The Value(s) of Cultural Studies

Abstract

In this chapter I seek to reflect upon the social, institutional and theoretical values that inform cultural studies to demonstrate how this field of enquiry can inform popular dance research. First I provide an historical overview of the social and institutional conditions under which cultural studies arose. This historicization of the discipline reveals shifting attitudes towards the popular and I draw on this material in Chapter 3 to illustrate differing approaches to defining popular dance. Second, I consider how cultural studies scholarship conceives the notion of culture. This not only illuminates its interest in the popular idiom, but also the way in which cultural studies understands popular culture as a site of contestation shapes how I then conceive and analyse popular dance practice. The assertion in cultural studies that popular culture constitutes a terrain of competing power relations allows me to demonstrate in Part II how the popular dancing body negotiates values of difference, inequality and contradiction. In view of this, my third area of exploration centres on the key intellectual strategies that cultural studies research brings to its subject of enquiry. I consider the main theoretical and methodological approaches employed in cultural studies and reflect upon how I can employ these paradigms in popular dance research. The literature that I call upon to investigate these three areas emerged from the 1990s, which marked a period of reflection and re-evaluation in cultural studies as scholars working in the field set out to define and critique this broad subject domain (Ferguson and Golding, 1997; Storey, 1996; Turner, 1990).