Henry Armand Giroux is an American-Canadian scholar and cultural critic. One of the founding theorists of critical pedagogy in the United States, he is best known for his pioneering work in public pedagogy, cultural studies, youth studies, higher education, media studies, and critical theory. In 2002 Routledge named Giroux as one of the top fifty educational thinkers of the modern period.
Arjun Appadurai is an Indian-American anthropologist recognized as a major theorist in globalization studies. In his anthropological work, he discusses the importance of the modernity of nation states and globalization. He is the former University of Chicago professor of anthropology and South Asian Languages and Civilizations, Humanities Dean of the University of Chicago, director of the city center and globalization at Yale University, and the Education and Human Development Studies professor at NYU Steinhardt School of Culture.
Materialist feminism highlights capitalism and patriarchy as a central aspect in understanding women's oppression. It focuses on the material, or physical, aspects that define oppression. Under materialist feminism, gender is seen as a social construct, and society forces gender roles, such as rearing children, onto women. Materialist feminism's ideal vision is a society in which women are treated socially and economically the same as men. The theory centers on social change rather than seeking transformation within the capitalist system.
The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) was a research centre at the University of Birmingham, England. It was founded in 1964 by Stuart Hall and Richard Hoggart, its first director. From 1964 to 2002, it played a critical role in developing the field of cultural studies.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim is an American writer of poetry, fiction, and criticism. Her first collection of poems, Crossing The Peninsula, published in 1980, won her the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, a first both for an Asian and for a woman. Among several other awards that she has received, her memoir, Among the White Moon Faces, received the 1997 American Book Award.
Declan Kiberd is an Irish writer and scholar with an interest in modern Irish literature, both in the English and Irish languages, which he often approaches through the lens of postcolonial theory. He is also interested in the academic study of children's literature. He serves on the advisory board of the International Review of Irish Culture and is a professor at the University of Notre Dame and at its campus in Dublin. In recent years and with publications such as After Ireland (2018), Kiberd has become a commentator on contemporary Irish social and political issues, particularly as such issues have been examined by Ireland's writers.
Paula Gunn Allen was a Native American poet, literary critic, activist, professor, and novelist. Of mixed-race European-American, Native American, and Arab-American descent, she identified with her mother's people, the Laguna Pueblo and childhood years. She drew from its oral traditions for her fiction poetry and also wrote numerous essays on its themes. She edited four collections of Native American traditional stories and contemporary works and wrote two biographies of Native American women.
Feminist anthropology is a four-field approach to anthropology that seeks to transform research findings, anthropological hiring practices, and the scholarly production of knowledge, using insights from feminist theory. Simultaneously, feminist anthropology challenges essentialist feminist theories developed in Europe and America. While feminists practiced cultural anthropology since its inception, it was not until the 1970s that feminist anthropology was formally recognized as a subdiscipline of anthropology. Since then, it has developed its own subsection of the American Anthropological Association – the Association for Feminist Anthropology – and its own publication, Feminist Anthropology. Their former journal Voices is now defunct.
Vytautas Kavolis was a Lithuanian sociologist, literary critic, and culture historian.
Arif Dirlik was a Turkish-American historian who published on historiography and political ideology in modern China, as well as issues in modernity, globalization, and post-colonial criticism. Dirlik received a BSc in Electrical Engineering at Robert College, Istanbul in 1964 and a PhD in History at the University of Rochester in 1973.
John Frow is an Australian academic who works in the areas of literary theory, narrative theory, intellectual property law, and cultural studies. He is currently a professor of English at the University of Sydney.
Andrea Lee Press is an American sociologist and media studies scholar. She is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Media Studies and Sociology, and Chair of the Media Studies Department, at the University of Virginia.
Ronaldo Munck is an Argentine sociologist who has worked on the political sociology and globalisation of Latin America and Ireland.
Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary field that examines the political dynamics of contemporary culture and its historical foundations. Cultural studies researchers generally investigate how cultural practices relate to wider systems of power associated with, or operating through, social phenomena. These include ideology, class structures, national formations, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and generation. Employing cultural analysis, cultural studies views cultures not as fixed, bounded, stable, and discrete entities, but rather as constantly interacting and changing sets of practices and processes. The field of cultural studies encompasses a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives and practices. Although distinct from the discipline of cultural anthropology and the interdisciplinary field of ethnic studies, cultural studies draws upon and has contributed to each of these fields.
Dr. D. R. Nagaraj was an Indian cultural critic, political commentator and an expert on medieval and modern Kannada poetry and Dalit movement who wrote in Kannada and English languages. He won Sahitya Akademi Award for his work Sahitya Kathana. He started out as a Marxist critic but renounced the Marxist framework that he had used in the book Amruta mattu Garuda as too reductionist and became a much more eclectic and complex thinker. He is among the few Indian thinkers to shed new light on Dalit and Bahujan politics. He regarded the Gandhi-Ambedkar debate on the issue of caste system and untouchability as the most important contemporary debate whose outcome would determine the fate of India in the 21st century.
Marianne Hirsch is the William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Professor in the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality.
Li Xiaojiang is a Chinese scholar of women's studies who was arguably the first to bring Women's Studies to importance in post-Mao China. One of China's leading feminist thinkers and writers, she has been a professor at several colleges, as well as director of gender studies at Dalian University. As a young student, she started off at the Henan University studying western literature, until an encounter showed her how lacking women's studies scholarship was and caused her to change her major from western literature to women's studies. In 1983 her work Xiawa de Tansuo was the catalyst for a surge of women's studies. She founded the first Women’s Studies Research Centre and later a museum dedicated to women’s cultural anthropology.
Freida High Wasikhongo Tesfagiorgis is a painter, art historian, and visual culturalist who focuses on African American, modern and contemporary African art, African Diaspora, and modern European Art and Primitivism. She is Professor Emerita, Departments of African-American Studies, Gender & Women’s Studies, and Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2021 she was the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 31st Annual James A. Porter Colloquium on African American Art at Howard University.
Marxist cultural analysis is a form of cultural analysis and anti-capitalist cultural critique, which assumes the theory of cultural hegemony and from this specifically targets those aspects of culture which are profit driven and mass-produced under capitalism.
Carol Marie Lazzaro-Weis was an American scholar of Romance languages. She was a professor of French and Italian at Southern University from 1984 to 2003, and at the University of Missouri from 2003 to 2017. From 2009 to 2015, she was president of the American Association for Italian Studies.
