meaning, make sense of their lives and surroundings, and offer resistance to unwanted and oppressive influences. As examples, cultural studies scholars such as Hall and Grossberg have drawn productively on these ideas.

Postmodern Approaches
The next group of thinkers that I wish to focus on is the postmodernists. There is, to be sure, a great measure of overlap between poststructuralists and postmodernists; however, there are significant differences between these two groups as well. In this regard, the formulations of Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard are most important. Many scholars of popular culture have been influenced by postmodernist thinking. The ideals of discontinuity, fragmentation, relativity, problematic nature of reality, playfulness, hybridity, pastiche, and border crossing associated with postmodernism have been applied usefully to the understanding and investigation of popular-cultural texts. When discussing the complex relationship that exists between postmodernism and popular culture, the writings of the Marxist thinker Fredric Jameson can prove to be of great value. Although he sees the shortcomings of postmodernism as an intellectual formulation, he makes use of it to understand the cultural landscape that has been produced in popular cinema, video games, music, and so on in terms of the cultural logic associated with late capitalism.

Feminist Approaches
The fifth group that merits close attention is feminists. Feminism gained great visibility as a social movement in the 1960s, and it has begun to influence our understandings of art and culture in significant ways. Feminists focus on the unequal power relations in society and how they impact cultural production. They are interested in exploring how issues of gender operate within popular culture and how inequalities and disparities between men and women are articulated in cultural texts. There have been a number of

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important feminist writers who have shaped the trajectories of thinking on popular culture. The British filmmaker Laura Mulvey, through her writings on narrative cinema and visual pleasure, focused on how the male gaze operates and the ways in which in cinematic narratives men derive pleasure by turning women into objects of desire. Janice Radway opened up an important space of critical inquiry by investigating the ways in which women derive pleasure and meaning in their interactions with popular romances. Ien Ang, in her important work on women and television dramas, focused on the mechanisms of pleasurehow it is generated and the ways in which it works. Similarly, Tania Modleski has done some pioneering work on the relationships between popular romances and women and television soap operas and women. Meghan Morris's work on popular culture, ranging from cinema to shopping malls, has illuminated questions of female subjectivity in terms of popular-cultural texts. Rey Chow's work on modern Chinese cinema that draws on feminism and deconstruction has encouraged many students of popular culture to adopt similar strategies of analysis. All of these feminist writers critique patriarchal social orders and male-dominated discourses in productive ways. The problematics of representation and the role of male ideology constitute important strands in their thinking.

Ethnographic Approaches
A sixth group that merits consideration consists of ethnographers, who are increasingly drawn to popular culture. Traditionally associated with anthropology, ethnographic attention has been given to all forms of culture, including industrial societies and the popular-cultural texts associated with them. Lila AbuLughod's work on Egyptian television soap opera and Purnima Mankekar's studies on Indian television dramas are but a few of the examples that exemplify this trend.

Additional Approaches
Several scholars share certain features with some of the groups referred to above, but do not fit neatly into any of these categories. For example, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has fashioned a number of concepts that have a direct bearing on the analysis of popular culture. His ideas on how cultural capital is produced are particularly relevant in this regard. He dissects how social distinctions, positions, and power relations are made, legitimized, and challenged in the domain of cultural productions. When we discuss theorists of popular culture, we need to cast our net as wide as possible and take note of developments in societies outside the West. For example the Indian cultural critic Ashis Nandy has written perceptively on Indian popular cinema and other popular-culture products in terms of subject formation and cultural values. The Japanese cultural commentator Kojin Karatani has written a number of seminal essays that shed valuable light on the dynamics of cultural production. The field of popular culture has made rapid progress over the years. From an undertheorized field has emerged a remarkable vibrancy. Questions of popular culture in relation to subjectivity, power play, representation, social formations, ideology, desire, and resistance have begun to attract increasing scholarly attention. The intent of this short entry has been to highlight some, though by no means all, of the more significant theorists associated with popular culture. Wimal Dissanayake

Further Readings
Fiske, J. (1989). Understanding popular culture. London: Unwin Hyman. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from prison notebooks. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Hall, S. , & Whannel, P. (1954). The popular arts. London: Hutchinson.

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Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. London: Verso. Storey, J. (1993). An introduction to cultural theory and popular culture. New York: Prentice Hall. Furner, G. (1996). British cultural studies. London: Routledge. Williams, R. (1983). Keywords. London: Fontana. Wright, W. (1975). Sixguns and society. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Entry Citation:
Dissanayake, Wimal. "Popular Culture Theories." Encyclopedia of Communication Theory. Ed. . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2009. 762-65. SAGE Reference Online. Web. 25 May. 2012.

http://www.sage-ereference.com/view/foundations/n104.xml?rskey=patdvq&result=9&q=popular %20culture

Cultural Studies
Cultural studies is a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, antidisciplinary, even postdisciplinary approach to education. When viewed together, cultural studies and education, broadly, seek to reveal and analyze relationships of knowledge, power, pedagogy, and formal and informal learning production and practice in society and culture. Conveying perspectives from the humanities and social sciences to critically assess education through support, resistance, or transformation, cultural studies engages education through both critique and creativity. Relational in nature, it is predicated upon intellectual activism as social intervention through engagement with praxis (the bridging of theory and practice) and represents a politicized engagement with society. For these reasons, this relationship is integral to considerations of the social and cultural foundations of education. This entry will provide a broad overview of cultural studies: its origins and related developments, illustrations of the kind of work cultural studies scholars/activists do, cultural studies contributions to education, and misconceptions about cultural studies.

Origins and Developments

Cultural studies practices existed before the term itself, so as with its theoretical origins, its institutional origins cannot be viewed as definitive. Cultural studies may be theorized and historicized in multiple locations, and while those mentioned here are by no means exhaustive, some particular movements and institutions are generally associated with cultural studies and education, and within these, certain individuals and propositions. Cultural studies has broad origins within the Russian culturology movement and the Harlem Renaissance in New York in the 1920s and 1930s, in addition to folk schools in Denmark and the Appalachian region of the United States in the 1930s (Myles Horton's founding of the Highlander Folk School, now the Highlander Research and Education Center, in 1932 in Tennessee), and the Ngritude Movement in France, and francophone Africa and the Caribbean. The 1960s saw the development of subaltern studies in India and Southeast Asia, adult literacy and popular education movements throughout Latin America (perhaps most noted in relation to Brazil with Paolo Freire's work in the 1960s), and popular theater of resistance in Kenya (the Kamiriithu Community and Cultural Centre in Limuru, Kenya, in the 1970s). The institutional beginnings of Western cultural studies are most often associated with the Birmingham school, originating from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS, founded 1964 at the University of Birmingham) in Birmingham, England, and the work of several associated scholars, including Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, and E. P. Williams in England, and Stuart Hall, Angela

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McRobbie, and Paul Willis, among others, at the CCCS. The 1980s saw the development of the intersections of cultural studies and critical pedagogy, developing as a discourse in discussions of postmodern educational thought and focused on examining the power, politics, and public consumption of schooling and, within schools, exploring representational politics, constructs of student subjectivity, and the analysis of pedagogy; it is praxis oriented and intervenes in the institutional arrangements and ideologies in society that reproduce oppressions and structural inequalities. As teachers are always operating within historically, socially, and culturally situated contexts and constraints, and because education itself is so politically charged and contested, teacher roles cannot help but also be political, a link underscoring education's relationship with cultural studies. In terms of progressive education, cultural studies has grown as a discourse that has included its institutional-ization in graduate schools of education, particularly from the 1990s through today. While a foundational context of its development has been its location in class-conscious social critique and intervention outside of the confines of formal education, cultural studies has expanded globally in terms of university programs, conferences, and scholarly publishing.

Characteristics of Cultural Studies

Culture is neither static nor stationary, but constantly in process, creating multiplicity, and approaches to its examination are not limited to any one part of the social spectrum. Unlike other disciplines or subjects, cultural studies has no single object area, theory, or methodological paradigm to neatly or cleanly define it. Cultural studies is inherently variable, differing in locations, moments, projects, and areas of inquiry. Reflecting its flexibility, in theory it does not endorse individuals or canons. Cultural studies has been taken up in various times and places, in locations where commitments were enacted to create social transformation and justice, address local and regional conditions and concerns, and co-construct knowledge in community engagement through popular approaches for purposeful political resistance. Cultural studies emerged from interdisciplinary activist projects within progressive adult education, where commitments to literacy and working-class issues and concerns were major emphases, and where academic and community research collaborations developed. Cultural studies resists generic definition, as it is an array of many different theories, circumstances, and representations; it is renowned for being arduously difficult to define, and this in turn becomes one of its most defining elements. Along with popular, grassroots performative cultural acts that formed as resistant political expression, cultural studies emerged from several traditional, established, academic disciplines (sociology, media studies, English, and philosophy, among others), while at the same time having an underlying ambivalent, at times altogether contentious, relationship with disciplinarity, which is why it is referred to at various moments as multidiscipli-nary, interdisciplinary, antidisciplinary, and postdisciplinary. Within cultural studies' theoretical discourses, there are convergences and divergences, and positions are never completely concrete, final, or resolved. Cultural studies allows concerns and expressions of experience on both personal and collective levels to be taken seriously as important indicators, interpretations, and negotiations of human existence. Because it deals generally with subjective human experience, cultural studies tends to favor qualitative research methodologies and, in particular, ethnography and textual analyses as primary methods of documenting the life and practices of ordinary society and culture. It has a commitment to the importance of recognizing popular culture as integral to the relationship of schooling and society, and links the creative and scholarly cultural production of the academy and community. Continually experimenting with applications of new approaches to existing social conditions, it has been related as a successor to critical pedagogy and multicultural education. It recognizes the importance and validity of nontraditional teaching experiences, and can offer resistance to formal school instruction when

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applied as a tool for oppressive social reproduction and cultural transmission. Ultimately, cultural studies may best be spoken of not in a definitive way, but more in terms of characteristics. Handel Wright offers an indicative, transient list of broad characteristics which underpin much of the work designated as cultural studies: (a) informed by and creative of theory yet praxis driven (no practice without theory, no theory without practice); (b) addresses issues of power, is concerned with social justice, examines and critically reflects on social and national identity/identification; (c) takes the popular seriously (mass-mediated or popular culture, low culture); (d) deals with issues of social difference and diversity; (e) is interdisciplinary and flexible (subject to radical and far-reaching change); and (f) is specific and local in its projects and never creates or endorses canons. Wright notes that these characteristics need to be treated as subject to negotiation, revision, even rejection, for cultural studies is always a contested terrain. Examples of cultural studies scholarship that address low culture or popular culture are studies that look at media presentations of performers such as Madonna, in terms of gender analysis, or sports stars such as Tiger Woods, in terms of racial analysis. Cultural studies has helped to argue for the value of sports stories, such as Lance Armstrong's story of recovery from cancer and his continued success as a professional bicycle rider, that can serve as rich examples of narrative stories that can teach students about ethics. Cultural studies makes the case that not only classic literature (high culture) but also sports stories can serve as examples of narrative arguments for teaching ethics.

Misconceptions About Cultural Studies

There are numerous misconceptions about cultural studies that one finds when working in a cultural studies of education program and when reading student applications to the program, as well as when potential faculty apply for job openings in the program. Sharing these misconceptions may help to further clarify just what cultural studies is, in contrast.

Not a Study of Cultures

Some international students and scholars may think of cultural studies as a study of cultures. There is a tendency for them to assume that individuals from a country other than the United States or United Kingdom, particularly if they have studied in one of these Western countries, can consider themselves experts in cultural studies. It is clear from their applications and letters and e-mail that they are not aware there is a group of scholars known as cultural studies scholars, or that cultural studies worries about certain kinds of problems and seeks to address those problems in particular ways. Just to be positioned as an outsider to the United States or United Kingdom does not qualify one as a cultural studies scholar, and it is possible to be a cultural studies scholar from the U.S. or UK, for example, and never have traveled or lived in other countries. Today, many people travel, and a good number live for extended periods of time in countries other than where they were born; everyone has the opportunity to meet international people. Still, all of this exposure to diverse cultures does not make a person necessarily or automatically a cultural studies scholar. Some examples of recent research work might help to illustrate a cultural studies approach to the study of cultures. So Young Kang, a doctoral student from Korea, wrote a dissertation that compared White feminist care theory, Black feminist care theory, and Korean care theory as she proceeded to develop her own care theory as a contribution to the conversation on caring. Her philosophical analysis involved descriptions of the various theories and critiques of them from the varying perspectives, so that it became clear that an eastern perspective is missing from care theory. In this dissertation, power issues were exposed such as positions of marginality for Korean perspectives of caring that are influenced by

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Confucian ideals. The decontextuahzed, ahistorical nature of White feminist care theory was troubled and the race/ethnicity discussion of care theory was enlarged beyond the boundaries of Black feminism to include an Asian perspective. Another graduate student, Zaha Alsuwailan from Kuwait, recently wrote a dissertation that examined the history of girls' education in Kuwait prior to and since the introduction of Western ideals through the discovery and development of the oil industry. Her analysis includes a comparison of Kuwaiti tribal, Islamic, and Western values and their varying influences on the national educational policy for girls' education, as well as the various people's responses to these policies. She examines the issue of girls being educated in terms of history, sociology, and anthropology and brings a cultural studies critique to the analysis in terms of gender issues as well as colonization issues. The work focuses on power issues in terms of the marginalization of women in the culture, but not necessarily in the Koran, and the hegemonic forces that create a situation where the women in Kuwait resist enrolling their daughters in schools and resist earning an education for themselves. What is taught in the all-girls' schools in terms of a genderized curriculum is also analyzed.

Not International Education

Other people apply to cultural studies of education programs who think that cultural studies of education means this is an international education program or a comparative education program. However, both international education and comparative education are fields of study that have a distinctive history of scholarship associated with them. That scholarship does not necessarily address power issues and take a social justice focus, as cultural studies work is committed to doing. One can find scholars with an international focus in most fields of study today, not just in education. For example, at the University of Tennessee, Brian Barber in Child and Family Studies looks at the problem of children growing up in violent conditions, such as in war zones. Barber's work takes him to various countries, such as Ireland, Bosnia, and Palestine, and it has an international focus, but that does not mean he is a cultural studies scholar. In the Public Health program, Arjumand Siddiqi, an epidemiologist, looks at health care access issues at an international level. Siddiqi studies national health policies and compares, for example, national spending on health care across a spectrum of differing types of governments and economic systems. This is international work and it involves comparisons of differing cultures, but that does not make it cultural studies research. A cultural studies approach to international studies would entail a need to address the power issues involved, with a focus on social justice issues. In Siddiqi's case, it might involve looking at classical liberal hegemony, which can be viewed as causing people to vote against national health care plans in the United States, for example, even though it would benefit them directly to have such a plan, because the United States's ideology emphasizes the value of choices and the importance of market competition in order to keep prices down and keep quality of health care up. In Barber's work on how war zones impact children growing up in them, a cultural studies scholar would need to address power issues: for example, looking at war in terms of the objectifying, marginalizing, other-ing process that goes on that allows us to think of the children as them, others, those Iraqis, distant and separate from the United States and its children. A cultural studies focus could provide a framework to address the experiences of children living in war zones in terms of race, class, and gender, as well as degrees of impact depending on varying social status.

Not Multicultural Education

Cultural studies may be erroneously thought of as multicultural education. Multicultural education began its development in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States with a distinct focus on power issues, in particular racism. However, many believe it has lost its critical edge as it has been mainstreamed into higher education and K-12 grade education. From the perspective of cultural studies scholars, multicultural

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education has evolved into a melting pot kind of approach to educational issues that seeks to embrace the valuing and appreciation of the experiences of all individuals, retaining its contextualizing of individual and collective identities but with less of an interventionist political focus. At one time, it had a sharper political focus that looked at issues of forced assimilation to the White majority culture and the loss of one's unique cultural identity. A cultural studies approach would examine and critically reflect on national identity/identification and the harm the majority culture imposes on various minorities, and antiracist educational approaches have developed that seek to maintain a political focus on social justice issues. Thus one finds that an antiracist approach to education is representative of cultural studies, but a multicultural approach is not necessarily representative.

Cultural Studies and Education: Always in Process

As a social project, cultural studies emphasizes the many cultural phenomena that comprise society, including moments of contention and intervention. In education, it is central to an oppositional, socially interventionist project that attempts the disruption of domination and oppression in schools and society. Even though cultural studies began with an educational focus, through adult education programs such as the Danish folk schools and Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, and extramural programs such as the Kamiriithu Community and Cultural Centre in Limuru, Kenya, over time, education has become marginalized as a topic for cultural studies, while popular culture focuses have continued to develop.

Early Focus
Adult education spaces were initially the only spaces that allowed for a broader and deeper social and cultural critique. However, as other spaces have developed, including cultural studies entering the academy with the establishment of CCCS in the 1960s and gaining legitimacy within higher education, a focus on educational issues has lessened. The world of school buildings and classrooms does not seem to be able to compete with a consumer-driven, product-oriented market, reinforced throughout media and society. There are, of course, exceptions. Henry Giroux and Handel Wright serve as good examples of scholars who bring cultural studies to bear on educational issues, but both of them have written about the marginalization of educational topics within cultural studies, and both have noted how cultural studies has moved away from its roots. Early on, cultural studies scholars such as Paul Willis worried about how schools treated working class lads and offered a deep analysis of schools in terms of their class distinctions. Paolo Freire was concerned about how schools create passive students who are so used to being banked, with knowledge deposited in their brains by their lecturing teachers, that they don't learn how to solve their own real problems or how to resist the forced passivity of the banking method. Myles Horton and the rest of the staff at Highlander Folk School strove to create adult centers where people could unlearn the passivity of school learning and begin to see themselves as social activists and leaders for change in a world that is unjust. Adults came to Highlander to learn how to organize and found themselves positioned as teachers teaching each other what they knew and helping each other solve their problems, with the staff at Highlander serving as facilitators and resources to aid in their organizing efforts. Cultural studies brings to education a focus on social justice issues. It attends to forms of discrimination such as racism, classism, and sexism and how these impact children in schools, and the teachers who teach them. It is concerned with the marginalization of immigrant students, new to a country, and whether their cultural expressions are engaged and their learning styles and needs are addressed in relevant ways. Cultural studies strives to connect educational theory to educational practice as it looks at how power is used in ways that are generative as well as harmful. Cultural studies pays attention to the formal curriculum in schools (what is present or not in terms of

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content), as well as the informal and hidden curricula (activities and structures of clubs and extracurricular activities, as well as daily ritual practices such as dismissal for lunch or recess, or the lack of recess or playgrounds in lower income school areas). Cultural studies examines educational policies and how they impact diverse student populations in diverse ways (for example, what are the effects of federally mandated educational policies such as No Child Left Behind and the push for standardized national testing on children and their teachers in poorer school districts?). Cultural studies considers the commodification of education as a consumer product and attends to marketing issues such as the sponsoring of Coke machines in school hallways and television sets in classrooms, donated by Channel One in exchange for the requirement that children watch Channel One programs while in school. (Channel One is a twelve-minute current-events television program, containing two minutes of commercials, shown in participating public schools who receive free video equipment in exchange. It is often given as a primary example of the corporatiza-tion of public schools.) Cultural studies takes up the creative democratization of access to knowledge and technology, such as free and open source software and the free culture movement.

A Research Example
In terms of research approaches, cultural studies of education starts with a social problem and then tries to consider what discipline areas and methodologies are available to help solve this problem. It is possible to find numerous discipline contributions and a variety of research methodologies employed to try to address research problems from a cultural studies perspective. For example, one of the authors of this entry, Barbara Thayer-Bacon, recently completed a study of five collective cultures in an effort to help her develop a relational, pluralistic democratic theory that moves beyond liberal democracy, with its assumptions of individualism, rationalism, and universalism, all of which have been critiqued by cultural studies scholars. She also sought to consider how such a theory translates into our public school settings. As a cultural studies scholar, it was vital that her theory writing be informed by practice in order to keep her theory grounded in the historical, local, contingent, everyday world. If she did not turn to the everyday world of schooling practice in various cultures, she risked writing a theory that assumes/imposes a universal, abstract perspective as if it were everyone's reality. A theory that is separated from everyday practice will be unable to actually address anyone's particular reality. Consequently, when she began working on this project, prior to trying to write any philosophical political theory that moves us beyond liberal democracy, she sought to immerse herself in particular school cultures and communities, relying on a phenomenological methodology. She realized that she was raised in an American culture that embraces classical liberal values of individualism, universalism, and rationalism. What triggered Thayer-Bacon's concerns with the impact of classical liberal democratic theory on U.S. public schools was the realization that the students who seem to be struggling the most in U.S. schools, the ones with the highest dropout rates and the lowest proficiency exam scores, are also students whose cultural backgrounds have a more collective focus that believes the family is the heart of the community, not the individual, and that it takes a village to raise a child. These students with the highest dropout rates include Native American, Mexican American, and African American students. Collective, communitarian values of cooperation, sharing, and fraternity, based on a belief in the interconnectedness of self to others, including nature, are in direct contrast to the individualistic values that shaped America's government as well as its schools. Thayer-Bacon suspected that if she studied Native American, Mexican, and African cultures in depth, she would gain a greater appreciation of the values and beliefs that support a collective sociopolitical focus and a greater understanding of how these values and beliefs function in contrast to individualistic ones. In order to help her address her own cultural limitations and better understand tough questions and issues a

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relational, pluralistic political theory must face in our pubic schools, Thayer-Bacon designed a study that required her to spend time in U.S. schools where the majority of the students historically have been disenfranchised from the United States's democracy. She spent time in communities where students from these three cultures are succeeding in American schools, as well as traveled to the origin countries of these three cultures to see how their collective focuses translate into the school curriculum and instruction there. Notice that this research project is focused on social justice issues (concern for the high dropout rate of students from collective cultures) and how these students are disadvantaged within American schools (the norms of the schools being based on Western European individualistic values). Thayer-Bacon is worried about social difference and cultural diversity. Her study is praxis driven, for it seeks to connect democratic theory to the daily practice of what goes on in public schools. The study is also interdisciplinary, as it involves philosophical theory and educational research, and its research methods use qualitative research techniques through observations, interviews, collection of materials handed out to parents, and field notes, as well as a narrative style of philosophical argumentation, through its phenomenological approach of direct experience and its use of the field notes gathered at the schools as narrative stories to illustrate the philosophical ideas. The researcher went into the field not knowing what she would find and was forced to be flexible and adaptive. Going to specific schools and staying in the homes of local members of the community, made her observations local and specific to particular people in their local settings. All of these qualities are what make this study a good example of cultural studies applied to education.

Other Research Approaches

As with the issues presented in Thayer-Bacon's study, the research and social justice work of cultural studies scholars/activists reflects this range in subject matter and application. Qualitative research applications of cultural studies and education offer a wide range of research possibilities. For example, an ethnographic educational research project conducted by Rosemarie Mincey examined the perceptions of educational experience of twenty adults in Guatemala who were participating in a formal social development program that employed an application of popular education pedagogy most associated with educator Paulo Freire. In this qualitative study, principal data collection methods were in-depth interviews and participant observations, with twenty interviews with ten male and ten female program participants providing the principal data that were analyzed for the study (participants ranged in age from sixteen to sixty-two, all with little or no prior formal schooling). Observations of classes and the interactions of the participants, both inside and outside of the classroom, were documented. Findings indicated that, with the exception of several participants who were attending formal schools, all of the participants had their formal educational pursuits interrupted or ended due to several prohibitive factors: large families, the need to help contribute to their families' subsistence, and economic difficulties. Almost all participants indicated a desire to have acquired more formal education, in addition to feeling that better educational opportunities would be key in helping their children and future generations have a better life. Grassroots organization, community activism, and sharing what was learned in the popular education classes with their communities were identified by the participants as being particularly significant. This study is grounded in Mincey's praxis of working for educational equity as a means of social justice, born from her experiences with formal schooling inequities she experienced as a student from a working poor family in the Appalachian region of the United States. This study draws from a number disciplines; namely, it is sociological in its view of social structures, institutions, and class, and anthropological in its use of data collection methods (ethnography). Theoretically, the study was informed by Marxist influences in the discernment of the roles class and economics may play in the translation of social power and

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structural schooling inequalities. The analytic perspectives of multicul-turalism and feminist critical pedagogy were applied to examine the contextualizing experiences of the intersections of gender, race, class, and schooling, and explored formal education and literacy as components of participatory democracy. The design and issues of this study deeply locate it within cultural studies and education. The relationship between cultural studies and education has strengthened the reconceptualization of education's social and cultural forms of knowledge, analysis, production, theory, and practice, supporting a foundational engagement with transformative implications for humanity. In higher education, cultural studies' relationship with education has brought the arts and humanities together with education, not just social foundational discipline areas such as sociology, anthropology, history, and philosophy, but also media studies, popular culture, literature, and film, for example, in a way that breaks down discipline boundaries and facilitates an understanding of issues in their shifting, changing complexity. This multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, antidisci-plinary, postdisciplinary approach to research analysis insists on never losing sight of the political implications of educational practices and the impact education research has on the daily lives of local, particular, contingent human beings, students in classrooms, in daycare facilities, on playgrounds, in shopping malls, on the streets. Cultural studies asserts that classrooms are not neutral places, textbooks are not neutral descriptions of the world, tests and grades are not neutral forms of assessing what students know, and policies such as mandatory attendance and zero tolerance have differing impacts on the lives of children and their families, for they are not neutral either. Where there are power issues, there are social justice issues, and cultural studies helps education address these issues through its contributions of critical assessment and creative possibilities, its offer of social engagement in resistance and transformation, with the hope of helping to change unjust conditions and improve the quality of people's lives as a result. Barbara J. Thayer-Bacon Rosemarie Mincey

Further Readings
Adams, F. , with M. Horton . (1975). Unearthing seeds of fire: The idea of Highlander Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair. Barber, B. K. (Ed.). (2008). Adolescents and war: How youth deal with political violence. New York: Oxford University Press. Casella, R. What are we doing when we are doing cultural studies in educationand why? Educational Theory, vol. 49 no. (1) 2009., pp. 10723. Dent, G. , ed. , & Wallace, M. (Eds.). (1992). Black popular culture. Seattle, WA: Bay Press. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed ( M. Bergman Ramos , ed. , Trans.). New York: Seabury Press. Giroux, H. Doing cultural studies: Youth and the challenge of pedagogy. Harvard Educational Review, vol. 64 no. (3) 2009., pp. 278308. Grossberg, L. , ed. , Nelson, C. , ed. , & Reichler, P. (Eds.). (1992). Cultural studies. New York: Routledge. Horton, M. , & Freire, P (1990). We make the road by walking ( B. Bell , ed. , J. Gaventa , ed. , & J. Peters , Eds.). Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Hytten, K. Cultural studies of education: Mapping the terrain. Educational Foundations, vol. 11 no. (A) 2009., pp. 3960. Kincheloe, J. , & Steinberg, S. (1997). Changing multiculturalism: New times, new curriculum. London: Open University Press. Lather, P. Research as praxis. Harvard Educational Review, vol. 56 no. (3) 2009., pp. 257277.

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Storey, J. (Ed.). (1996). What is cultural studies? A reader. London: Arnold. Wright, H. (1996). Notes. Presented in the 590 Cultural Studies Seminar, University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Wright, H. Dare we de-centre Birmingham? Troubling the origins and trajectories of cultural studies. European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 1 no. (1) 2009., pp. 3356.

Entry Citation:
Thayer-Bacon, Barbara J., and Rosemarie Mincey. "Cultural Studies." Encyclopedia of the Social and Cultural Foundations of Education. Ed. . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2008. 215-22. SAGE Reference Online. Web. 25 May. 2012.

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