Perpustakaan Digital ITB

This article presents an always risky cartography of the institutionalization of the field of Cultural Studies in Colombia in the 1990s. The article starts with a personal narration on how the author was introduced to this novel field by entering the first graduate programme in Cultural Studies in Colombia. Here, it locates the major tensions, stereotypes and loud silences characteristic of the social sciences in Colombia in which this institutionalization was infused and also threatened by the 1990s. But far from thinking that this recent event inaugurated an intellectual project thanks to the importation of theories and methodologies at this moment, the article describes previous intellectual traditions like the one influenced by the works of Orlando Fals Borda that had challenged positivist and neutral intellectual approaches to major problems in Colombia. Also, it high lights the influence that the work of Jesu ? s Mart? ?n Barbero had through his paramount work on media and mediation since the 1970s. Afterwards, the article succinctly contextualizes the institutionalization of Cultural Studies in the 1990s throughthe emergence of the Ministry of Culture and the multicultural mantra and awhole scholarly and state’s concern for cultural industries and culture policies. Finally, it describes the ‘perverse confluences’ between these new events and the arrival of neoliberal policies that had radically changed and challenged Colombian public and private universities. The article concludes with a contrasting image between a multiplication of interests, programmes, departments, conferences and publications in Cultural Studies in the larger universities in Colombia and their rampant transformation through the new scripts of audit cultures, indexation and the whole quantification of knowledge production.