Cultural studies can we/ should we reinvent it?

This short article returns to an original sense of the term ‘cultural studies’, that is, a subject which needed to be invented to supplement a democratic deficit in established humanities and social science disciplines. It reviews reasons why something like cultural studies needs to be reinvented again today (converging crises in democratic systems and culture, deriving from new social and political ecologies, linked to technology), but also reasons why, right now, this is particularly difficult. Addressing this challenge requires a modesty as to what can be done, but also an urgency opening up a space where the threats to democracy’s future can honestly be faced in a cross-disciplinary dialogue.