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Cultural Studies
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SPACE FOR CULTURAL STUDIES

Hudson Vincent
Published online: 01 Mar 2013.

To cite this article: Hudson Vincent (2013) SPACE FOR CULTURAL STUDIES, Cultural
Studies, 27:5, 666-686, DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2013.773657

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 Hudson Vincent

SPACE FOR CULTURAL STUDIES

Conversations with the Centre

Based on a series of interviews conducted in the summer of 2011 with fourteen key
faculty and students of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at
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Birmingham University in England, including Lucy Bland, Rosalind Brunt, John

Clarke, Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, Stuart Hanson, Richard Johnson, Gregor
McLennan, Angela McRobbie, David Morley, Christopher Pawling, Andrew Tolson
and Helen Wood, this work focuses on the emergence and development of the now
defunct birthplace of British cultural studies. In an effort to understand the origins
and contemporary landscape of cultural studies within British higher education
today, certain questions must be posed to those most closely connected to the
Centre: What were the historical conditions of possibility that allowed a particular
formation of cultural studies to emerge in 1964 at an up-and-coming university
in Birmingham? What does its closing in 2002 tell us about the conditions of
possibility for its practice today? What will be the possibilities of its practice in the
coming years? Through these questions, I demonstrate the intimate connection
between the changing forms of cultural studies at the Centre during its existence
and the larger movements in higher education today.

Keywords Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies; University of

Birmingham; British cultural studies; Lucy Bland; Rosalind Brunt; John
Clarke; Paul Gilroy; Stuart Hall; Stuart Hanson; Richard Johnson;
Gregor McLennan; Angela McRobbie; David Morley; Christopher
Pawling; Andrew Tolson and Helen Wood

Introduction
In the summer of 2011, I interviewed thirteen people, who had been students
or faculty at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham,
England, in an effort to begin to assemble an oral history of the Centre, to tell
its story through the voices of those who knew it best and to reveal some
lessons it may have to teach us about the possibilities of interdisciplinary
practices then and now. These people included Lucy Bland, Rosalind Brunt,
John Clarke, Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, Stuart Hanson, Richard Johnson, Gregor

Cultural Studies, 2013

Vol. 27, No. 5, 666
686, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2013.773657
# 2013 Taylor & Francis
 S PA C E F O R C U L T U R A L S T U D I E S 667

McLennan, Angela McRobbie, David Morley, Christopher Pawling, Andrew

Tolson and Helen Wood.1 I cannot thank them enough for taking the time to
speak with me. I especially want to thank Lawrence Grossberg for helping
arrange the interviews and agreeing to publish them here.2

Heterotopic visions
In media res, the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of
Birmingham blossomed. The pages that follow contain a small portion of the
many stories that the Centre produced through its 38-year existence (1964

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2002). Its birth, life and death are described
the ups and downs. From
hearing these stories, only one thing becomes certain: the history of the Centre
cannot be told once.
To describe the Centre seems an act of ventriloquism. These collected
accounts combine and contradict each other in ways that reveal a continuous
yet heterogeneous life. The few poles that unified the Centre as an educational
space fostered disparity
a disparity best understood as a set of academically,
politically and socially constituted concentric circles centrifugally related to the
Centre itself. Students were encouraged to follow their academic and political
interests by default
there were no pedagogical superiors telling students
what was best. The Centre was remarkable in its ability to flatten the
traditional, academic hierarchy between students and faculty. It was a place
‘where teachers [were] learning the same thing at the same time as their
students’ (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies 1969
1971). If the
faculty still had authority over the Centre, it was certainly different from what
one expects in higher education. Faculty led, supported and encouraged
students where it was necessary. At the end of the day, however, students and
faculty pursued their own academic
political interests via the Centre, both
individually and collectively.
One can describe the Centre as a collection of student and faculty working
groups, seminars and management groups. In practice, it was more complex.
Students moved from one group to the next, creating new ones and dissolving
others. The content of seminars was constituted week by week. The daily
management of the Centre changed in relation to student admission and
graduation. It was a space that was always changing as it adapted to the needs
and desires of its students.
But life at the Centre was not so easy. Founded on a commitment to the
collaborative and interdisciplinary study of culture, in the world of traditional
academia, the Centre’s existence was nothing if not precarious. Its directors
consistently fought for its physical and intellectual place at Birmingham
a
fight that was ultimately lost. Operating at the frontiers of multiple disciplines,
e.g. literature, sociology, history, philosophy, etc., the Centre actualized
 668 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

practices that were so contrary to the disciplinary traditions of higher

education that it was necessarily a space to be struggled over. This struggle
constituted by the Centre was eventually lost in 2002, when the university
closed down cultural studies entirely.
While life at the Centre was certainly anything but romantic, it is difficult
to look upon its history without a hint of nostalgia. Looking back, for both
those who were and were not there, the Centre came to represent a unique
moment in British higher education: a moment of radical collaboration,
interdisciplinary study and democratization. It would be mythologized as the
place where politics and academics combined to produce a new kind of
intellectual work
cultural studies. But even this heterotopic vision of the
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Centre is only part of the story
a moment of struggle temporally specific to

the late 1960s through the 1970s.
Tension and conflict at the Centre was constant, as students disagreed with
one another over academic and political matters, about whether to separate
and how to combine academic and political efforts. Some would leave
academia, and others would stay. Some would remain identified with and even
devoted to cultural studies; others would abandon it for other projects. There
was no single type of student at the Centre. In John Clarke’s words, they were
nothing ‘other than weird’ (Clarke 2011). In this way, the Centre was an
institution that attracted and bred disparity
something echoed through the
interviews that follow.

Cultural studies: a contextual approach

Cultural studies at the Centre was constituted by radically contextual work.
Both its object and manner of study were necessarily so. To understand any
single aspect of contemporary culture, one had to understand the complex
processes through which it was constituted, and the complex relations within
which it was constituted. These might include economic, political, social and
linguistic factors that were linked to its production, distribution and
consumption. Thus, to analyse contemporary culture meant to be knowl-
edgeable in each of the fields relevant to the project at hand. In this way, the
analysis of culture demanded interdisciplinary study. In the words of David
Morley, ‘cultural studies is interdisciplinarity, or it is nothing’ (Morley 2011).
Because of this commitment, practicing cultural studies at the Centre was
extraordinarily demanding. Compared to traditional models of higher
education, the models in which students were expected to choose a single
discipline to master, cultural studies seemed a nearly impossible task.
And perhaps it was impossible for a single individual to practice. Whether
collaborative work at the Centre came out of necessity or coincidence is
unclear, but it undoubtedly became an essential part of the Centre’s practices.
 S PA C E F O R C U L T U R A L S T U D I E S 669

People of different interests and expertise came together around a common

object of study and a common desire to positively affect the world. With the
magnitude of work to be done on any given topic, dividing research and
learning from one another’s knowledge became critical to the success of their
work
to change the world. It is difficult to see how cultural studies could be
done any other way but collectively.
The task of organizing, facilitating and directing such work was under-
standably difficult. The staff at the Centre (originally, Hoggart and Hall)
undoubtedly realized that they couldn’t teach separate seminars on every
discipline. They couldn’t teach how to work collaboratively. Such things had to
be learned independently through practice. Providing a space where such work
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could both be practiced and fostered became the role of the staff
to provide a
structure for students to thrive intellectually and politically via contextual
collaboration.
‘Promoting group work wherever possible’, the early years of the Centre
were defined by a variety of collective ‘projects’ (although many ended up
being individual ones) addressing three major areas of study: the ‘historical and
philosophical’ contexts of contemporary debates around culture and social
change; ‘the sociology of literature and the arts’; and ‘the critical-evaluative’
studies of mass, popular and media art (Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies 1964). In 1964, when the Centre was opened, these projects included
studies on Orwell and the 1930s, the local press (eventually the Rowntree
Project), the relationship between the providers of television programming
and their audiences, ‘Pop Music and Adolescent Culture,’ and ‘the Meaning of
Sport and its Presentation’ (1964).
In 1965, the Centre began to organize itself around a series of three
weekly seminars: a general seminar in which faculty, students and visitors
presented their research; a seminar, generally led by Stuart Hall, which
focused on a wide range of theoretical, analytical and methodological texts
from a broad range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives,
attempting to define the project and foundations of cultural studies; and a
‘working seminar,’ originally taught by Richard Hoggart and first conceived as
having a focus on cultural analysis and ‘close reading’ (Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies 1965
1966). Many Centre members seem
to especially remember an exercise on William Blakes’s ‘The Tyger’.3 In 1968,
the spring and summer meetings of the working seminar became the first site
of collective work, again led by Stuart Hall, in which all students participated.
This specific working seminar focused on questions of women’s magazines and
eventually on a short story called ‘Cure for Marriage.’ In 1969, the collective
focus was on the western, especially through the lens of structuralism.
In 1971, these collective seminars were rearranged around subgroups,
which were ‘designed to enable the study of one relatively coherent theory of
economic, social and political structures which incorporated an analysis of
ideology and culture, and the subdividing of general theoretical problems into
 670 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

problem areas derived from individual thesis work’ (Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies 1969
1971). The subgroups were originally seen as part of a
collective effort to study a coherent theory of the social formation in its full
complexity. Beginning with that of Karl Marx, the first subgroups organized
under this topic were Literature and Society, Mass Media, Subcultures and
Work and Leisure.4
Over time, the various subgroups emerged around students’ shared
research interests. It is important to note that these subgroups were
remarkably democratic in operation. After the 1968 student movement, it
seems only natural that the Centre developed this extraordinary form of
collective and democratic work. The subgroups formed and dissolved as
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students pursued their varying interests with one another. While Hoggart and
Hall (1969
1979), as well as later directors including Richard Johnson (1980

1987), tried to be a part of each working group, the students collectively
decided what the reading list for each group would be and the timeline for
their specific projects. The subgroups would reconvene at the end of each term
for presentations to the entire Centre on the results of their collective projects.
As the collaborative nature of the Centre deepened, the publications of the
Centre followed suit. Up until 1971, the Centre would publish a ‘series of
occasional papers’ (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies 1969
1971).
These consisted of ‘long articles which appeared on an irregular basis and in
pamphlet form’ (1969
1971). In the summer of 1971, the Centre published
the first issue of the Working Papers in Cultural Studies, the contents of which
reflected ‘the varied nature of the Centre’s activities, but contributions from
outside the Centre’ as well (1969
1971). Although the first issue contained no
collaborative work, the many Working Papers in Cultural Studies, stencilled
papers and pamphlets that followed would be distinguished by their uniquely
collaborative nature. Essays by three and more people were not uncommon for
the Centre. ‘Subcultures, Cultures and Class’, ‘Women Take Issue’, ‘Theories
of Language and Subjectivity’ and ‘Literature/Society: Mapping the Field’ are
just a few examples of such work (1969
1971).
While the collective and democratic nature of the Centre was undoubtedly
remarkable, as the interviews below will allude to, its arrangement led to
many extraordinarily divisive moments. John Clarke, Paul Gilroy, Rosalind
Brunt, Christopher Pawling and others relate how many of the intellectual and
political projects of students resulted in heated debate at the Centre
debates
over certain aspects of feminism and psychoanalysis seem to be the most
memorable. Yet the debates were not always so highbrow either. Rosalind
Brunt, David Morley and others recall that students were always having
internal debates about reading lists, protests, editions of the working papers
and simple management matters of the Centre. Students often debated
whether they ‘should be sitting there in the first place’, rather than outside the
classroom, changing the world (Brunt and Pawling 2011). Stuart insisted on
 S PA C E F O R C U L T U R A L S T U D I E S 671

the importance of their work at the Centre to a degree that convinced most;
however, these debates would never stop while he was there.
And what else could one expect from such a place? By the early 1970s, the
Centre was almost completely democratic in operation. Every institutional
practice from course work and the daily management of the Centre to the
admissions process was defined by student input
something absolutely
extraordinary for an institution of higher education then and especially today.
Sure the democratization and collaborative work of education increased
rampantly after 1968 but to such a level that it even affected admissions is truly
amazing. Many of the interviews, including those with Richard Johnson and
Stuart Hall, reveal how exceptional it was for students of the Centre to be
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choosing whom to accept.

The collective and democratic nature of the Centre through the subgroups,
admissions and management of the Centre provided the means through which
theory could be practiced
the birth of collective, intellectual work (in the
service of politics) at the Centre. The subgroups, specifically, were the place
where students could combine their common interests in new, unexpected
ways. Through collaborative engagement with the issues that mattered most to
them, students were able to express themselves politically both inside and
outside the Centre. The Working Papers in Cultural Studies and stencilled papers
were simply the formal products of their work.
The impact of the Centre stretched far beyond these publications into the
variety of political struggles that students would help fight and lead. In my
interview with Stuart Hall, he recalls that ‘the Centre was very involved with
social movements, with race, gender, sexuality, . . . with protests against
Vietnam, against racism, against patriarchy . . . [,] the student revolutions and
the student occupation in 1968 of the Great Hall in Birmingham University’
(Hall 2011). Hall sees two reasons for the radical turn to politics in the late
1960s by the Centre:

One really important reason was the fees for overseas students had just been
raised. And everybody said this is not fair, third-world students cannot pay
that kind of money. But the second was because Birmingham thought it
owed itself a bit of argy bargy, and it did! Berkeley, everything is in ferment,
how come we don’t have any ferment here? What about a little ferment
here?
(Hall 2011)

He goes on to say that this feeling is what often attracted students to the
Centre
its commitment to a different kind of politics: a collective, cultural
politics.
A diffused politics distinct from traditional politics, cultural politics is what
made the Centre’s impact so unique. It was revealed in their academic and
 672 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

intellectual endeavours as much as it was revealed in their day-to-day lives in

Birmingham. To David Morley,

the Centre was one of the key institutions that changed the definition of
politics. At the beginning of that period, in the late 60s early 70s, you had
social movements, CND, etc., but people still thought of politics as party
politics. It was to do with strikes, it was to do with revolutions, it was to
do with institutional control. The invention of cultural politics, the fact
that these days it’s only common-sensical to think of the cultural
dimension of politics, was a form of the remaking of common sense to
which the Centre contributed enormously . . . I think the contribution the
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Centre made in relation to politics is most legible and significant around

the re-definition of the political and the development of specifically
cultural politics . . .
(Morley 2011)

As Morley notes, there’s no doubt that many, if not most, students of the
Centre participated in party politics; however, it’s this new form of cultural
politics that made the Centre’s impact so interesting. Richard Johnson sees this
new political form as akin to the one feminism took up. ‘I think we took over,
the Centre as a whole took over, quite a feminist conception of what politics
was’ (Johnson 2011). This politics was about how to articulate one’s life in the
world
day to day, minute to minute.
Saying this, the Centre never limited itself to a single type of politics. Hall
was never ‘interested in cultural politics as the only kind of politics’ (Hall
2011). Rather, he and perhaps the Centre as a whole were ‘interested in the
fact that all politics requires economic, political, and cultural conditions of
existence’ (2011). They understood that culture was constitutive of every
social and political formation and, thus, was the object requiring rigorous
analysis. In this sense, it was the Centre’s approach that was so unique
an
intrinsically contextual and interdisciplinary one with political implications.
The political struggles that resulted from such an approach often placed
students of the Centre directly against the university at which they were
enrolled. Richard Johnson recalls that the Centre ‘became sort of reformers of
the university and interested in community politics’ after the student
movement (Johnson 2011). The Centre and its students became the locus of
various disruptive, internal political struggles at the University of Birmingham.
Like the Centre’s intellectual practices, its home is described throughout these
interviews as being at the limits of the university
it had moved from a
Quonset hut at the edge of campus to a rundown section of the eighth floor of
Muirhead Tower. Nonetheless, this centre of intellectual and political activity
was felt throughout the entire campus and local community.
It is precisely at this turning point that Hoggart felt ‘as a senior professor
that he’d lost control of what was going on in it. He couldn’t deliver it as well
 S PA C E F O R C U L T U R A L S T U D I E S 673

behaved, well brought up, traditional students with traditional views, etc. So
he went to UNESCO’ (Hall 2011). The Centre’s collective commitment to
politics necessitated the turn to a more democratic arrangement of the
institution itself. There is a reason why the subgroups, management
committees and admissions processes all came under the control of students
after 1968. Richard Johnson sees this coarticulation in two steps:

. . . it’s a two-stage process. First there’s the student movement, which led
to some democratization in the institution and quite radical democratiza-
tion of some individual units. But then the social movements impact, you
know women’s movement, black politics, gay and lesbian politics, they
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find spaces because of the democratization to shift things along. So I think

that double process happened.
(Johnson 2011)

The institution’s commitment to collective politics and democratic arrange-

ment was necessarily coarticulated with the student and social movements
external to it.
As I noted previously, however, it would be a mistake to see the politics of
the Centre as a single, unified effort by the students. Certainly, many students
shared common, political beliefs and practices, but the disparity between
students was often more recognizable than their commonalities. Whether
tactical or ideological, huge splits in opinion would reveal themselves in general
meetings of the Centre and casual conversations amongst its members. Yet in
spite of the clear, political tension between most students, in the words of Paul
Gilroy, ‘there was a certain shared politics’ (Gilroy 2011). This shared politics
came directly out of the practices that the Centre fostered
an intellectual
concern for the present and a political desire to change it for the better.
The intellectual and political project of cultural studies was intrinsically
interdisciplinary and collaborative. In this sense, it celebrated the unique
differences between students and disciplines and challenged them to find a
common ground so to change the world. The Centre took the complexity of
the world at face value. Since the world is complex, our politics must be
complex as well. And consequently, the politics of cultural studies required
rigorous intellectual work
work in-between disciplines, involving new
modes of cooperation and collaboration among people. Through radically
contextual, intellectual practices and common, political projects, hegemonic
powers could be altered. In this way, studying at the Centre was a training in
changing the powers that be.
 674 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

Disciplining culture
The story of the founding of the Centre in 1964
its funding by Allen Lane in
return, partly, for Hoggart’s testimony in the Lady Chatterly Lover’s trial, the
invitation to Stuart Hall, etc.
is well known and has been told many times
(and is partly told again in Stuart Hall’s interview). It is by now commonly
observed that the analysis of culture emerged in response to particular
historical demands in England after World War II. Raymond Williams, E.P.
Thompson, Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall were only a few of the leading
figures in the development of this new field. Until 1964, however, culture as
an object of study had not been properly defined in higher education. This is
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the context of the challenge taken up by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies.
Hoggart and Hall knew whose work they admired and had some ideas,
perhaps rather vague initially, about the type of work they wanted to do; they
just were not sure what the methodology or canon of such an academic field
would entail. There was not a methodology. There was not a canon. To repeat
a phrase echoed in the interviews that follow, ‘they had to make it up as they
went along’. As I have said, they knew it had to be interdisciplinary,
collaborative and political. They knew, I think, that they had to create their
own practices of knowledge production and intellectual labour. Perhaps they
even knew how much this experiment would set them against the university,
or at least, the university against them. It is this story
the internal political
and intellectual practices of the Centre and its ongoing struggles with the
university, ultimately leading to the end of cultural studies at Birmingham in
2002
that is less widely known.
The gaze of higher education is one of disciplinary judgement. For the
practice of cultural studies to exist within the university, the Centre would
have to define its object of study and methodology. In other words, it would
have to define the ‘discipline’ of cultural studies. The Centre had to discipline
culture. While the Centre had a deep concern for its methodological
‘approach’ from the start, this disciplining process was, nevertheless, slow
to occur (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies 1964). By 1971, the
Centre had fully recognized this need for such a distinct, methodological
definition for cultural studies.
In the sixth report of the Centre (1969
1971), its members reflect on
their development out of the ‘culture and society’ tradition
Culture and
Anarchy, Notes towards the Definition of Culture, Scrutiny, The Uses of Literacy and
The Long Revolution. This lineage shared three critical aspects that helped the
Centre identify itself:

first, a conviction that these were matters of extreme social urgency which
could not be postponed; second, a belief that cultural criticism had to raise
itself above the terms provided by the status quo, providing a sort of
 S PA C E F O R C U L T U R A L S T U D I E S 675

second dimension to the dimension of social expertise itself; and thirdly, a

belief that literary studies, broadly defined or redefined, provided one of
the few intellectual milieus in which such considerations could be seriously
advanced.
(Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies 1969
1971)

The Centre saw itself carrying on this tradition, having ‘initially proposed
work along the same path: its methodology’ (1969
1971). Grounded in
literary criticism and ‘close reading’, the Centre located itself around three
specific areas of interest: ‘the debate about ‘‘culture and society’’, the study of
literature and culture in its social and historical setting, and specific studies in
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modern culture, including nonliterary arts and popular forms of communica-

tion’ (1969
1971). Through the late 1960s, this trajectory of study would lead
the Centre to the frontier of literary studies and the social sciences, sociology
specifically. Through the interdisciplinary and theoretical debates that directly
followed these pursuits, the Centre found itself in a ‘curious paradox’ where
‘phenomenology, symbolic interaction, structuralism and Marxism were
precisely the areas which cultural studies inhabited in its search for an
alternative problematic and method’ (1969
1971). The convergence of these
philosophical developments would guide the development of cultural studies at
the Centre during its early years.
The rigorous work of defining cultural studies methodologically and
theoretically required ‘serious critical work of an empirical kind’ (Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies 1969
1971). This work would begin in the
summer term of 1970 and ‘required a commitment from students over and
above most normal graduate programmes’ (1969
1971). It required not only
an extraordinary commitment to theoretical, disciplinary and empirical work
of numerous kinds, but it demanded students not to erect the ‘fatal barrier
between knowledge and action’ that so many academic disciplines had
previously (1969
1971). The paradoxical position the Centre wished to take
was to produce rigorous, empirical analyses that had direct, political
implications for the world inside an institution that thrived on academic
work of a singularly privileged kind. ‘The critical and reflective study of
modern culture, if situated in its determining social structures, must never
become so scholarly, that it forgets, collectively, to answer the questions its
progenitors so urgently posed’ (1969
1971). Simultaneously, the Centre had
to be placed within and against the traditions of higher education.
This distinct line that the Centre claimed to walk could only work with a
certain kind of intellectual space
one distinct from the rest of higher
education. On the one hand, the Centre’s very practices resisted and even
rejected the scholarly and disciplinary work of traditional disciplines. On the
other hand, it could only continue to exist on its own terms as long as the
university was not asking too many questions and imposing too many
requirements and regulations. Paradoxically, the Centre could barely sustain
 676 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

its activities without the resources it received from the university
resources
for which the institution demanded certain results in return. The Centre
reports note the obvious:

We are poorly staffed and funded for such an ambitious project.

Interdisciplinary work, especially, is poorly placed and supported: paid
ritual obeisance, in terms of its contribution in ‘advancing the frontiers of
knowledge’, in practice it runs up against the boundaries between
disciplines, the division of labour in intellectual work, the awkward
problems of relevance and action which flow from truly critical
knowledge, the protocols of good academic manners, and the defense
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of institutional boundaries . . . . The traditional roles of deference and

status which enclose staff and students, traditionally, cannot survive for
long in a field where teachers are learning the same thing at the same time
as their students. But alternative modes of work are difficult to define and
carry through in a climate which is, largely, inhospitable to them. These
are some of the ‘costs’ of the project we have undertaken.
(Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies 1969
1971)

The Centre was operating in a place simultaneously beyond and within

traditional academia
a precarious place for such a newly established
institution.
Hoggart and Hall served as the barriers between the University of
Birmingham and the Centre. They acted as the middle ground
the buffer

between the two. When the university came asking questions, first Hoggart
and later Hall, after Hoggart left to UNESCO in Paris, did the work of
preventing the institution from knowing too much and from imposing
regulations on the Centre. This would become more and more difficult as the
years progressed.5
From 1964 through 1989, one could make the case that the Centre
remained a largely undisciplined department. It did not have a strict canon or
methodology during that period. In the words of Stuart Hall,

We knew that there must be a method. We knew that there must be a

curriculum . . . [,] but we did not know where we were trying to get to,
except to understand what culture was . . . . Uncertainty was what the
object of this was, what the methodology was, and what the core
curriculum was.
(Hall 2011)

Significantly developing its theoretical and empirical grounding each year,

the Centre would continue to develop as long as it did not need to define itself
as a single area of study
a discipline. Of course, there were texts that
students returned to year after year, but the inflection of these texts and the
 S PA C E F O R C U L T U R A L S T U D I E S 677

introduction of new ones depended on the interests of the students

structuralism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, feminism, etc. As students
changed, the Centre changed in tandem.
While the academic interests of the Centre were certainly in constant flux,
one can get a sense of the intellectual space the Centre thought it was
occupying by the set of texts assigned to its first undergraduate course in 1969.
As the 1968
1969 Centre Report details, the Centre had offered its first
‘introductory course in Contemporary Cultural Studies as one of the special
options for undergraduates in the English department in their second and third
years’ (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies 1968
1969). The first
versions of the undergraduate course consisted of two sections: ‘close work on
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selected texts (practical reading leading into cultural analysis) and more general
topics including problems of theory and method’ (1968
1969). With this
arrangement in mind, the very first course was taught around the following
two reading lists:

List A (Preliminary reading)

Berger: INVITATION TO SOCIOLOGY
Hall and Whannel: THE POPULAR ARTS
Halloran: THE EFFECT OF MASS COMMUNICATION
Hoggart: THE USES OF LITERACY
Leavis, F. R.: EDUCATION AND THE UNIVERSITY
McLuhan: UNDERSTANDING MEDIA
Shuttleworth: TWO WORKING PAPERS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Williams: CULTURE AND SOCIETY
List B
Arnold: CULTURE AND ANARCHY
Eliot: NOTES TOWARDS THE DEFITION OF CULTURE
Fischer: THE NECESSITY OF ART
Leavis, F. R.: THE COMMON PURSUIT
Leavis, F. R. and Thompson: CULTURE AND ENVIRONMENT
Leavis, Q. D.: FICTION AND THE READING PUBLIC
Marcus: THE OTHER VICTORIANS
Mannheim: IDEOLOGY AND UTOPIA
Nisbet: THE SOCIOLOGICAL TRADITION
Rickman: UNDERSTANDING AND THE HUMAN STUDIES
Rosenberg and White: MASS CULTURE
Trilling: BEYOND CULTURE
Watt: THE RISE OF THE NOVEL
Weber: THE PROTESTANT ETHIC AND THE SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM
Williams: THE LONG REVOLUTION [sic]
(Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies 1968
1969)
 678 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

As stated previously, these texts give us insight into how the Centre was
framing the intellectual space it occupied. These first undergraduate seminars
were co-taught by Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall, Andrew Bear and Alan
Shuttleworth. With growing popularity, what consisted of two-week seminars
for second- and third-year students in 1969 would become a full one-year
course on cultural studies by 1972, attracting nearly 30 students annually by
1974.
The Centre’s growing popularity and presence within the Department of
English led to its placement in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of the university
in 1975. With this movement, the Centre developed its first taught M.A.
course by examination and dissertation (replacing the M.A. by thesis), which
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included the following:

Course (I): Theory and Method in Cultural Studies

A history of the theoretical development of cultural studies through

various intellectual traditions
‘culture and society’, Weber and the
‘cultural sciences’, the ‘sociological’ tradition, the ‘anthropological’
definition, structuralism, theories of subcultures, classes, alternative and
counter-cultures, etc.

Course (II): British Society and Culture (1880
1970)

A history course providing the critical background for ‘the study of culture
in the social history of a modern industrial society, Britain’.

Course (III): A Subject Area in Cultural Studies

An independent course that allows students to pursue a single area within

cultural studies that they would pursue collectively through subgroups.
(Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies 1975
1976)

The initial arrangement and development of the taught M.A. course reveals the
paradoxical nature of the work of cultural studies. The specific arrangement of
these courses structured the M.A. programme in a way that allowed the
Centre to alter its content year to year. The subgroups (Course III), by
definition, changed with the interests of the students. Of course, the other two
courses covered such an immense amount of material that the decision of what
to teach was always overwhelming
developing each term.6 Regardless of
how the University of Birmingham might have viewed the new graduate
programme, its arrangement grounded the collective, interdisciplinary and
contextual nature of cultural studies into the institutional structure of higher
education. It kept alive the same mission the Centre began in 1964, namely,
that the arrangement of courses, seminars and working groups ‘must be
 S PA C E F O R C U L T U R A L S T U D I E S 679

allowed to grow and change with the shape of each project’ (Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies 1964).
In 1989, the Centre lost its structure and name when the University of
Birmingham officially merged the Centre with sociology and created the
Department of Sociology and Cultural Studies. (During these tumultuous
changes, cultural studies was directed by Michael Green, between 1992 and
1997, followed by Jorge Larrain.) Cultural studies was no longer solely a
postgraduate programme that offered an undergraduate course; it had a full
undergraduate major: Media, Culture and Society. Now under the policy
requirements of undergraduate programmes, the department had to assign
daily readings and weekly assignments. The canons they created included
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Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Dick Hebdige, Paul Gilroy and others. In my
interview with Stuart Hanson, Andrew Tolson and Helen Wood, Hanson
recalls his time teaching at the Centre, saying that

the Andrew [Tolson] generation and the generation prior provided the
material that we taught. So we began to read Paul Willis when I was at the
university. And McRobbie was writing then. People like Chas Critcher.
David Morley had done his nationwide study notes. So those students in
some ways were providing the raw material. Some of the material they
were producing, Learning to Labor, those kinds of things.
(Hanson, Tolson and Wood 2011)

In this sense, although the policies of undergraduate assessment required the

formation of a formal canon, there was none. They took the radically changing
work coming out of the postgraduate programme as the model for their own.
There is no doubt that it truly was a unique undergraduate course. Daily
classes included trips into the city, fieldwork and media analysis. While the
undergraduate programme framed the practice in more disciplinary terms, the
essential qualities of cultural studies at the Centre were still present. A deep
concern for student and faculty collaboration, a commitment to local politics
and personally meaningful engagement with academics were all present
throughout the programme. Helen Wood vividly recalls her admission
interview for the undergraduate degree:

Jorge Larrain [Chair of the newly formed Department of Sociology and

Cultural Studies] talked to me about what I thought about woman
magazines at the moment and what I thought about unemployment. So I
had this interview about what I was upset about really and what annoyed
me. And I thought, oh, so you can come to university and study what
really ticks you off. This is amazing.
(Hanson, Tolson and Wood 2011)
 680 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

It was an undergraduate programme modelled after the past 25 years of

experience and work at the Centre
an intellectual and academic
commitment to contextual studies and politics.
But the Centre-like days of the undergraduate programme would not last
long. As an official university department, cultural studies became subject to
the same institutional requirements as other departments, and its operations
became more transparent to the administration through the university’s
institutional analyses. The most comprehensive and important of which was the
Research Assessment Exercise (RAE)
an assessment first begun in 1986 by
the government of Margaret Thatcher. Then administered every three years,
the first assessment of the Department of Sociology and Cultural Studies
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occurred in 1989. To understand the RAE’s impact on the department is to

understand its collapse.
In the words of Andrew Tolson, ‘looking at it from afar, what I think led
to the demise of the department particularly was the RAE . . .’ (Hanson et al.
2011). He goes on to say that

the UK in the late 80s early 90s . . . [had] a series of research assessments,
which are about bureaucratizing research. Putting research into particular
definable boxes. So you have to be part of a ‘unit of assessment’ as they’re
called. And secondly, assessing individuals as individual authors. It
privileges the individual.
(Hanson et al. 2011)

One can immediately understand why such an assessment would not favour
cultural studies
a practice founded on contextual and collective work.
Stuart Hanson recalls an internal debate about which RAE panel to submit
their work to since the department was a mix of sociology and cultural studies.
Cultural studies alone contained a number of disciplinary methods. ‘Some of it
looked more like sociology, some of it looked more like anthropology, some
of it was visual stuff, some of it was media stuff’ (Hanson et al. 2011). There
was absolutely no way for cultural studies to map onto the RAE, neither in
terms of individual nor disciplinary work. Moreover, cultural studies was so
committed to local and community-based intellectual and political work that it
was hurt even more by the RAE’s privileging of work with ‘international
reach’ (2011).
Because the University of Birmingham was on the rise as a prominent
institution in British higher education, it took departmental RAE scores
exceptionally seriously. Stuart Hanson recalls how the university ‘saw itself as
an elite. It was aiming to get into the top ten, and one of the ways you did that
was to up your RAE results across the whole university’ (Hanson et al. 2011).
Andrew Tolson agrees that ‘it’s something to do with that university and those
ambitions taking those strategic decisions. Not that intrinsically a 3a is a bad
 S PA C E F O R C U L T U R A L S T U D I E S 681

result’, since such a performance at his old university would have been
‘perfectly viable’ (2011).
The university would use the department’s RAE rating (3a) as reason to
close it in 2002. Whether or not this was the only reason for the department’s
closing is unclear. Helen Wood recalls ‘the university’s decision was that it
wouldn’t tolerate any departments below a 4. So all departments below a 4
were to be restructured’ (Hanson et al. 2011). Upon their 3a rating, the
Centre was notified of this new university policy. The department would
spend the next ‘six months talking to people, talking to the English
department, talking to American Studies, talking to other places about where
they might restructure’ themselves (2011). Unfortunately, these talks were
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made in vain.
Members of the department recall much debate and confusion in their
preparation for that fatal RAE assessment. The then chair of the Department of
Sociology and Cultural Studies, Frank Webster, submitted the initial ‘RAE bid,
which is quite a complex thing. And which is then submitted to an internal
panel, which then in some way acts. It’s like a mock RAE. It got a 4 at that
point . . .’ (Hanson et al. 2011). The interviews note some debate about
whether the university took into account this draft or a later version that no
one was ‘particularly happy with’ (2011). Nevertheless, Hanson notes that ‘if
you actually want to say what it was, it was the RAE. That was the thing that
did it for the department’ (2011). In the absence of a formal disciplinary
canon, methodology, and a commitment to individual research with
international reach, the undergraduate programme in cultural studies at
Birmingham was doomed from the start.
Unfortunately, its closure in 2002 is just one example of a larger
movement in American
European higher education against radically inter-
disciplinary and collaborative practices that translate into affectively disparate
politics. The institutionalization of the Centre through the imposition of a
bureaucratic and managerial ethos by the University of Birmingham provided
the differential function leading to its closing in 2002
the limit of the Centre.
This exponential movement towards closure can be traced through its
existence as a postgraduate Centre tangentially connected with the English
Department, to an undergraduate and graduate Department of Cultural Studies
in the Faculty of Social Sciences, to becoming the Department of Sociology and
Cultural Studies in the Faculty of Commerce and Social Sciences. This complex
trajectory reveals continuing efforts by the University of Birmingham to
incorporate the activities of the Centre into the larger institution’s set of
sanctioned practices and mission to become a top-tier British university.
The practices of the Centre never properly fit into the goals of university,
and how could they? The Centre
cultural studies
resembled nothing of
Birmingham’s peer institutions, let alone those to which it aspired to become.
Taking up resources and degrading their RAE rating, it was seen as a parasitic
tumour and was ultimately removed as such. Honoured by a blue plaque in
 682 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

Muirhead Tower, the Centre has been relegated by the University of

Birmingham to the annals of history
the history of British cultural studies.

Space for Cultural Studies

Understanding this trajectory of the Centre and the set of intellectual and
political possibilities it actualized allows us to reconsider our contemporary
practices and the possibility of actualizing new ones. A set of extraordinary
coincidences allowed the Centre to come into being in 1964, and a set of all
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too ordinary incidents led to its closing in 2002. As research production,

individual publication and disciplinary work becomes more essential than ever
for university promotion, can cultural studies still exist in higher education?
Upon the closure of the Department of Sociology and Cultural Studies,
Helen Wood remembers her move from teaching Media, Culture and Society
to the University of Manchester:

So where I then went when I left Birmingham, I went to Manchester,

which was a four star sociology department, the best in the country, came
top in the RAE. We were very much told to have as little to do as possible
with our undergraduate students. And it was exactly the opposite kind of
teaching experience. You know, we don’t want to see you. You should be
out doing research. Maybe there’s something about that teaching ethos
being preserved in an environment where research is such a competitive
thing, whether those two things can sit together.
(Hanson et al. 2011)

The contextually collaborative and political practices of cultural studies at

Birmingham would be overshadowed by a certain turn of values through the late
1980s and beyond. A set of values, institutionalized by policy assessments like the
RAE that would quantify and rank departments by their disciplinary qualities.
The RAE and similar department analyses would become the scale by which
university bureaucrats allocate funds. Perform properly to the gaze of the RAE,
and you’ll receive increased funding. Perform poorly, and you’ll be fired.
As austerity measures continue to sweep across institutions of public
education in Britain, the USA and Europe, the severity of these practices has
become even more pronounced. University officials are being forced to make
difficult decisions. Where does one cut back? Which departments should go?
Which professors? How does one judge performance? Of late, these
universities seem resolute in their answer to choose the quantity of individual
research and publication, international prestige, external income from
academic work and job creation as their value-indicators. Given these choices

choices that reveal the ways in which administrators are valuing intellectual
 S PA C E F O R C U L T U R A L S T U D I E S 683

labour and allocating resources
the decline of collaborative, interdisciplinary

and political work in higher education seems inevitable.
But perhaps I paint too harsh a picture. There are certainly exceptions to
this larger movement in higher education.7 Certainly, interdisciplinary work is
still being done, perhaps now more than ever. Students are still, sometimes,
working collaboratively, and political struggles are certainly being fought in
and through the university. But what made the Centre so unique was the union
of these three qualities into a single mode of practice
cultural studies. It’s
one thing for interdisciplinary, collaborative and political work to simply exist.
It’s another thing entirely for them to thrive. It may be that they can only do
so
at the least do so most productively
when articulated together.
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We are in the midst of a hegemonic struggle, and at the centre of it lies a

series of battles over the ‘value’ and ‘purpose’ of higher education. Cultural
studies never has nor should serve the sole purpose of education. Individual,
disciplinary study is important, but should it really be the purpose of higher
education? By the current behaviour of university and legislative bureaucrats,
one would think so. The question must be asked: what does higher education
stand to gain from the practices of cultural studies?
It seems clear that if one wishes to change the world, one must first
understand it. And the understanding of the world cannot be enveloped by any
single discipline
economics, philosophy, anthropology, sociology or any
other. Each discipline brings its own knowledge, information and politics to
the world. Crossing those disciplinary boundaries, perhaps even transcending
them, seems essential to the creation of a more complete comprehension of
the world. If we really want to change the world, an interdisciplinary approach
is critical, and how can we achieve such an approach without collaboration?
Academic collaboration allows us to tell the interdisciplinary stories that
describe the world in all its complexity. Saying this, such academic collaboration
will not change the world by itself.
Cultural studies at the Centre always expanded beyond its academic,
institutional position in society. It stretched itself into the political fabric of
Birmingham through research and activism that had direct impact on the
community. Each of the interviews in this journal describes the extent to
which this is true. Cultural politics, as disparate and conflicting as it may have
been, was essential to the practice of cultural studies. The Centre had a deep
commitment to telling stories that revealed the complexity of the world;
however, they did so through writing and activism that transformed their
community both inside and outside the university. The Working Papers in
Cultural Studies, pamphlets and stencilled papers that the Centre produced were
all ‘less ‘‘closed’’ and inaccessible than most publications which appeal to an
academic audience’ (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies 1969
1971).
They were written collaboratively in an effort to tell meaningful stories that
would spark collaboration in politics
to realize the capacity of collective
 684 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

politics. For how can we change the world without political collaboration? If
we really want to change the world, collective politics is vital.
It seems that these two interconnected and essential characteristics of
cultural studies
interdisciplinary study and collective politics
constitute at
least two significant expressions of the very project of changing the world. As
higher education distances itself from these practices of cultural studies (and
other formations), it may lessen its capacity to change the world. Perhaps we
in the academy have given up on this project of late?
I believe that one of the lessons that these interviews make visible for us is
the even more urgent need to create a space where interdisciplinary
collaboration is fostered in an effort to better understand the world we live
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in. Without such a space, we cannot tell stories adequate to the contemporary
world, and we cannot shape new forms of positive and collective politics. With
the help of such spaces, we can change the world or, at the least, we will have
better tools and better understandings to do so.
Perhaps it is now necessary for us to think more broadly about the role and
location of cultural studies. Can cultural studies exist outside the university? If
so, where? Some might point to think tank models as possible spaces. Others
might point to mobile, digital platforms. We must look at the common
locations of our daily lives
coffee shops, libraries, corporations, etc.,
as
potential spaces for such work. If we really want to change our world, no
stone can go unturned. We
all of us
need to radically experiment with
new kinds of spaces in the search for future practices of cultural studies.
Saying this, spaces within the university should not be forgotten in our
ongoing experimentation. The academy has been our home for the past half-
century. There is no reason to give up the space now, but there is also no
reason to limit ourselves. Such a practice need not necessarily exist within the
institutions of higher education. Cultural studies can be done in other places
and in other ways. With a commitment to understanding our world through
the radically contextual analysis of culture, a dedication to interdisciplinary
collaboration and a recognition of the power of collective politics
translated
into a commitment to open up new spaces for cultural studies
we can at least
enliven the effort to open up new, unexpected possibilities for the world.
Despite the demise of cultural studies at Birmingham and attempts to
deconstruct the singular, monolithic and even utopian images of the Centre
that are too often reproduced, romantic visions of the Centre remain. Today,
it seems more important than ever to understand its complex history and the
radical possibilities it actualized. Understood affectively through the stories of
those who were there, perhaps the intellectual and political work of the Centre
can provide us with new possibilities to actualize in our own precarious
present. The interviews collected in this publication reflect an ongoing effort
to express the academic, social and political possibilities of the practices of
cultural studies, specifically those actualized between 1964 and 2002 at the
University of Birmingham in England.
 S PA C E F O R C U L T U R A L S T U D I E S 685

If nothing else, it is clear that the time for cultural politics is now and always
has been. In the pages that follow, you will find the stories of some of the people
who were involved with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. The
best way to make the argument for the importance of cultural studies today is to
reveal the ways in which it shaped the lives of so many people, communities and
cities over the last half-century. Moreover, by telling the stories of those who
have dedicated their lives to the practice of cultural studies, perhaps we can
discover new political strategies for actualizing those practices today.
What I discovered from the interviews that follow was a set of stories that
could never be combined into a single vision or history of British cultural
studies. The enigma of the Centre is something one had to experience to fully
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understand. Nonetheless, these stories give us a glimpse of what it was like to

be there, and one cannot help but compare our current academic milieu with
its own. Such a comparison inevitably draws forth a certain nostalgia, and
maybe this is not such a bad thing. Indeed, it is possible for the words that
follow to affect us in radical ways
to open up new doors of possibility and
new paths for actualizing them. Thus, I leave you with the words of those who
lived and continue to live British cultural studies first-hand, in the hope that
you might feel what they feel
the joy of cultural studies.

Notes
1 As a result of both technical and personal issues, we have decided not to
publish the actual interview with Angela McRobbie. Instead, we publish a
brief ‘self-interview’ that she has written especially for this occasion.
2 I would also like to thank the Morehead-Cain Foundation for providing the
funding that allowed me to conduct these interviews.
3 See interview with Rosalind Brunt and Christopher Pawling.
4 See 1969
1971 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies Report.
5 See interviews with Richard Johnson, Stuart Hanson, Andrew Tolson, and
Helen Wood.
6 See interview with Stuart Hall.
7 An analysis of these ‘minor’ programmes throughout higher education is
certainly needed today.

Notes on contributor

Hudson Vincent is a senior undergraduate and Morehead-Cain Scholar at

the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studying comparative
literature and cultural studies. His research interests lie at the intersection of
literature, philosophy and cultural studies. Hudson is currently working on an
historical analysis of the Spinozist renaissance within France during the 1960s.
 686 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

References
Brunt, R. & Pawling, C. (2011) Interview, June 6.
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (1964) ‘Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies Report 1964’, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (1966) ‘Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies Report 1965
1966’. Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies.
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (1969) ‘Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies Report 1968
1969’. Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies.
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Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (1971) ‘Centre for Contemporary

Cultural Studies Report 1969
1971’. Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies.
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (1976) ‘Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies Report 1975
1976’. Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies.
Clarke, J. (2011) Interview, May 31.
Gilroy, P. (2011) Interview, June 2.
Hall, S. (2011) Interview, June 2.
Johnson, R. (2011) Interview, June 1.
Morley, D. (2011) Interview, June 3.
Hanson, S., Tolson, A., & Wood, H. (2011) Interview, June 6.