Cultural Studies papers

Pofolia’s corpus holds 94 papers from Cultural Studies (2012–2026), each with a short summary. Below, the 20 most-cited, then the most recently added.

At a glance

• Most cited: A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (2017, 18,351 citations).
• The 20 papers listed have 58,036 citations between them.
• 2 of the 3 with a known journal quartile appeared in a Q1 journal.
• 2 have a free full text (open access).
• Most frequent journals: Bloomsbury Academic eBooks, Choice Reviews Online, Feminist Studies.
• Published between 2012 and 2026.

Most cited

Ranked by citation count. Because citations accumulate over time, this list naturally leans towards work published a few years ago; for where the field is now, see “recently added”. How to read the signals

• A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance

  Macat Library eBooks · 2017 · FWCI 1049.98 · 18,351 citations

  Leon Festinger's 1957 theory proposed that illogical behaviors stem from a drive to avoid internal contradiction (cognitive dissonance), shifting psychology from behaviorism to mental processes.

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• Black Skin, White Masks

  2023 · FWCI 65.13 · 6,308 citations

  The abstract posits that Black individuals navigate a dual existence, behaving differently depending on whether they are with fellow Black people or white people, particularly in colonial contexts.

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• Art as Experience (1934)

  SUNY Press eBooks · 2026 · FWCI 726.49 · 5,227 citations

  John Dewey's seminal work, "Art as Experience," is an internationally recognized exploration of the formal structure and characteristic effects across all art forms, including architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature.

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• Domination and the Arts of Resistance

  Yale University Press eBooks · 2017 · FWCI 292.39 · 4,350 citations

  This book introduces the concepts of "public" and "hidden" transcripts to explain how subordinate groups and the powerful engage in deceptive interactions, with the powerless using secret discourse to critique power and the powerful asserting mastery.

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• Civilization and Its Discontents

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2018 · FWCI 1610.14 · 4,274 citations

  Freud's seminal 1929 work, "Civilization and Its Discontents," offers a psychoanalytic perspective on culture, synthesizing his theories on the mind.

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• Borderlands/La Frontera

  Feminist Studies · 2025 · Q2 · FWCI 1643.26 · 2,029 citations

  Gloria Anzaldúa's "La Conciencia de la mestiza" articulates the "mestiza consciousness," a new identity forged from the contradictions and ambiguities of cultural transfer.

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• Procedures for Identifying Infants as Disorganized/Disoriented During the Ainsworth Strange Situation

  2026 · FWCI 242.16 · 2,002 citations

  A method is presented to identify "disorganized and/or disoriented" infant behaviors within the Ainsworth Strange Situation, with potential applicability to other mildly stressful observational settings.

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• A Natural History of Human Thinking

  Harvard University Press eBooks · 2014 · FWCI 260.46 · 1,849 citations

  Human cognitive uniqueness stems from cooperative social interaction, not just individual problem-solving, according to comparative studies of humans and great apes.

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• Transitional objects and transitional phenomena 1 —a study of the first not-me possession 2

  2018 · FWCI 1337.93 · 1,723 citations

  This work introduces the concepts of "transitional object" and "transitional phenomena" to describe the developmental stage between oral needs and mature relationships, appearing around 4-12 months.

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• Cultural identity and diaspora

  2014 · FWCI 2778.69 · 1,376 citations

  A new Caribbean cinema is emerging, distinct from but related to existing Afro-Caribbean and Asian diasporic visual representations.

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• The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2018 · FWCI 244.10 · 1,342 citations

  This handbook offers a comprehensive overview of 4E cognition, covering debates on the nature of cognition, perception-action relations, and recent trends like Bayesian inference and predictive coding.

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• The secret of our success: how culture is driving human evolution, domesticating our species, and making us smarter

  Choice Reviews Online · 2016 · 1,240 citations

  This book argues that culture, not just intelligence, is the primary driver of human evolution, leading to our species' domestication and enhanced cognitive abilities.

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• Autoethnography as Method

  2016 · FWCI 157.25 · 1,138 citations

  This book presents autoethnography as a research method, guiding readers through self-reflection and narrative writing to connect personal experience with broader cultural understanding.

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• Social Media: A Critical Introduction

  2014 · FWCI 252.19 · 1,050 citations

  This book offers a critical framework for analyzing social media, moving beyond surface-level observations to expose underlying structures and power dynamics.

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• Memes in Digital Culture

  The MIT Press eBooks · 2013 · FWCI 72.17 · 1,041 citations

  This book offers a novel definition of Internet memes as digital content units created with awareness of each other, circulated, imitated, and transformed online by many users.

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• A Theoretical Framework for the Critical Posthumanities

  Theory Culture & Society · 2018 · Q1 · SJR 1.00 · FWCI 528.95 · 995 citations · Open access

  This paper proposes a new theoretical framework for the critical posthumanities, grounded in a neo-Spinozist monistic ontology that emphasizes radical immanence and the primacy of intelligent matter.

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• ‘Nothing Comes Without Its World’: Thinking with Care

  The Sociological Review · 2012 · Q1 · SJR 1.00 · FWCI 226.13 · 993 citations

  This essay argues that 'thinking with care' is essential for collective thinking in interdependent worlds, proposing it as a vital requisite grounded in a relational ontology.

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• Dear Science and Other Stories

  2020 · FWCI 259.05 · 971 citations

  Katherine McKittrick's work positions black storytelling and stories as rebellious, anticolonial methodologies that interrupt dominant knowledge systems.

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  Bloomsbury Academic eBooks · 2015 · FWCI 863.46 · 908 citations

  This volume offers a comparative historical analysis of populism across Europe, the United States, and Latin America, exploring its conceptual utility, historical development, and ideological transformations.

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• Diachronic Word Embeddings Reveal Statistical Laws of Semantic Change

  2016 · 869 citations · Open access

  Researchers developed a robust method to quantify semantic change in words over time using word embeddings and historical corpora, revealing two statistical laws governing how word meanings evolve.

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Recently added

• Flooding the others: The vanished minority riverscapes of Ada Kaleh and Sorbian Lusatia

  Journal of European Studies · 2026 · Q2

  Dam construction and subsequent resettlement disproportionately impact the cultural heritage and distinct socio-cultural identities of minoritised ethnolinguistic groups, as seen in the submergence of Ada Kaleh and Sorbian villages in Lusatia.

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• Cultivating national solidarity: An action research study among christian generation Z students in Indonesia

  Social Sciences & Humanities Open · 2026 · Q1

  A theological intervention based on perichoresis improved national solidarity in 126 Indonesian Christian Gen Z students, though gains varied by school (one showing significant improvement from N-Gain 0.34 to 0.97).

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• Intentional transmission of knowledge optimises cumulative cultural evolution

  Scientific Reports · 2026 · Q1

  Adults strategically select information to transmit to learners, promoting the cultural accumulation of beneficial discoveries, unlike young children who lack this strategic preference until age 9-10.

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• Federated Learning Applications for Cross Cultural Communication Analysis Through Privacy Preserving Integration of Linguistic and Paralinguistic Feature Extraction

  International Journal of Computational Intelligence Systems · 2026 · Q1

  A novel Culture-Aware Federated Learning (CAFL) model integrates linguistic and paralinguistic features across 27 cultural groups, achieving 93.7% accuracy in communication pattern recognition while reducing privacy risk by 87.4% compared to centralized methods.

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• Pioneer fantasy media: inclusive representation and imperial logic in contemporary television

  New Review of Film and Television Studies · 2026 · Q2

  Contemporary TV series like Yellowstone's prequel '1883' employ 'pioneer fantasy media' to reframe U.S. imperial history by focusing on diverse characters' relationships and romantic/thrilling narratives, thereby downplaying darker aspects of expansion.

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• Negotiating Legibility in Participatory Philosophical Inquiry

  Educational Theory · 2026 · Q2

  A participatory philosophical inquiry group with disabled activists developed new methods to challenge able-minded norms in communication and reasoning, demonstrating new paths in epistemological and ethical territory.

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• The Many Faces of the Parasite

  Ethnos · 2026 · Q1

  This special issue introduces the 'parasite' concept to analyze cohabitation, exploring strategies of shelter/expulsion and affects of gratitude/resentment.

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• Trafficked and Rescued: Travails of the Chinese “Slave Girl” in Progressive Era California

  Gender & History · 2026 · Q2

  Progressive Era discourse racialized Chinese "slave girls" as objects of rescue, distinct from non-Chinese sex workers, enabling missionaries to wield state power for reform.

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Journals in this field

The journals that publish most of this field’s papers. Quartile (Q1–Q4), SJR and h-index are from SCImago Journal Rank; “in this field” is how many of the journal’s pooled papers belong here. What is a Q1 journal? · What is the h-index?

Every journal in Cultural Studies (Q1–Q4) →

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