Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguist, is considered the father of modern structural linguistics. His key contribution was the idea that language is a structured system of signs, and meaning is produced not by reference to external reality but through differences between signs.

In Imagined Communities (1983), Benedict Anderson posits that nations are not naturally occurring entities but are “imagined political communities" constructed through cultural forms. He introduces the concept of “simultaneity in homogeneous, empty time," wherein individuals, though

In Strangers to Ourselves (1991), Julia Kristeva introduces the concept of “wounded cosmopolitanism” to describe a form of global consciousness that does not arise from privilege or voluntary mobility, but from cross-cultural experiences marked by

In The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha (1994) explores how culture is produced in the “in-between” spaces shaped by the complexities of postcolonial experience. Central to his argument is the concept of the Third Space—a liminal zone where cultural meaning is not fixed but constantly negotiated and rearticulated through

Balibar’s concept of “a right to difference in equality” (1991) argues that genuine equality should not be based on the erasure of difference, but rather on the recognition and protection of difference.

Stuart Hall offers a nuanced understanding of culture as always implicated in power,  because it is embedded in social relations and operates through ideological formations (Hall, 1997, p. 25). Hall is concerned that cultural studies is losing its political urgency, becoming too academic and detached from actual social movements.