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Corrine's Last Reading Post!

 Hi everyone! Looking forward to seeing you all tomorrow to talk through these readings. Something that struck me in these readings was how easily something like cultural studies (which is supposed to be provisional and non-universal, for the most part) becomes broken down into binaries that posit one position or the other rather than a more flexible understanding. For example, du Gay (and other scholars we've read) explores how the political economy and the cultural economy are set against one another, which is why Hall's call to understand the economic as cultural is so necessary, and Stratton and Ang explore how cultural studies itself became set up as largely national vs. the global, or maybe rather a larger emphasis was placed on the national. 

My question in all of this is: While we know it can be helpful to be able to abstract our scholarship to larger issues, can it ever be helpful to think in universal terms or binaries? These readings (and the tenets of cultural studies) seem to really push us to think beyond these more "simple" ways of thinking, and I absolutely am with it and try to replicate that in my own work, but I do wonder if writing these off completely is just setting up another binary? Is it always both/and with cultural studies rather than the traditional and/or? (I hope this all makes sense, I feel like I am rambling a bit and having a hard time putting these thoughts into words!) 

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