Birmingham school of cultural studies

Call for Change · #1 Saturday, February 19, 2011

BIRMINGHAM SCHOOL OF CULTURAL STUDIES

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. This institution has produced a lot of important reserchers. During 1960’s and 1970’s, this centre develpoed a variety of critical approaches for analysis, interpretations, and critism of cultural artifacts combining socialogical theory and contexualization with litrary analysis of cultural text. They are basically inspired by the ideas of Althusser and Gramsci.
The Centre is notable for producing many key studies and researchers. Stuart Hall, 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 Black street violence). This anticipated many of the law and order themes of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government in the 1980s.Richard Johnson was later director and encouraged research in social and cultural history.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.In later years, 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. 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. Following is the detail of few leading researchers of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies.

Stuart Hall:

Stuart Hall (born 3 February 1932 in Kingston, Jamaica) 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 an early and influential contributor to the school of thought that is now known as British Cultural Studies or The Birmingham School of Cultural Studies. At the invitation of Hoggart, Hall joined the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University in 1964. Hall took over from Hoggart as director of the Centre in 1968, and remained there until 1979. While at the Centre, Hall is credited with playing a role in expanding the scope of cultural studies to deal with race and gender, and with helping to incorporate new ideas derived from the work of French theorists. Hall left the Centre in 1979 to become a professor of sociology at the Open University.Hall retired from the Open University in 1997 and is now a Professor Emeritus.British newspaper The Observer called him "one of the country's leading cultural theorists".
In 1951 Hall moved to England as part of the Windrush generation, the first large-scale immigration of West Indians, as that community was then known. He won a Rhodes Scholarship to Merton College at the University of Oxford, where he obtained an M.A. In the 1950 and 60s, after working on the Universities and Left Review, Hall joined E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams and others to launch the New Left Review in the wake of the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary (which saw many thousands of members leave the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and look for alternatives to previous orthodoxies). His career took off after co-writing The Popular Arts with Paddy Whannel in 1964.
As a direct result, Richard Hoggart invited Hall to join the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. In 1968 Hall became director of the Centre. He wrote a number of influential articles in the years that followed, including Situating Marx: Evaluations and Departures (1972) and Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse (1973). He also contributed to the book Policing the Crisis (1978) and coedited the influential Resistance Through Rituals (1975). After his appointment as a professor of sociology at the Open University in 1979, Hall published further influential books, including The Hard Road to Renewal (1988), Formations of Modernity (1992), Questions of Cultural Identity (1996) and Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (1997). He retired from the Open University in 1997. Ideas
Hall's work covers issues of hegemony and cultural studies, taking a post-Gramscian stance. He regards language-use as operating within a framework of power, institutions and politics/economics. This view presents people as producers and consumers of culture at the same time. (Hegemony, in Gramscian theory, refers to the cultural production of 'consent' as opposed to 'coercion'.). Hall has become one of the main proponents of reception theory, and developed Hall's Theory of encoding and decoding. This approach to textual analysis focuses on the scope for negotiation and opposition on part of the audience. This means that the audience does not simply passively accept a text — whether a book or a film — and that an element of activity becomes involved. The person negotiates the meaning of the text. The meaning depends on the cultural background of the person. The background can explain how some readers accept a given reading of a text while others reject it. This theory is also one of the main proponents used to describe audience reception.
Hall developed these ideas further in his model of encoding and decoding of media discourses. The meaning of a text lies somewhere between the producer and the reader. Even though the producer encodes the text in a particular way, the reader will decode it in a slightly different manner — what Hall calls the margin of understanding. This line of thought has links with social constructionism. In Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (1978), Stuart Hall and his colleagues studied the reaction to the importation into the UK of the heretofore American phenomenon of mugging. Employing Cohen's definition of moral panic, Hall et al. theorized that the "rising crime rate equation" has an ideological function relating to social control. Crime statistics, in Hall's view, are often manipulated for political and economic purposes. Moral panics (e.g. over mugging) could thereby be ignited in order to create public support for the need to "police the crisis." The media play a central role in the "social production of news" in order to reap the rewards of lurid crime stories.
His works — such as studies showing the link between racial prejudice and media have a reputation as influential, and serve as important foundational texts for contemporary cultural studies.Hall has also widely discussed notions of cultural identity, race and ethnicity, particularly in the creation of the politics of Black diasporic identities.One can see Hall's political influence in New Labour, though Hall would recoil at the thought. Hall wrote many influential articles in the CPGB's theoretical journal, Marxism Today (MT), which challenged the left's views of markets and general organisational and political conservatism. This discourse had a profound impact on the Labour Party under both Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair, especially as many of those around both leaders came to political maturity at the apogee of the influence of MT. However, Hall regards himself as unreconciled with the Labour Party as ever.

Raymond Henry Williams :

Raymond Henry Williams (31 August 1921 – 26 January 1988) was a Welsh academic, novelist and critic. He was an influential figure within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the mass media and literature are a significant contribution to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts. Some 750,000 copies of his books have sold in UK editions alone and there are many translations available. His work laid the foundations for the field of cultural studies and the cultural materialist approach. Early publications
He made his reputation with Culture and Society, published in 1958, which was an immediate success. This was followed in 1961 by The Long Revolution. Williams's writings were taken up by the New Left and received a wide readership. He was also well known as a regular book reviewer for the Manchester Guardian newspaper. His years in adult education were an important experience and Williams was always something of an outsider at Cambridge University. Asked to contribute to a book called My Cambridge, he began his essay by saying, "It was never my Cambridge. That was clear from the start". Williams's position about other writers on culture and society may surprise some readers. For example, in his short book about George Orwell, he is sharply critical of a figure with whom many people assume he has much in common. Williams also wrote in a critical way about Marshall McLuhan's writings on technology and society. This is the background to the chapter in Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974) called "The Technology and the Society." His book on Modern Tragedy may be read as a response to The Death of Tragedy by the conservative literary critic George Steiner. Later, Williams was interested in the work of Pierre Bourdieu, though opining that the latter was too pessimistic in terms of the possibilities for social change.

Richard Hoggart :
He was born in Leeds and educated at Cockburn High School and the University of Leeds. He served with the Royal Artillery during World War II, and was demobilised as a Staff Captain. He was appointed Staff Tutor at the University of Hull from 1946 to 1959 and Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Leicester from 1959 to 1962.
The Uses of Literacy (1957), his most regularly cited work, was partly autobiography, and was interpreted as lamenting the loss of an authentic popular culture and as denouncing the imposition of mass culture by the culture industries. Hoggart was an expert witness at the Lady Chatterley trial, and his arguments that it was an essentially moral and "puritan" work, which merely repeated words he had heard on a building site while on his way to the court, are sometimes viewed as having had a decisive influence on the outcome of the trial. As Professor of English at Birmingham University (1962-1973), he founded of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in 1964 and was its director until 1973. Hoggart was Assistant Director-General of UNESCO (1971-1975) and finally Warden of Goldsmiths, University of London (1976-1984), after which he retired from formal academic life. The 'Main Building' at Goldsmiths has now been re-named the 'Richard Hoggart Building' in tribute to his contributions to the college.
Hoggart was a member of numerous public bodies and committees, including the Albermarle Committee on Youth Services (1958-1960); the Pilkington Committee on Broadcasting (1960-1962); the Arts Council of Great Britain (1976-1981); and the Statesman and Nation Publishing Company Ltd (1977-1981). He was also Chairman of the Advisory Council for Adult and Continuing Education (1977-1983), and the Broadcasting Research Unit (1981-1991), as well as a Governor of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre (1962-1988). In recent works like The Way We Live Now (1995), regretting the decline in moral authority which he holds religion once provided, he has attacked contemporary education for its emphasis on the 'vocational' and 'cultural relativism' for its tendency to concentrate on the popular and meretricious..

What is Culture?
Culture (from the Latin cultura stemming from colere, meaning "to cultivate") is a term that has different meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. However, the word "culture" is most commonly used in three basic senses:
• excellence of taste in the fine arts and humanities, also known as high culture
• an integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for symbolic thought and social learning
• the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group.
• When the concept first emerged in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, it connoted a process of cultivation or improvement, as in agriculture or horticulture. In the nineteenth century, it came to refer first to the betterment or refinement of the individual, especially through education, and then to the fulfillment of national aspirations or ideals. In the mid-nineteenth century, some scientists used the term "culture" to refer to a universal human capacity. Following World War II, the term became important, albeit with different meanings, in other disciplines such as sociology, cultural studies, organizational psychology and management studies.

Popular Culture :

Popular culture (commonly known as pop 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. Heavily influenced by mass media (at least from the early 20th century onward) and perpetuated by that culture's vernacular language, this collection of ideas permeates the everyday lives of the society. Popular culture is often viewed as being trivial and "dumbed-down" in order to find consensual acceptance throughout the mainstream. As a result of this perception, it comes under heavy criticism from various scientific and non-mainstream sources (most notably religious groups and countercultural groups) which deem it superficial, consumerist, sensationalist, and corrupted.
It is manifest in preferences and acceptance or rejection of features in such various subjects as cooking, clothing, consumption, and the many facets of entertainment such as sports, music, film, and literature. Popular culture often contrasts with the more exclusive, even elitist "high culture", that is, the culture of ruling social groups, and the low or folk culture of the lower classes. The earliest use of "popular" in English was during the fifteenth century in law and politics, meaning "low", "base", "vulgar", and "of the common people"; from the late eighteenth century it began to mean "widespread" and gain in positive connotation. (Williams 1985). "Culture" has been used since the 1950s to refer to various subgroups of society, with emphasis on cultural differences.
Defining 'popular' and 'culture', which are essentially contested concepts, is complicated with multiple competing definitions of popular culture. John Storey, in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, discusses six definitions. The quantitative definition, of culture has the problem that much "high culture" (e.g. television dramatizations of Jane Austen) is widely favoured. "Pop culture" is also defined as the culture that is "left over" when we have decided what high culture is. However, many works straddle or cross the boundaries, e.g. Shakespeare and Charles Dickens. Storey draws attention to the forces and relations which sustain this difference such as the educational system.
A third definition equates pop culture with Mass Culture. This is seen as a commercial culture, mass produced for mass consumption. From a Western European perspective, this may be compared to American culture. Alternatively, "pop culture" can be defined as an "authentic" culture of the people, but this can be problematic because there are many ways of defining the "people." Storey argues that there is a political dimension to popular culture; neo-Gramscian hegemony theory "... sees popular culture as a site of struggle between the 'resistance' of subordinate groups in society and the forces of 'incorporation' operating in the interests of dominant groups in society." A postmodernism approach to popular culture would "no longer recognise the distinction between high and popular culture'. Popular culture changes constantly and occurs uniquely in place and time. It forms currents and eddies, and represents a complex of mutually-interdependent perspectives and values that influence society and its institutions in various ways.

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