What does Cultural Ctudies do?

Cultural studies looks into or attemts to analyze culture ina matter that is similar to a scientist dissecting an organism to have a better understanding about the organism itself and how it evolves and works. Therefore, cultural studies possess an all-incorporative attitude. It allows numerous other disciplines to be taken into consideration- such as psychology, political science, media theory, communication studies, linguistics, discourse analysis etc in order to understand the ever changing culture. Due to that aspect cultural studies does not have any fixed definiton. In its attempt to understand culture, cultural studies deals with culture as a part of everyday life and because of that it is an evolving field that changes and develops with culture itself. Cultural studies aims to examine its subject matter in terms of cultural practices and their relation to power and how these two aspects relate to each other in a vise versa motion. . Research and teaching in the field explores the relations between culture understood as human expressive and symbolic activities, and cultures understood as distinctive ways of life. Cultural life is not only concerned with symbolic communication, it is also the domain in which we set collective tasks for ourselves and begin to grapple with them as changing communities. For example, in the movies Third Person Singular Number and Better Luck Tomorrow we see a common trait of blatant individualism and cynical indifference. The movies are from two different countries having almost polar oppposite culture, if spoken bluntly. But yet the attitude and lifestyle of the characters of these two movies shows that nothing matters apart from their own lives, they are not that worried about the society or life itself even. In this case Cultural studies would focus on the criterion of similarity between these two movies while taking into consideration all the reasons there are that suggests that movies should be different. (313 words)