Some clues for conducting cultural analyses in Cultural Studies in Education (CSE)

Abstract

This article proposes methodological clues for conducting cultural analyses within the field of Cultural Studies in Education (CSE). Rather than presenting a rigid research protocol, it conceives cultural analysis as a situated, contingent, and engaged investigative practice, constructed through the interplay of the research problem, corpus, concepts, context, and writing. Drawing on the research experiences of the authors and on references from Cultural Studies and post-critical educational theorizing, the article develops four methodological clues: implication, context, and rigor in contingency; language, textuality, and the production of meaning; traces, assemblages, and cultural articulations; and everyday life, materialities, and the description of cultural forms. It argues that these clues contribute to understanding how practices, discourses, images, and cultural artifacts produce meanings and subjectivities, thereby expanding the methodological possibilities of educational research. Conducting cultural analysis, therefore, involves following clues, problematizing meanings, acknowledging the researcher's implication, attending to contexts and everyday life, and reading cultural artifacts as texts traversed by power relations.