Jaafar Aksikas is a Moroccan-born American academic, activist, media personality and cultural critic. He is currently Professor of Cultural Studies and Media Studies at Columbia College Chicago, United States, where he teaches at the intersection of politics, media and culture. He is also President and CEO of the Institute for Global Media, Democracy and Culture. He was also President of the Cultural Studies Association (2014-2016). Jaafar Aksikas was educated both in Morocco and the USA and holds a Ph.D in Cultural Studies from George Mason University, USA and an MA in the Humanities from the prestigious Royal Al Akhawayn University, Morocco. His teaching, research and activism are at the intersection of media, politics, law and culture. His books and edited volumes include:
Aksikas, Jaafar (2019). Cultural Studies in the Classroom and Beyond: Critical Pedagogies and Classroom Strategies. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN978-3-030-25393-6.
Aksikas, Jaafar (2016). Culture, Law, and Legitimacy in the Era of Neoliberal Capitalism. London: Routledge. ISBN978-1-138-64284-3.
Aksikas, Jaafar (2016). Cultural Studies and the 'Juridical Turn': Culture, Law, and Legitimacy in the Era of Neoliberal Capitalism. London: Routledge. ISBN978-1-138-64284-3.
Aksikas, Jaafar (2014). Cultural Studies and/of the Law. Abingdon: Routledge. ISBN978-1-138-80416-6.
Aksikas, Jaafar (2009). Arab Modernities: Islamism, Nationalism, and Liberalism in the Post-Colonial Arab World. New York: Peter Lang. ISBN978-1-4331-0534-0.
Aksikas, Jaafar (2002). The Sirah of Antar: an Islamic Interpretation of Some Aspects of Arab and Islamic History. Ifrane: Al Akhawayn University Press. ISBN978-9954-413-00-5.
Critical Purchase in Neoliberal Times, a special journal issue on engaged and community-based forms of cultural studies scholarship for the journal Lateral.
He is also the Editor of the Cultural Studies and Marxism book series for the international publisher Rowman & Littlefield International (2015–present).
His work has appeared in several scholarly journals, including Cultural Studies, Reviews in Cultural Theory, Lateral, Mediterranean Politics, and Cultuur en Migratie. Aksikas has taught and published widely in the fields of Cultural Studies, media/culture industry studies, critical legal studies, American Studies, and Middle Eastern Studies. He also serves on the editorial boards of Cultural Studies and Lateral journals. He has received numerous awards, including the George Mason University VISION Award (2003) and the Marquis Who is Who in America award (2010). He also holds membership at the Phi Beta Delta Honor Society for International Scholars.
He is also the Founding General Editor of Cultural Landscapes, the Founding Coordinator of the Cultural Studies Colloquium Series at Columbia College Chicago, and he serves as a member of the Illinois Network on Islam and Muslim Societies. He also serves as consultant for lawyers and the media on Middle Eastern and North African societies, cultures and politics.
The Frankfurt School is a school of sociology and critical philosophy associated with the Institute for Social Research, founded at Goethe University Frankfurt in 1923. Active in the Weimar Republic during the European interwar period, the Frankfurt School initially comprised intellectuals, academics, and political dissidents dissatisfied with the contemporary socio-economic systems of the 1930s. The Frankfurt theorists proposed that social theory was inadequate for explaining the turbulent political factionalism and reactionary politics occurring in 20th-century liberal capitalist societies, such as Nazism. Critical of both capitalism and of Marxism–Leninism as philosophically inflexible systems of social organization, the School's critical theory research indicated alternative paths to realizing the social development of a society and a nation.
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.
Arabization or Arabisation is a sociological process of cultural change in which a non-Arab society becomes Arab, meaning it either directly adopts or becomes strongly influenced by the Arabic language, culture, literature, art, music, and ethnic identity as well as other socio-cultural factors. It is a specific form of cultural assimilation that often includes a language shift. The term applies not only to cultures, but also to individuals, as they acclimate to Arab culture and become "Arabized". Arabization took place after the Muslim conquest of the Middle East and North Africa, as well as during the more recent Arab nationalist policies toward non-Arab minorities in modern Arab states, such as Algeria, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Bahrain and Sudan.
Berberism is a Berber political-cultural movement of ethnic nationalism, started mainly in Kabylia (Algeria) and in Morocco later spreading to the rest of the Berber communities in the Maghreb region of North Africa. The Berberist movement in Algeria and Morocco is in opposition to cultural Arabization, the pan-Arabist political ideology and Islamism.
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.
Marxism is a method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand class relations and social conflict and a dialectical perspective to view social transformation. It originates from the works of 19th-century German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. As Marxism has developed over time into various branches and schools of thought, no single, definitive Marxist theory exists. Marxism has had a profound impact in shaping the modern world, with various left-wing and far-left political movements taking inspiration from it in varying local contexts.
William Eugene Connolly is an American political theorist known for his work on democracy, pluralism, capitalism and climate change. He is the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. His 1974 work The Terms of Political Discourse won the 1999 Benjamin Lippincott Award.
Douglas Kellner is an American academic who works at the intersection of "third-generation" critical theory in the tradition of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, or Frankfurt School, and in cultural studies in the tradition of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, or the "Birmingham School". He has argued that these two conflicting philosophies are in fact compatible. He is currently the George Kneller Chair in the Philosophy of Education in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
David Stanley Hill is a British Marxist politician, academic and educational activist. He is Research Professor (Emeritus) in Education at Anglia Ruskin University, Chelmsford, England, and also Visiting Professor at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, and in the Social Policy Research Centre at Middlesex University, London. He was an elected Labour Party councillor for East Sussex County Council and Brighton Borough Council in the 1970s and 1980s and has been a candidate in thirteen local, national and European elections since 1972, most recently as Parliamentary Candidate in Hove and Portslade in the 2015 general election for the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC). In Britain he is currently a member of the Labour Left Alliance and Anti-Capitalist Resistance, the British section of and the Fourth International.
Social democracy is a political, social, and economic philosophy within socialism that supports political and economic democracy. As a policy regime, it is described by academics as advocating economic and social interventions to promote social justice within the framework of a liberal-democratic polity and a capitalist-oriented mixed economy.
Alfredo Saad-Filho is a Brazilian Marxian economist.
Cultural studies, also called the cultural sciences, is an interdisciplinary field or scientific branch that explores the 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.
Cultural homogenization is an aspect of cultural globalization, listed as one of its main characteristics, and refers to the reduction in cultural diversity through the popularization and diffusion of a wide array of cultural symbols—not only physical objects but customs, ideas and values. David E. O'Connor defines it as "the process by which local cultures are transformed or absorbed by a dominant outside culture". Cultural homogenization has been called "perhaps the most widely discussed hallmark of global culture". In theory, homogenization could work in the breakdown of cultural barriers and the global adoption of a single culture.
Neo-Marxism is a Marxist school of thought originating from 20th-century approaches to amend or extend Marxism and Marxist theory, typically by incorporating elements from other intellectual traditions such as critical theory, psychoanalysis, or existentialism. Neo-Marxism comes under the broader framework of the New Left. In a sociological sense, neo-Marxism adds Max Weber's broader understanding of social inequality, such as status and power, to Marxist philosophy.
Post-Marxism is a perspective in critical social theory which radically reinterprets Marxism, countering its association with economism, historical determinism, anti-humanism, and class reductionism, whilst remaining committed to the construction of socialism. Most notably, post-Marxists are anti-essentialist, rejecting the primacy of class struggle, and instead focus on building radical democracy. Post-Marxism can be considered a synthesis of post-structuralist frameworks and neo-Marxist analysis, in response to the decline of the New Left after the protests of 1968.
A critical theory is any approach to humanities and social philosophy that focuses on society and culture to attempt to reveal, critique, and challenge power structures. With roots in sociology and literary criticism, it argues that social problems stem more from social structures and cultural assumptions rather than from individuals. Some hold it to be an ideology, others argue that ideology is the principal obstacle to human liberation. Critical theory finds applications in various fields of study, including psychoanalysis, sociology, history, communication theory, philosophy and feminist theory.
Al Muharrir was an Arabic-language daily newspaper published in Morocco. It was in circulation between December 1974 and June 1981.
Christian Fuchs is an Austrian social scientist. From 2013 until 2022 he was Professor of Social Media and Professor of Media, Communication & Society at the University of Westminster, where he also was the Director of the Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI). Since 2022, he is Professor of Media Systems and Media Organisation at Paderborn University in Germany. He also known for being the editor of the open access journal tripleC: Communications, Capitalism & Critique. The journal's website offers a wide range of critical studies within the debate of capitalism and communication. This academic open access journal publishes new articles, special issues, calls for papers, reviews, reflections, information on conferences and events, and other journal specific information. Fuchs is also the co-founder of the ICTs and Society-network which is a worldwide interdisciplinary network of researchers who study how society and digital media interact. He is the editor of the Open Access Book Series "Critical, Digital and Social Media Studies" published by the open access university publishing house University of Westminster Press that he helped establish in 2015.
The term "Cultural Marxism" refers to a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory which misrepresents the Frankfurt School as being responsible for modern progressive movements, identity politics, and political correctness. The conspiracy theory posits that there is an ongoing and intentional academic and intellectual effort to subvert Western society via a planned culture war that undermines the Christian values of traditionalist conservatism and seeks to replace them with culturally liberal values.
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.
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