Reflective blog on Workshop of Cultural Study by Kalyani Vallath ma'am

What do you think about Cultural Study?

 

 To put it in a simple words, it is about  culture, we surrounded by and how the surrounding affect us in creating our dynamic personality as well as in instilling a sense of belongings. Cultural shall be remain different from person to person or from place to place as it is acquired by different people in different manners.

Moving further to it, in a literary language it can be defined as…

Cultural Study is an interdisciplinary study that investigates the ways in which ‘culture’ creates and transforms individual experiences, everyday life, social relations and power as well. Indeed, it deals with all the humanities such as Psychology, Philosophy, Sociology and so on. In fact it is an umbrella term and it has a very deeper significant.

As a consequence, cultural study also became a part of NTA,NET examination. In order to enlighten us with the field of cultural study and how it works, on the 26^th December, 2019 a very fruitful workshop was organized by Dilip Barad sir at English Department,MKB and was delivered by Dr.Kalyani Vallath ma’am. She is a very passionate teacher and entrepreneur from Trivendrum,Kerala. 

Ma’am elicited a very insightful lecture on how the cultural studies at its beginnig stage developed in Britain as a reaction against liberal humanism and orthodox Marxism. She also made us familiar with several key concepts of cultural studies such as Michel Foucault’s concept of power and knowledge, Mass culture, popular culture, subculture studies and so on. In a way this helped me a lot in crystal clearing my basic knowledge about cultural study as well as I was also influenced by a very short but effective sentence uttered by ma'am,

'To describe is more important from what you have studied'

The following are theories that covered in the one day workshop by Dr.Kalyani Vallath ma'am.

#Frankfurt school

                     This is the group of philosophers and social scientists associated with the institute of Social Research at the Gotethe University,Frankfurt as well as they influenced New Left and 

#Cultural Studies.

#Hegelian Dialectical Method

                  New Left in Britain and,the student movement in Us:New Left in the US

#Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS)

#Cultural Materialism

#Criticism of Marxism

#Circuit of Culture; influence of mass media in connecting communication and capitalism

#Traumas Studies:  i) Psychological Trauma

                               ii) Cultural and Collective Trauma

#Globalization Studies

#Queer Studies

#Visual Cultural Studies

#Mass Culture

#Cyberfeminism and Cyborg Studies

#Popular Cultural Studies

                       Pioneers of Cultural Studies

Richard Hoggart	“Uses of Literarcy: Aspects of Working Class Life (1957) Talks about changes that occurred in culture due to massification.
E.P.Thompson	“The Making of the English Working Class” Talks about development of the working class in 18th and 19th Century
Raymond Williams	"The Long Revolution" It talks about emerging of freedom and change due to democratic values in society "Communication" "Country and City" "Keywords" "Marxism"
Staurt Hall	Theory of encoding and decoding message
Michel Foucault	Archeology  and genealogy Concept of Power and Knowledge
Pierre Bourdieu	Concepts of Field and Habitus "Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste" "Black Atlantic"
Edward Soja	"Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Andeles and Other Real and Imagined Places"

We know that to study cultural study in one day, isn’t a easy task at all but how can we refuse when we have a passionate teacher like Kalyani ma’am. We inspired a lot by ma’am’s enthusiasm and enlighten our knowledge about basic theories of cultural Study under her guidance. I am grateful to Kalyani ma’am for coming a far way to here and providing us such an informative session and I am also thankful to Dilip Barad sir for arranging a session.