The Impact of Cultural Studies Moving Forward

Morley’s article aims to redefine cultural studies as an interdisciplinary forum and reifies the question of whether cultural studies will survive as a discipline. Borrowing from sociology and anthropology, cultural studies is discussed here as a subject of study, an uncertainty that may pose a threat to other, more traditional subjects of study. In reading this article I developed the following questions: What is the moral purpose of cultural studies, and will its objective be to create change? Will the study of cultural studies be about the narcissistic development and questioning of the validity of the discipline itself, as noted by Morley? In contrast to Morley’s article, I found Sefton-Green’s article to be particularly optimistic, providing answers to the actual societal impact that cultural studies has had through the example of the English education system and how cultural studies has brought attention to the education of minority/disadvantaged youths, emphasizing ways in which a cultural studies approach could uniquely “reach excluded youth in ways that traditional schooling does not,” leading to both economic and social changes (61).

In his article, Sefton-Green likens media studies to that of cultural studies in its ambiguous shift of the educational system and the ways in which it is regulated by the state, albeit through the state’s imposed limitations on the field. As Sefton-Green writes, “CS is a period of avant-garde development which is in turn recuperated or incorporated by the State. Or in the case of the regulatory model of Media Studies, an attempt by the State to mediate and control the production of docile citizens” (60). While Sefton-Green, like Morley, understands the limitations on cultural studies and its crisis as a discipline, what attracted me most to this article, was his main argument: that cultural studies needs to continue to be reinforced and find niches in which it can grow so that its crisis can be combatted. In relation to its effects on education he writes,  “that as minority and ‘other’ kinds of cultural experiences become valid objects of study in their own write as consequence of interrogation by CS theory, so much an approach gives rise to a kind of micro-political intervention….Here the effect of CS theory has been to offer educators context, a language and a purpose for education by making the objects of CS study, its subjects as it were” (61). I found that Sefton-Green’s article was not only the  accessible for me in regards to our readings for this week, but it allowed me to develop a framework for understanding how I could ground my cultural object’s exploration of “secrets and secrecy” through a cultural studies approach, and the ways in which a cultural studies approach could best bring attention to the issues I have chosen to explore in relation to personal identity, private and public realms and social media.