Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
Encyclopedia
The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) was a research centre at the University of Birmingham
, England
. It was founded in 1964 by Richard Hoggart
, its first director. Its object of study was the then new field of cultural studies
.
emphasized the reciprocity in how cultural texts, even mass-produced products are used, questioning the valorized division between "producers" and "consumers" that was evident in cultural theory such as that of Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School
.
, popular culture
, and media studies
. The Centre, and the theorists associated with it, tend to take an interdisciplinary approach to the study of culture, incorporating diverse elements such as Marxism
, post-structuralism
, feminism
, and critical race theory
, as well as more traditional methodologies such as sociology
and ethnography
. The Birmingham Centre studied representations of various groups in the mass media
and evaluated the effects and interpretations of these representations on their audience.
, who became the centre's director in 1968, developed his seminal Encoding/Decoding model here. Of special importance is the collective research that led to Policing the Crisis (1978), a study of law and order campaigns that focused on "mugging" (a code for street violence). This anticipated many of the law and order themes of Margaret Thatcher
's Conservative government in the 1980s. Other noted Centre books include 'Off-Centre: Feminism and Cultural Studies'; 'Resistance through Rituals'; 'The Empire Strikes Back'; 'Border Patrols: Policing the Boundaries of Heterosexuality'.
Richard Johnson was later director and encouraged research in social and cultural history. The centre staff included Maureen McNeil, noted theorist of culture and science, Michael Green who focused on media, cultural policy and regional cultures in the midlands, and Ann Gray, culture and media.
Noted graduates and associates of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and the Department of Cultural Studies include: Paul Gilroy
(LSE) theorist of culture and race, Angela McRobbie
(Goldsmiths) theorist of consumption, femininity and popular culture, Celia Lurie (Goldsmiths) feminist theory and consumption, Jackie Stacey (University of Manchester, film, cancer culture and science in culture', Sarah Franklin (LSE) science as culture, Debbie Epstein (University of Cardiff education, childhood and youth studies, sexuality and popular culture, Peter Redman (The Open University) masculinities, psychoanalytic theor, Mary Jane Kehily (The Open University) childhood and youth studies, Joyce Canaan (City University, Birmingham) cultures of higher education, Anoop Nayak (Newcastle University) geographies of race, Deborah Lynn Steinberg (Warwick University) science cultures, sexuality and popular culture, Hilary Pilkington (Warwick University) Russia and youth subcultures, Sue Wright (Danish Pedagogic University) cultures of higher education, Hazel Carby (Yale) race and literature, David Parker (Nottingham University), Mica Nava (University of East London) media studies, Chris Griffin (Bath University) girls and youth cultures, and Adrian Kear (Aberystwith University) performance studies and psychoanalysis, Kevin J. Brehony (Roehampton University) historical studies of educational ideologies..
Empirical
researchers included David Morley and Charlotte Brunsden, who produced The Nationwide Project
at the Centre. Dorothy Hobson's research about the reception of Crossroads was based on her MA dissertation. Another important empirical researcher is Paul Willis
, who received his PhD from the CCCS in 1972 and stayed as a researcher there until 1981.
In later years, on the dissolution of the Centre and formation of the Department of Cultural Studies, Sadie Plant
, noted cybertheorist and feminist (author of Zeroes + Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture), taught there, as did Jorge Larrain, the well-known Chilean sociologist and cultural historian, author of Identity and Modernity in Latin America and John Gabriel, sociologist of race. Frank Webster
, a Sociologist with interests in Information Society issues and sympathy for the 'cultural turn', joined the newly formed Centre for Cultural Studies and Sociology in 1999, but left for City University London when the Centre was closed in 2002.
It all started in April 2002, when, according to student testimonies, rumors began to circulate that the Department was going to be closed down because it had received a “very bad” 3a mark in a recent Research Assessment Exercise
(RAE). Despite assurances as to the contrary, on June 21, 2002, right after the end of term, staff members received emails informing them of a decision that had already been taken to close down the Department. The decision was to be ratified on June 26.
Students and staff began a campaign to save the school, which gained considerable attention in the national press (see links below) and sparked numerous letters of support from former alumni all over the world. The main argument of the campaigners was that the Department was being closed down because of economic pressures relating to the public funding of British universities in accordance with RAE marks. Ironically, the Department of Cultural Studies was a top money-making unit inside the School of Social Sciences.
Additionally, concerns were expressed that the Department was being “belatedly punished” for its political radicalism
, as one journalist put it. Indeed, the unreservedly leftwing Department’s long history of conflict with the University’s administration was well known to all who had studied at the University of Birmingham
between the 1960s and the 1980s.
Of the four staff members who were “retained”, one was attached to the Department of Social Policy, one to the Department of English, and one to the Institute of European Studies. The remaining ten staff members were invited to retire voluntarily in return for a severance package (one year’s pay).
Professor David Marsh
, a political sociologist from the Department of Political Science and International Studies (POLSIS), was drafted in as temporary head of a new Department of Sociology, with Cultural Studies dropped from the title. Further posts were created in Sociology during 2003.
The Department had been top of the Guardian league table for Sociology before its closure and it continues to excel in this poll. The Department was recently ranked fourth in Guardian league tables for Sociology.
University of Birmingham
The University of Birmingham is a British Redbrick university located in the city of Birmingham, England. It received its royal charter in 1900 as a successor to Birmingham Medical School and Mason Science College . Birmingham was the first Redbrick university to gain a charter and thus...
, England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
. It was founded in 1964 by Richard Hoggart
Richard Hoggart
Herbert Richard Hoggart is a British academic and public figure, whose career has covered the fields of sociology, English literature and cultural studies, with a special concern for British popular culture.-Career:...
, its first director. Its object of study was the then new field of cultural studies
Cultural studies
Cultural studies is an academic field grounded in critical theory and literary criticism. It generally concerns the political nature of contemporary culture, as well as its historical foundations, conflicts, and defining traits. It is, to this extent, largely distinguished from cultural...
.
History
The Centre was the focus for what became known as the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, or, more generally, British cultural studies. Birmingham School theorists such as Stuart HallStuart Hall (cultural theorist)
Stuart Hall is a cultural theorist and sociologist who has lived and worked in the United Kingdom since 1951. Hall, along with Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, was one of the founding figures of the school of thought that is now known as British Cultural Studies or The Birmingham School of...
emphasized the reciprocity in how cultural texts, even mass-produced products are used, questioning the valorized division between "producers" and "consumers" that was evident in cultural theory such as that of Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School
Frankfurt School
The Frankfurt School refers to a school of neo-Marxist interdisciplinary social theory, particularly associated with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main...
.
Methodology
Some areas studied by the Birmingham Centre and those associated with it include subcultureSubculture
In sociology, anthropology and cultural studies, a subculture is a group of people with a culture which differentiates them from the larger culture to which they belong.- Definition :...
, popular culture
Popular culture
Popular culture is the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture, especially Western culture of the early to mid 20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the...
, and media studies
Media studies
Media studies is an academic discipline and field of study that deals with the content, history and effects of various media; in particular, the 'mass media'. Media studies may draw on traditions from both the social sciences and the humanities, but mostly from its core disciplines of mass...
. The Centre, and the theorists associated with it, tend to take an interdisciplinary approach to the study of culture, incorporating diverse elements such as Marxism
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
, post-structuralism
Post-structuralism
Post-structuralism is a label formulated by American academics to denote the heterogeneous works of a series of French intellectuals who came to international prominence in the 1960s and '70s...
, feminism
Feminism
Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...
, and critical race theory
Critical race theory
Critical Race Theory is an academic discipline focused upon the intersection of race, law and power.Although no set of canonical doctrines or methodologies defines CRT, the movement is loosely unified by two common areas of inquiry...
, as well as more traditional methodologies such as sociology
Sociology
Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...
and ethnography
Ethnography
Ethnography is a qualitative method aimed to learn and understand cultural phenomena which reflect the knowledge and system of meanings guiding the life of a cultural group...
. The Birmingham Centre studied representations of various groups in the mass media
Mass media
Mass media refers collectively to all media technologies which are intended to reach a large audience via mass communication. Broadcast media transmit their information electronically and comprise of television, film and radio, movies, CDs, DVDs and some other gadgets like cameras or video consoles...
and evaluated the effects and interpretations of these representations on their audience.
Noted staff members
The Centre is notable for producing many key studies and researchers. Stuart HallStuart Hall (cultural theorist)
Stuart Hall is a cultural theorist and sociologist who has lived and worked in the United Kingdom since 1951. Hall, along with Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, was one of the founding figures of the school of thought that is now known as British Cultural Studies or The Birmingham School of...
, who became the centre's director in 1968, developed his seminal Encoding/Decoding model here. Of special importance is the collective research that led to Policing the Crisis (1978), a study of law and order campaigns that focused on "mugging" (a code for street violence). This anticipated many of the law and order themes of Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990...
's Conservative government in the 1980s. Other noted Centre books include 'Off-Centre: Feminism and Cultural Studies'; 'Resistance through Rituals'; 'The Empire Strikes Back'; 'Border Patrols: Policing the Boundaries of Heterosexuality'.
Richard Johnson was later director and encouraged research in social and cultural history. The centre staff included Maureen McNeil, noted theorist of culture and science, Michael Green who focused on media, cultural policy and regional cultures in the midlands, and Ann Gray, culture and media.
Noted graduates and associates of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and the Department of Cultural Studies include: Paul Gilroy
Paul Gilroy
-Biography:Born in the East End of London to Guyanese and English parents , he was educated at University College School and obtained his bachelor's degree at Sussex University in 1978. He moved from there to Birmingham University where he completed his Ph.D...
(LSE) theorist of culture and race, Angela McRobbie
Angela McRobbie
Angela McRobbie is a British cultural theorist, feminist and commentator. She combines the study of different dimensions of youth culture with a commentary on development in cultural theory and politics.-Biography:...
(Goldsmiths) theorist of consumption, femininity and popular culture, Celia Lurie (Goldsmiths) feminist theory and consumption, Jackie Stacey (University of Manchester, film, cancer culture and science in culture', Sarah Franklin (LSE) science as culture, Debbie Epstein (University of Cardiff education, childhood and youth studies, sexuality and popular culture, Peter Redman (The Open University) masculinities, psychoanalytic theor, Mary Jane Kehily (The Open University) childhood and youth studies, Joyce Canaan (City University, Birmingham) cultures of higher education, Anoop Nayak (Newcastle University) geographies of race, Deborah Lynn Steinberg (Warwick University) science cultures, sexuality and popular culture, Hilary Pilkington (Warwick University) Russia and youth subcultures, Sue Wright (Danish Pedagogic University) cultures of higher education, Hazel Carby (Yale) race and literature, David Parker (Nottingham University), Mica Nava (University of East London) media studies, Chris Griffin (Bath University) girls and youth cultures, and Adrian Kear (Aberystwith University) performance studies and psychoanalysis, Kevin J. Brehony (Roehampton University) historical studies of educational ideologies..
Empirical
Empirical
The word empirical denotes information gained by means of observation or experimentation. Empirical data are data produced by an experiment or observation....
researchers included David Morley and Charlotte Brunsden, who produced The Nationwide Project
The Nationwide Project
The Nationwide Project was an influential media audience research project conducted by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, England, in the late 1970s and early 1980s...
at the Centre. Dorothy Hobson's research about the reception of Crossroads was based on her MA dissertation. Another important empirical researcher is Paul Willis
Paul Willis (cultural theorist)
Paul Willis is a leading British cultural theorist.He was born in Wolverhampton and received his education at the University of Cambridge and at the University of Birmingham. He worked at Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and subsequently at the University of Wolverhampton. He was a...
, who received his PhD from the CCCS in 1972 and stayed as a researcher there until 1981.
In later years, on the dissolution of the Centre and formation of the Department of Cultural Studies, Sadie Plant
Sadie Plant
Sadie Plant is a British author and philosopher.She earned her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Manchester in 1989, then taught at the University of Birmingham's Department of Cultural Studies before going on to found the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at the University of Warwick,...
, noted cybertheorist and feminist (author of Zeroes + Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture), taught there, as did Jorge Larrain, the well-known Chilean sociologist and cultural historian, author of Identity and Modernity in Latin America and John Gabriel, sociologist of race. Frank Webster
Frank Webster
Frank Webster is a British sociologist. His critical writing on the "information society" has been translated into many languages. In his book Theories of the Information Society, he examined six analytically separable conceptions of the information society, arguing that all are suspect to some...
, a Sociologist with interests in Information Society issues and sympathy for the 'cultural turn', joined the newly formed Centre for Cultural Studies and Sociology in 1999, but left for City University London when the Centre was closed in 2002.
Closure in 2002
The Department was dramatically closed in 2002, a move the university's senior management described as 'restructuring'. Four of its fourteen members of staff were to be “retained” and its hundreds of students (nearly 250 undergraduates and postgraduates at that time, many from abroad) to be transferred to other departments. In the ensuing dispute most department staff left. There were protests against the decision to close Cultural Studies and Sociology from round the world and the University received much adverse criticism.It all started in April 2002, when, according to student testimonies, rumors began to circulate that the Department was going to be closed down because it had received a “very bad” 3a mark in a recent Research Assessment Exercise
Research Assessment Exercise
The Research Assessment Exercise is an exercise undertaken approximately every 5 years on behalf of the four UK higher education funding councils to evaluate the quality of research undertaken by British higher education institutions...
(RAE). Despite assurances as to the contrary, on June 21, 2002, right after the end of term, staff members received emails informing them of a decision that had already been taken to close down the Department. The decision was to be ratified on June 26.
Students and staff began a campaign to save the school, which gained considerable attention in the national press (see links below) and sparked numerous letters of support from former alumni all over the world. The main argument of the campaigners was that the Department was being closed down because of economic pressures relating to the public funding of British universities in accordance with RAE marks. Ironically, the Department of Cultural Studies was a top money-making unit inside the School of Social Sciences.
Additionally, concerns were expressed that the Department was being “belatedly punished” for its political radicalism
Radicalization
Radicalization is the process in which an individual changes from passiveness or activism to become more revolutionary, militant or extremist. Radicalization is often associated with youth, adversity, alienation, social exclusion, poverty, or the perception of injustice to self or others.-...
, as one journalist put it. Indeed, the unreservedly leftwing Department’s long history of conflict with the University’s administration was well known to all who had studied at the University of Birmingham
University of Birmingham
The University of Birmingham is a British Redbrick university located in the city of Birmingham, England. It received its royal charter in 1900 as a successor to Birmingham Medical School and Mason Science College . Birmingham was the first Redbrick university to gain a charter and thus...
between the 1960s and the 1980s.
Of the four staff members who were “retained”, one was attached to the Department of Social Policy, one to the Department of English, and one to the Institute of European Studies. The remaining ten staff members were invited to retire voluntarily in return for a severance package (one year’s pay).
Professor David Marsh
David Marsh (political scientist)
David Marsh is a British political scientist. He is currently Director of the Research School of Social Sciences at Australian National University...
, a political sociologist from the Department of Political Science and International Studies (POLSIS), was drafted in as temporary head of a new Department of Sociology, with Cultural Studies dropped from the title. Further posts were created in Sociology during 2003.
The Department had been top of the Guardian league table for Sociology before its closure and it continues to excel in this poll. The Department was recently ranked fourth in Guardian league tables for Sociology.
External links
- Conditions of their Own Making: An Intellectual History of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham by Norma Schulman
- CCCS Publications - Stencilled Papers by CCCS
- Department of Sociology, University of Birmingham
On the Department's closure
- Save Cultural Studies at Birmingham campaign
- "Birmingham's cultural studies department given the chop", article in The GuardianThe GuardianThe Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
newspaper, 27 June 2002 - "Cultural elite express opposition to Birmingham closure", article in The GuardianThe GuardianThe Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
newspaper, 18 July 2002 - "The wrong result", article in The GuardianThe GuardianThe Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
newspaper, 18 July 2002 - Cultural Studies and Sociology at, and after, the closure of the Birmingham School, Cultural Studies, 18 (6) 2004: 847-62. By Frank Webster (Head of Department in 2002)