Cultural Reader

What is the technosphere? Think of the technosphere as Earth’s newest “sphere,” alongside the lithosphere and biosphere. It’s the vast, cou...

1. Materialism Jameson’s work begins from Marx’s materialist premise — that social and cultural phenomena must be understood in relation t...

Hans-Georg Gadamer, one of the great philosophers of the 20th century, devoted his life to exploring how human beings understand one another...

"Complicit Masculinity", a term coined by gender sociologist R.W. Connell (in " Masculinities " , designates a nuanced l...

What is Mimicry? In the context of postcolonialism , mimicry refers to the way colonized people adopt the customs, techniques, and language...

In the annals of economic history, societies have moved from agricultural economies, where land is the primary resource, to industrial econo...

What happens to someone who belongs to a discriminated gender, an oppressed minority, a low socioeconomic class, and a persecuted race? The ...

Politeness theory, developed by sociolinguists Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson, explains how people use language to maintain social bala...

The Sincerity Condition is a fundamental aspect of communication in linguistics. The sincerity condition's definition requires speakers ...

Definition: Heidegger's concept of Mitsein, usualy translated as "being-with," refers to the fundamental fact of human existe...

Definition: Heidegger's concept of Dasein, which is often translated as "being-there", refers to the unique way that human bei...

Absurdism is a philosophical position that argues that life is essentially meaningless, that it is impossible to rationally explain why life...

In philosophical phenomenology, the verb "to constitute" or the word "constitution" is central in describing how  things...

In Edmund Husserl's phenomenology  Intentionality  ( Intentionalität)   means that consciousness is characterized by the fact that it is...

Strategic essentialism is a key term in postcolonial theory, introduced by Indian thinker and literary critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in ...

Governmentality is a concept developed by the French philosopher Michel Foucault between approximately 1979 and 1984, in the second and thir...

The study of language was one of the first areas in which the concept of binary oppositions was applied. This concept was central to the th...

In critical theory and postcolonial studies, the term "Subaltern" characterizes the state of a person whose voice and actions are ...