Introduction: Conjunctures of Class, Culture, and the Media in Contemporary Greek Studies

In the introduction of the first volume, we referred to main approaches and theories of class. While introducing the second volume, we examine relevant works on contemporary Greece, revising studies concerned with class questions in the country, overviewing the state of the art of the current critical Greek media and cultural studies. Several of the contributions to the second volume address different questions and empirical contexts that are usually discussed under the broader cultural studies approach (related to inquiries on television, cinema, poetry, counter-cultures, and subcultures). As the fields of media and culture are broad and tend to overlap, we maintain the relative distinction between media and cultural studies only to summarize the different scholarly trajectories currently developing in the fields of culture and media in Greece. The volume subtitle, “neoliberalism, the mainstream, and counter cultures”, provides a conceptual anchor to all contributions gathered here, as all phenomena examined concern the deep and polyvalent penetration of neoliberalism in Greece particularly after the debt crisis in the early 2010s, as both a politico-economic system of governance and a dispositif of organizing individuals’ conduct in times of crisis, competition, and uncertainty.