Cultural Studies Methodology and Political Strategy

"With a newly translated passage from Gramsci, Carley has come to alert us that our understandings, especially of conjuncture, are themselves situated conjuncturally. With Metaconjuncture, he opens a new pathway for Cultural Studies to advance itself as an analytic for our times and times to come." 

—Jack Bratich, Rutgers University, USA

“Cultural Studies aims to overcome the fragmentation of the study of culture by highlighting culture as a living process.  Metaconjuncture pushes the conversation to politically interrogate theories, methodologies and conjunctures.  Abutting Stuart Hall and Gramsci, Carley’s work rethinks, realigns and re-analyzes Cultural Studies."

—Shirley R. Steinberg, Werklund Research Professor of Critical Youth Studies, The University of Calgary; author of Behind the Bricolage: Redefining Rigor and Complexity in Research (2021)

This book is an intervention into cultural studies' theoretical and methodological foundations. It addresses a crisis in conjunctural analysis: that there is no theorized method for conjunctural analysis as it pertains to recognizing a conjunctural shift or the emergence of an organic crisis. This crisis is connected to the belief that the definition of the conjuncture is ambiguous in Gramsci’s work, but using a broader range of primary, secondary, and also untranslated sources on the conjuncture, Carley demonstrates that Gramsci has decisively settled that ambiguity. Through a philological approach to Gramsci’s original texts, this book alters the debate around conjunctural analysis and offers means to reinterpret cultural studies and its relationship to its founding thinkers.

Robert F. Carley is Associate Professor of International Studies at Texas A&M University, College Station.