Culture at the Crossroads

This collection explores the interfaces of culture, gender, and power from politico-religious, linguistic, legal and historiographic perspectives. More importantly, the contributions gathered here examine culture’s manifestations in different socio-economic, political, theoretical, and discursive contexts. Being aware of “the crisis in humanities,” researchers, scholars and experts seek to relocate culture and cultural studies within academia and analyze the epistemological relationship between culture and education, while also trying to eschew and refashion the stale conventional methodologies of approaching culture as an academic subject. Is it possible to go beyond the “crisis in humanities” by valorizing culture in social and human sciences, on the one hand, and natural and exact sciences, on the other, especially when we take into consideration the escalation of fundamentalist, extremist and xenophobic tendencies all over the globe? How can we approach the issues of ethics and teaching humanities and sciences? This book moves beyond conventional conceptions of culture that associate it with knowledge and enlightenment to suggest a holistic view of culture that enacts the dialectics of power, nationality, class, gender, and ethnicity in an ever-shifting transnational context.Engaging readers in a lively intellectual and cultural debate, this volume is essential reading for undergraduate and graduate students, teachers, critics, and scholars from various academic fields and disciplines, including historiography, cultural studies, anthropology, political science, literature and critical theory.