[1] Cultural studies arose in the 1970s and 1980s as a way of empowering otherwise disenfranchised voices: those who did not follow common or accepted political or social norms.
It is a way of challenging an established power by investigating issues of "multiculturalism, the politics of literacy, and the implications of race, class, and gender".
[2] Cultural studies is influential in the composition classroom because it enables instructors to help students write about subjects they were familiar with and to "teach close reading and interpretation of texts....substituting popular culture or media for literary texts";[2] allows for the idea that we are inundated by culture in everything we see and read, and so it is useful in the composition classroom to analyze, examine, close-read, and understand the meaning in and around the texts.
Teachers use multicultural texts[4] that introduce and encourage discussions of multiple literacies, the implications of power, and the "contact zones" where cultures overlap and potentially collide.
When it comes to the personal essay, students from different multicultural backgrounds will bring different approaches, from the way the begin their stories to the information they choose to address.