Drawing on Stuart Hall’s influential “Notes on deconstructing ‘the
popular’” [Hall, S. (1981). In R. Samuel (Eds.), People’s history and
socialist theory (pp. 227–240). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.],
this essay maps out some of the major shifts in cultural studies’
relationship to popular culture over the past several decades. It
concludes with a call for cultural studies to find ways to work
from the terrain of the popular, rather than merely studying that
terrain, or trying to “translate” its scholarly analyses for popular
audiences. This is a necessary path to fulfilling its mission as a
political project.