Aleida Assmann

What keeps cultural studies in motion and, more difficult still, what hold them together? They are continuously animated through so-called ‚turns‘ that in regular intervals open up new perspectives and transform the leading issues and concepts. Such regular innovations are not only due to internal readjustments in terms of methodological changes but are also connected to cultural and social changes. In this way, cultural studies have become an integral part of the transformation of the world as we see and construct it. They are not only a lense through which we observe the transformation of the world, but also a tool with which it is produced. In this active engagement and entanglement with the real world, cultural studies have lost a sense of their professional boundaries. They are constantly extending their realm of research, incorporating avidly new territory. To the extent that cultural studies have embraced the project of cultural self-thematization and self-transformation, they have become as fluid and volatile as culture itself. mehr