DEFINITION OF THE TERM: Being part of the contemporary social sciences and humanities, cultural studies is a discursive formation with a different scale of institutionalisation that focuses on the various functions of symbolic culture.

HISTORICAL ANALYSIS OF THE TERM: The origins of the term ‘cultural studies’ are usually associated with the establishment in 1964 of a research centre at the University of Birmingham called the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). This centre, directed by ­Richard Hoggart, gave rise to the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies (also called British cultural studies) and published such influential journals as Working Papers in Cultural Studies and Cultural Studies from Birmingham. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, cultural studies were introduced into the curricula of universities in many other countries. In Poland, this discipline developed in various forms, although mostly in the area of cultural knowledge.

DISCUSSION OF THE TERM: The range of issues addressed and research conceptualisations developed within cultural studies is extremely diverse. Well-known scholars in this discipline include Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, and Edward Palmer Thompson, who are together known as the founders of British cultural studies. The output of their successors, including Paul Willis, Dick Hebdige, Angela McRobbie, Iain Chambers, and Paul Gilroy, is also meaningful. On the other hand, numerous scientific accomplishments have also been achieved outside the ­British cultural studies community. Analysing the social divisions and lifestyle consequences of fast-growing industrial societies after 1945 posed new challenges for cultural scholars. Cultural scientists frequently argued against cultural reductionism; however, scholars’ focus of attention on the relationship between culture and power resulted in oversimplification because they often neglected the relationship between culture and man in their analyses. In a way, interest in the subjective attributes of the human person, and thus also in the different models of cultural studies, was eliminated.

SYSTEMATIC REFLECTION WITH CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS: This article abandons the reporting form of presenting cultural studies, which is prone to simply describing its diversity. Instead, an attempt has been made to revitalise considerations on the relationship between the person, culture, and cultural studies themselves. In this context, of particular interest is the sources of these relationships and the results of particular types of interaction.