This course introduces students to the key concepts and interpretative methods of cultural studies. While keeping in mind that cultural studies is a discipline which does not allow an easy and clear categorization, the course will begin with a brief survey of the historical origin of the field and its key terms by studying a few foundational works before moving onto examples of interdisciplinary approaches and practices emerged onwards.

In investigating cultural studies and the value of reading the ‘culture’ from a cultural studies perspective, our focus will be the cultural discourse on adoption. Even before Hollywood celebrities recently crowded the mass media with their competitive race for a foreign baby from Third World countries, adoption has been circulated, consumed, and imagined through the generation of typified stories such as abandoned babies, war orphans, ‘waiting’ children, failed parentship of birth parents, infertile couples, and happily constructed adoptive families. Seeing the production of popular discourse on adoption in the contemporary U.S. context as a terrain of a cultural politics, our course texts will be drawn from short stories, memoirs, films, TV shows, newspapers, and websites of adoption agencies.

A selection of reading also may include the work of F. R. Leavis, Raymond Williams, Louis Althusser, Stuart Hall, E. Wayne Carp, Judith Modell, David Eng, Laura Briggs, Karen Dubinksky, Eleana Kim, and Jane Jeong Trenka.
These readings will be available through e-course reserves.