ABSTRACT
The tradition of theory and scholarship associated with cultural studies has much to offer the study of politics. It encourages us to see our subject in a much wider societal and cultural context than is usually the case and enables us to address important questions about the relationship between politics, culture, and individual experience. In common with other interpretive approaches to politics cultural studies urges us to see culture as constitutive of political situations. It also asks us to see such culture as inseparable from the clash of particular political identity and interest groups. From this perspective our challenge is not that of establishing how culture informs politics or how politics informs culture but that of making sense of the conditions under which (and the ways in which) culture becomes a vitally important location of individual and collective political action, struggle, and contest.
