We live in an increasingly übercapitalist society. It’s übercapitalist in that a specific version of neoliberalism, characterised by low pay, zero-hours and fixed-term contracts, is growing ever more aggressive; and that the disruptive technology firm Uber offers one of the most high-profile examples of this intensified form of deregulated cap…[Read more]

We live in an increasingly übercapitalist society. It’s übercapitalist in that a specific version of neoliberalism, characterised by low pay, zero-hours and fixed-term contracts, is growing ever more aggressive; and that the disruptive technology firm Uber offers one of the most high-profile examples of this intensified form of deregulated cap…[Read more]

‘On the Obsolescence of Bourgeois Theory in the Anthropocene’ is an attempt to think theory beyond the stereotypes of what it is considered to be. This includes preconceived notions of what it is to be a
theorist, and to create, publish and disseminate critical theory.

Many thinkers, for example, are currently attempting to replace the tyr…[Read more]

The relationship between culture and policy has long been a major topic for media and cultural studies. With
this issue, we hope to broaden the meaning of cultural policy, from policies that are explicitly regulating
something we call the “cultural” (including media or traditional rituals or symbols) to include the practice of
policy-making and…[Read more]

This essay explains that cultural studies is, by design, too diverse and heterogeneous a project to be reduced to a single methodology. It goes on to offer a brief definition of project, and to describe four of its major characteristics: (1) its leftist politics, (2) its radical contextualism, (3) its radical interdisciplinarity, and (4) its…[Read more]

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
co…[Read more]

This article introduces a special issue on the topic of Cultural Studies and Critical Literacies. The collection of articles is drawn from the central theme of the inaugural Summer Institute of the Association for Cultural Studies: to explore the implications of studying literacy by combining perspectives from cultural studies and (critical)…[Read more]

Rap superstar Eminem has become the new poster child for everything that’s dangerous about contemporary popular culture. He’s crude, juvenile, and foul-mouthed. His lyrics are violent, misogynistic, and homophobic. He’s corrupting our youth, poisoning our culture, and laughing about it all the way to the bank. Or so the story goes. This essay…[Read more]

With the public discourse around filesharing veering towards punitive extremes, our aim in this essay it to reframe the issue in two ways. First, we argue that the filesharing debates are “too economic,” insofar as they reduce a multi-faceted phenomenon to a single issue: financial loss resulting from the theft of intellectual property. Lost in…[Read more]