The Study of Cultural Turn in Modern Society

My paper intends that ‘Cultural turn’ is a dynamic process that has unfolded in theory, art, and politics since the 19th century. References to the “cultural turn” reflect a broad movement (which progresses differently across disciplines, countries, and traditions) that emphasizes the importance of arts and culture for education, moral growth, social criticism, and change. By the 1980s, these developments had led to an explosion of forms of ‘cultural studies’, ‘identity politics’ and ‘multiculturalism’ in response to changes in capitalist structures and the relationships between economic, cultural and political institutions. The cultural turn was a shift in emphasis in the 1980s and 1990s from institutional activities to the ways in which past events were experienced, shared, disseminated, and encoded into culture. Building on new research on labor, peasants, and, most importantly, women’s and gender studies in the 1960s and 1970s, a cultural turn turned to social symbols, such as language, to find new ways of understanding the past. The cultural shift focuses on new methodologies that revisit old data to reveal information about often underrepresented groups.