Perpustakaan Digital ITB

In this article, I locate the institutionalization of Cultural Studies in the Departamento de Lenguajes y Estudios Socioculturales in the Universidad de Los Andes, Bogota ?, Colombia. The conditions of possibility of the said institutionalization are ascribed to something like a crisis, itself engendered by the encroachment of neoliberal ideology on the University’s sense of mission and understanding of itself. Essentially, a more or less traditional department of modern languages was abolished and a potentially innovative but epistemologi- cally fuzzy department devoted to teaching language and the linguistic turn, each informed by the other, was cobbled together in its place. This required the retooling of the department’s professors, but also the hiring of new professors who influenced the department’s intellectual direction and contributed to the sharpening of the project. The article then describes how the incipient programme was the site of a struggle for epistemological clarity, which is here represented in the form of an argument about the necessity of thinking both Foucault and Marx together in the project of critical Cultural Studies.