Theorizing is not the sole concern of C ultural Studies; its corollary is activism, particularly through contributing to policy in order to make a difference in people's lives. We talk about power or the politics of representation not only to deliberate on abstract forms or draw generalisations, but also to see how we may apply these for a better world. In this lecture we shall see the ways in which the critics and scholars of Cultural Studies have dwelt on the issue of cultural policy.

Several cultural critics have been rallying for Cultural Studies' contribution to policy making, for the effectiveness of Cultural Studies and for changes that the discipline may eventually bring. For instance in his essay “Putting Policy into Cultural Studies” (1992) Tony Bennett argues that Cultural Studies, as it has been largely practised in at least the last two decades, stands guilty of being at times purely semiological. He insists that there has to be a critique of the purely semiological issues of meaning making, of signifying practices and of encoding and decoding codes, which no doubt have been very important aspects of cultural studies.