For some time, Cultural Studies has provided a receptive environment for theories concerned with the interrelationship of political, economic, institutional and cultural forces. In the Theory Thread for Lateral, we will continue in this tradition. We hope to give voice to theories that can provide the concepts necessary to investigate the configuration of forces that make up the present. We hope to elaborate the intellectual strategies that can enable our intervention in the present. We hope to articulate the philosophical framework necessary to meet the demands made by the present to rethink taken for granted theoretical and methodological assumptions. What has made theorizing within Cultural Studies so creative is its various approaches to the cultural: the cultural as a way of life, as an expression of the people, the working classes, the masses. The theoretical vitality of Cultural Studies has found renewal in its ongoing focus on representation and the various technologies informing cultural mediation, while, however, respecting if not encouraging a demanding self-criticism of theoretical and methodological assumptions. in Cultural Studies then, theorizing aims to grasp and intensify the tension between a tradition of scholarship and thinking afresh the political, economic, institutional and cultural forces of the present.

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