Cultural Politics
CulturalPolitics.net is a site designed to offer resources for the analysis of the role of culture in shaping our political, economic, and social lives. Cultural politics understands culture -- popular culture/mass media, folk culture and the arts -- not as something added to other more substantive domains but as an arena where social, economic, and political values and meanings are created and contested.
The 5 subsites introduced below look at cultural politics in different arenas and from different angles, but all focus especially on the role culture plays in maintaining, deepening or lessening social inequalities.
Popular Culture
Looks at the way in which inequalities of race, class, gender, sexuality and global power are played out in television, film, music, and other forms of mass media.
Digital Cultures
Examines the social impact of the Internet, video games and related computer-based new media. New media interactions both reflect the surrounding culture, and provide unique new experiences that, for better and for worse, shape the wider world.
Social Movements and Culture
Looks at the role of culture as a force in social change movements, historically and in the present. The site highlights both social movement cultural texts like protest songs and murals, and the dynamics of movements as unique subcultures.
Environmental Justice Cultural Studies
Examines how the unequal environmental burdens placed on women, working people, and people of color in the US and around the globe, are shaped by mainstream culture and resisted by cultural texts from within the movement for Environmental Justice.
Interdisciplinary Cultural Theory
Surveys the history and current nature of interdisciplinary cultural theory as used in the such fields as American, ethnic, gender, queer, and postcolonial studies. Useful to anyone, newcomer or expert, interested in learning more about the development and present state of cultural theory - the key toolkit for studying cultural politics.