ABSTRACT
This chapter presents practices from the interdisciplinary field of cultural studies. Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary field that investigates the ways culture constructs and shapes everyday social interactions. Cultural studies uses a triangulated or three-pronged approach to inquiry. The areas of inquiry and the kinds of questions asked resonate well with constructionist philosophy and narrative approaches. The polysemic nature of cultural texts are central to a cultural studies approach. Stuart Hall, a pioneer of cultural studies, contends that there are three positions from which people decode, or make meaning of, the encoded, or embedded, cultural texts. In particular, cultural studies methodologies help youth workers and youth examine how the consumption of pop culture relates to ethnicity, class, race, sexuality, and/or gender. Pop culture is all the things. This includes all the things produced by the culture industries: TV, film, technology and social media, fashion trends, comics, video games, music, professional and NCAA sports, cosplay, and books.
