Understanding Culture: Cultural Studies, Order, Ordering

Understanding Culture offers an accessible and comprehensive overview of the field of cultural studies whilst also proposing a different way of ‘doing’ cultural studies. It focuses on the ways in which cultural objects and practices serve as both a means of ordering people’s lives and as markers of that ordering. The book reviews the state of the discipline of cultural studies and suggests a new theoretical and methodological orientation drawing on the work of: Foucault; scepticism, Wittgenstein; Harvey Sacks and John Law; uses insights from a variety of sources to examine the complex ways in which meanings are manufactured as lives are ordered in particular social settings: personal life, education, health, the city and law; and presents case studies that illustrate what the new cultural studies looks like, covering: colonialism, everyday life and identity, and technology.