David Walton 2008: Introducing Cultural Studies. Learning Through Practice‪.‬

David Walton 2008: Introducing Cultural Studies. Learning through Practice. London: Sage. 323pp. ISBN 978-1-4129-1895-4 (pbk) David Walton's handbook is arguably the most notable cultural studies book to have come out of Spain since Felicity Hand and Chantal Cornut-Gentille's groundbreaking Culture and Power (1995). Walton's own contribution to that collection, 'From Donald Duck to the McDonaldization of Society: "Doing" Cultural Studies--a Heuristic, Involving a little Haberdashery' (in addition to his 'Cultural Studies: An Annotated Bibliography of Useful Sources' in the same volume), already displayed some of the basic ingredients (also present in Walton's other publications: 1998, 2002) for the new handbook: a creative approach to criticism, inspired by the heuristic as a device to think with ideas rather than just about ideas; a sense of fun, irony, and even "parody with a pedagogical point" (61); a love of puns as a means to redefine concepts (what Walton calls "puncepts" [300]), and a self-conscious care to keep the reader or/and student motivated. Produced by Sage, recently the publishers of a few important cultural studies text-books (e.g. Hall 1997; Tudor 1999; Couldry 2000; McRobbie 2005), the book makes amends for the comparative neglect of cultural studies in Iberian English studies (about which Cornut-Gentille and Hand have often complained), while it also bras witness to the productivity of cultural studies panels in AEDEAN conferences and the Culture and Power Seminar, with its own conferences and publications, which Walton himself has often presided over.