Thinking Activity : Cultural studies , Media Power and truly Educated

Hello Friends!

In our syllabus we have learned  about culture  and cultural studies. This blog is my academic task on thanking activity on cultural and cultural unit 1. This task given by Dr Dilip barad head of English department. So let's we look. 

Q : 1 What is Culture ?

A culture is a way of life of a group of people the behaviors, beliefs, values and symbols and they accept, generally without thinking about them, and that are passed along by communication and imitation from one generation to the text. Culture is symbolic communication.

Culture means it was something coming from past well thought and making perfect. Today culture is about present of today. Everyday thought, voice lives is important. 

Q : 2 What is Cultural Studies? 

Cultural studies, interdisciplinary field concerned with the role of social institutions in the shaping of cultural. 

As Patrick Brantliger has pointed out, cultural studies is not " a tightly coherent, unified movement with a fixed agenda, but a loosely coherent group of tendencies, issues, and questions. Arising from the social turmoil of the 1960s,  culture studies is composed of elements of Marxism, post-structuralism and postmodernism, feminism, gender studies, anthropology, sociology, race and ethnic studies, film theory, urban studies, public policy, popular culture studies, and postcolonial studies : those fields that concentrate on social and cultural forces that either create community or cause division and alienation. 

Q : 3 Four goals of cultural studies. 

Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary field of academic studies that draws from other disciplines like history, anthropology and political science. The goal of cultural studies is to analyze and understand how cultures are constructed and how they evolve over time.

• First,  cultural studies transcend the confines of a particular discipline such as literary criticism or history. 
• Second,  cultural studies is politically engaged. 
• Third,  cultural studies denies the separation of "high" and "low" or elite and popular culture. 
• Fourth,  cultural studies analyzes not only the cultural work,  but also the means of production. 

Q : 4 How is understanding of 'power' at the center of cultural s^tudies  ?

Cultural studies read power with critical insight, it makes the students, scholar politically incorrect. This also makes it difficult for CS to survive in the academia wheres' are in majority.

• Let us understand 'power '

This video help us to understand power.

The power of capitalism :

• Where power comes from? 
• How it's exercised? 
• How one can read or write power? 

Six source of civic power :

1. Physical force 
2. Wealth 
3. State Action 
4. Social norms 
5. Ideas 
6. Numbers 

How power exercised? 

Three law of power  :

1. Power is never static 
2. Power is like water 
3. Power is compounds 

What we can do?  Read power and write about power. 

👉Michael Foucault 's knowledge and power. 

Foucault was interested in the way power structures depend upon structures of knowledge (arts, science, medicine, demographics) and how, once they acquire knowledge, create subjects to be controlled.

Foucault's methodology seeks to understand how some sections of the population have been classified as criminals or insane. That is, he is interested in understanding the processes of classification that helped exclude some people from society. Foucault argues that certain authorities who possess power in society produce knowledge about those who lack power. Such a system of knowledge is called 'discourse'. The arts, religion, science and the law are discourses that 'produce' particular subjects.

Discourse and knowledge produce certain categories of 'subjects' (people) who are then treated in particular ways: the immoral are 'remedied' by priests, criminals are jailed by the law, the sick are treated by doctors, and the insane shut away in asylums by psychiatrists. What happens, therefore, is that the production of knowledge about those who lack power leads to very effective practices of power on the part of the authorities. Knowledge and classification systems such as medicine, the law or religion are therefore modes of social control.

👉Why Media Studies is important in our digital culture?

Media, Culture and Everyday Life offers an exciting opportunity to engage with current debates in media and communication studies about the impact of contemporary media on everyday life. The programme addresses the changes, challenges and unprecedented possibilities that digital media bring to everyday life in the twenty-first century, while emphasizing the importance of studying media in a wider historical context.

By exploring the ways in which media and everyday life are intertwined, the programme addresses broader questions of modernity and social change, ranging from experiences of everyday space, time and mobility, to the impacts of media on self and identity, how we access, ‘store’ or remember the past, and the broader environmental, infrastructural and social impacts of digital technologies.

Informed by cutting-edge research in the field of cultural, media and communication studies, the programme is widely interdisciplinary in scope, drawing on perspectives from disciplines such as cultural studies, anthropology, philosophy, cultural geography, visual culture, urban studies, games and memory studies.

The programme is built around three core modules which focus on:

• The study of contemporary media together with past forms of media, in order to a) understand the historical origins or predecessors of today’s media, and b) to understand how media change is produced, experienced and negotiated

• Reflection on the role of contemporary media technologies in social and cultural life, drawn from students’ own everyday experience of media.

• Research methods and approaches used in the study of media, culture and everyday life.

You will develop skills that directly enhance employability, including applying critical thinking skills, giving presentations, plus data management, problem-solving, team-working and research design and implementation.

You'll be able to pursue your own specific research/study interest in media, culture and everyday life via a 12,000-15,000 word dissertation and by choosing from a range of masters-level module options offered by the Department and wider School.

You will develop skills that directly enhance employability, including applying critical reviewing skills, giving presentations, plus data management, problem-solving, team-working and research design and implementation.

Thank you .....