Understanding Culture: Cultural Studies, Order, Ordering [ABRIDGED] (Theory, Culture & Society)

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.

Understanding Culture:

· 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.

· Presents case studies that illustrate what the new cultural studies looks like, covering: colonialism; everyday life and identity; and technology.

Understanding Culture will be invaluable reading for students and scholars of cultural studies and sociology.

 

Born in London, Gavin Kendall was educated at Cambridge, Manchester and London Universities, and before moving to QUT, lectured for six years at Lancaster University. His books include The Sociology of Cosmopolitanism; State, Democracy and Globalization; Understanding Culture; and Using Foucault′s Methods.

"I try to relate my teaching to my research, inasmuch as I try to always discuss my thinking on the key questions that have stayed with me through all my years as an undergraduate, a postgraduate, and an academic – questions of power and government, of the role of law, and of the limits of sovereignty."