ABSTRACT
These short excerpts from a recent polemical exchange about Cultural Studies demonstrate that work denned under this heading is still highly controversial. The quotations cited above reflect on the tensions between the perspectives of Cultural Studies and of Political Economy, with each side tending to depict the other as an inadequate framework for the analysis of culture and the media. Other debates around Cultural Studies are aligned differently, as we shall see below. Cultural Studies is currently the subject of contending claims which are often also of significance for media studies more generally. For even if the definitive attributes of Cultural Studies as a distinctive field refuse to be fixed, culture as an analytic theme and as a perspective on the media (and social life generally) continues to grow in prominence. And while there are a number of differing approaches to culture within the human sciences, today it requires a significant feat of evasion to take a cultural perspective on the media without in some way coming to terms with the literature of Cultural Studies and its existence as an established, and rapidly growing, academic project. Cultural Studies is notoriously heterogeneous. Its diversity makes any attempt to offer a synoptic account of it precarious. However, this caveat does not alter my argument in this chapter, which is that there is an intellectual vitality, a set of concerns, and an array of theoretical and empirical orientations within Cultural Studies from which media research greatly benefits.
