Cultural Studies

The contemporary theories we use view culture as dynamic rather than static. In the Cultural Studies programme from University of Canterbury we consider the following sorts of questions: how is culture produced, and who controls it?

How do we use and interpret culture? How might culture be preserved, destroyed, or changed? How does our sense of identity merge with our culture? How is culture changing and developing in the 21st century?

Unique to UC

• The Cultural Studies programme at University of Canterbury is the only one in Aotearoa New Zealand, and we draw on more than 15 participating programmes – most of the College of Arts.

• One of the central strengths of Cultural Studies is its interdisciplinarity – the way that it draws on the perspectives, methods, and theories of numerous fields of study. The idea is not to reduce culture to something simple and unified, but to appreciate its complexity.

Research

• You can construct a Cultural Studies degree that is quite generalised or relatively specialised (focusing on film and media; sexuality and gender;

• Places, spaces and technologies; bicultural studies; cultural identity and politics; environmentalism and human-animal studies, for example).