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Understanding Culture offers an accessible and comprehensive overview of the field of cultural studies whilst also proposing a different way of `doing' cultural studies. It focuses on the ways in which cultural objects and practices serve as both a means of ordering people's lives and as markers of that ordering. The book reviews the state of the discipline of cultural studies and suggests a new theoretical and methodological orientation drawing on the work of: Foucault; scepticism, Wittgenstein; Harvey Sacks and John Law; uses insights from a variety of sources to examine the complex ways in which meanings are manufactured as lives are ordered in particular social settings: personal life, education, health, the city and law; and presents case studies that illustrate what the new cultural studies looks like, covering: colonialism, everyday life and identity, and technology.
List of contents
Surveying the Field of Cultural Studies
The Notion of Ordering as an Organizing Principle for Cultural Studies
Building a Method for Cultural Studies as a Study of Ordering
Ordering through the Culture of Government
A Colonial Example
Ordering through the Culture of Law and Regulation
Ordering through the Culture of Everyday Life
Ordering through Routinization
Technique, Technology and Self
Conclusion
Reshaping Cultural Studies
About the author
Born in London, Gavin Kendall was educated at Cambridge, Manchester and London Universities, and before moving to QUT, lectured for six years at Lancaster University. His books include The Sociology of Cosmopolitanism; State, Democracy and Globalization; Understanding Culture; and Using Foucault′s Methods."I try to relate my teaching to my research, inasmuch as I try to always discuss my thinking on the key questions that have stayed with me through all my years as an undergraduate, a postgraduate, and an academic – questions of power and government, of the role of law, and of the limits of sovereignty."
Summary
Offers an overview of the field of cultural studies whilst proposing a different way of 'doing' cultural studies. This book focuses on the ways in which cultural objects and practices serve as both a means of ordering people's lives and as markers of that ordering. It suggests a different theoretical and methodological orientation.
