Pablo Castagno’s latest book, ¿Qué Hacen los Estudios Culturales?, offers both an intervention and a provocation within the field of Cultural Studies. Drawing on Latin American and global traditions, Castagno challenges the notion that Cultural Studies is a fragmented field. Instead, he argues for the existence of a shared project grounded in critical thinking, methodology as a political tool, and the pursuit of transformative alternatives.
In this interview, Castagno—an alumnus of George Mason University’s PhD Program in Cultural Studies—discusses the book’s core thesis, its dialogue with Latin American genealogies, and its grounding in contemporary struggles. Structured in six parts, the book engages themes such as Marxism, conjunctural analysis, methodology, and the arenas of culture. The author’s reflections traverse the politics of knowledge, the extractive logics of global capitalism, and the challenges of doing Cultural Studies in and from the Global South.
To begin, could you give a general overview of the book ¿Qué Hacen los Estudios Culturales? What would you say is its central thesis?
I contend an idea that is predominant both in the North and Latin America, although it has not been the prevailing tendency at Mason. This view is that Cultural Studies constitutes a field without a common definition, object, methodology, and political project. I don’t pretend that there is just one legitimate path, but my thesis is that, despite the variety of positions within the field of Cultural Studies, and within Latin American Cultural Studies, we can outline a common project. For example, some authors employ the lens of social totality in their research, others use the category of context, conjuncture, field of power, or cultural circuits. These perspectives modulate different investigations and have distinct political implications, but they are all part of a trend to avoid falling into disciplinary enclosures. Cultural Studies/Estudios Culturales is just one possible name for this project. In my reading, it researches political-cultural situations from concrete points of entry, which condense the social determinations of a given epoch and place. More importantly, it looks for alternatives to the present. The political foundation of a cultural studies project comes from this dialectical approach: it represents the social formation beyond its appearances.
The question posed in the title is compelling—it’s something often asked from outside the field, but also a recurring self-reflective question from within. Could you share your thoughts on how and why you chose this title?
First, the impetus for this book arose from a postgraduate seminar I taught in the Program of Cultural Studies at Universidad Nacional de Santiago del Estero in Argentina. By then, this was one of the two programs in the country under the specific name of Cultural Studies. We had students from History, Anthropology, Sociology, Cultural Management and so on, and a recurring comment from them was: “We read Bourdieu, Gramsci, Fanon, Adorno, García Canclini, Nelly Rirchard, Derrida... this whole repertory from the past and the present, but what does Cultural Studies actually do?” Second, there is the influence of the Latin American conjuncture. When I imagined the book, the first wave of the pink tide, the national-popular governments of the 2000s, had already receded. Neoliberal-conservatives were in power in Argentina, Jair Bolsonaro had been elected in Brazil, a coup d’ état removed Evo Morales in Bolivia, and Chavismo had regressed to something quite antithetical to its dream of a 21st-century socialism. In the best scenarios, there were impasses unbearable for the popular classes. Indeed, in the aftermath of the pandemic, and despite progressive trends in Chile, Colombia, and Brazil, everything worsened in Argentina. My position is that it is not effective to respond to recent right-wing turns by simply calling for a return to neo-Keynesian economic policies, as national-popular political forces nostalgically promote. We must provide radically democratic alternatives towards the future. I think Cultural Studies can do this job. The emphasis on practice in the title connotes this idea. For example, the extractive economies I discuss (whether we talk about debt, fracking, or digital platforms) are not supplementary to capital accumulation, but integral to it. We need to transcend capitalism and neocolonialism.
One of the key contributions of the book seems to be your effort to incorporate Latin American genealogies into the field of Cultural Studies. Could you elaborate on that intervention and explain its significance to the field?
The title of the book, read from the North, alludes also to this point you address. On one hand, there are key accounts of Cultural Studies, but they often do not consider Latin American works. On the other hand, there are notable Latin American Cultural Studies genealogies in English by Latin American scholars, but they do not discuss cultural studies trajectories beyond the region. My challenge was to write about the international scene including Latin America. It is neither a book on ‘British’ and ‘North American’ Cultural Studies, nor on estudios culturales latinoamericanos. In this context, the discussion of what the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano called the “coloniality of power” is fundamental. It is fashionable now in the North to talk about aspects of coloniality. This is fine. But we should not overlook that what truly matters is a structural critique of the postmodern colonial-capitalist system. My reading of Enrique Dussel, Roberto Schwarz, Maristella Svampa, and Fernando Coronil, among others, was also important in this sense. Viceversa, in Latin America, a discussion on what John Beverley called neo-Arielist, nationalist-elitist positions within the intellectual field, which cannot break with coloniality, is crucial. In other words, my effort to “incorporate” Latin American views is based on a double critique. As Walter D. Mignolo points out in his book Local Histories/Global Designs (2012), “to the travelers and to the homeowners: to travelers and homeowners in hegemonic positions from the perspective of travelers and homeowners in subaltern positions.” (p.174).
In what ways did your time in the PhD program at George Mason University contribute to the development of the ideas in the book?
My work is deeply indebted to the PhD Program at GMU. I frequently remember a moment that perhaps resonates in other students’ experiences as well. During the first meeting I had with Professor Roger Lancaster, after listening to him and catching a glimpse of the library in his office, I thought: “well… finally… I found the place I always wanted to find”. And this is not just because the program’s strength in the politics of knowledge, or because its discussions of French Sociology, the Frankfurt School, Marxism, and post-Marxism notably influenced my conception of culture, my approach to methodology as a political practice, or my reading of political economy, to mention some lines of the book. My debt is more profound. It has to do with the ability to liberate the senses of intellectual practice. As Antonio Gramsci argued, when you are taken by the ideas of your class opponents, you get paralyzed. Not just theoretically, physically. Originally trained in Political Science and International Relations, I had managed to escape economic and foreign policy milieus before going to GMU with a Fulbright fellowship, but I was unable to play the game of overturning institutional domains, so to speak, through analysis. What I gained at GMU was the imprint of material reality, tout court. I am grateful to my professors for this.
Finally, are there any new projects you're currently working on that you'd like to share?
I have been writing about/against the Right in Argentina. My research on Milei’s government, “Beyond the Echoes of the Right”, appeared in Media, Populism and Hate Speech (Brill, 2025), and another article is coming soon in Tabula Rasa, a cultural studies journal from Colombia. I analyze how La Libertad Avanza’s [Freedom Advances] violence and psycho-political regressions go hand in hand with its ultra-neoliberal class project and its right-wing populist strategy, marking the darkest moment of Argentina since the military junta of the 1970s – a project of total decomposition, if we can still speak there is something such an independent state. It is a class war. So this has taken me to think again about the past as well. Past and present telescope into one another. At Mason, more than twenty years ago, I drafted an essay from my experience of the dictatorship as a child, but then I lost my moment to write this memory. I hope now to get it back, so as to be strong enough to write about this present.
More from Castagno
- Castagno, Pablo Andrés. "Into the factory: Teaching Cultural Studies as a Critique of Global Capitalism." Cultural Studies in the Classroom and Beyond: Critical Pedagogies and Classroom Strategies, ed. by J. Aksikas, S. Johnson Andrews, and D. Hedrick (Springer International Publishing, 2019): 243-257.
- Castagno, Pablo Andrés, with Ana Wortman and Matías Romani. Los usos de la creatividad: horizontes en estudios culturales (TeseoPress, 2023) — co-edited volume that examines IDB and World Bank policies on the “creative economy,” among other topics.
- Castagno, Pablo Andrés. "Beyond the Echoes of the Right." Media, Populism and Hate Speech, ed. by S. Çoban and Y. G. İnceoğlu (Brill, 2025): 115-135. — analysis of La Libertad Avanza’s ultra-neoliberal project and violence in Argentina.
You can purchase the book here.
August 08, 2025