Culture as a site of struggle : the contribution of cultural studies

Cultural studies today is an increasingly global, heterogeneous and decentred imagined community of academics and critics who are all, somehow, interested in the intersections of culture, society and politics. An intellectual movement which was first instutionalised with the establishment of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK (aka 'the Birmingham Centre') in the mid-1960's, cultural studies has since spread across continents and taken its place in academic programmes in many universities around the world, including Asia. As a consequence, however, it is becoming increasingly unclear exactly what the shared intellectual core of cultural studies is, and what its conceptual boundaries are - in terms of field of study and theoretical and analytical approaches brought to bear on that field.