The Birmingham School and British Cultural Studies

How a circle of post-war British scholars made working-class and popular culture a serious object of study and founded the field of cultural studies.

Definition

British cultural studies is the interdisciplinary field, crystallised at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies from 1964, that studies culture as ordinary lived experience and as a site of power, combining literary analysis, sociology, and Marxist theory.

Scope

This topic covers the founding texts and institution of British cultural studies: Hoggart, Williams, and Thompson's recovery of working-class culture, the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, and its shift from a literary to a more theoretical, Gramscian programme. It does not cover the encoding/decoding model or subcultures in detail, which have their own topics.

Core questions

• How did popular and working-class culture become legitimate objects of study?
• What did cultural studies take from literary criticism, and what from Marxism?
• How did the field move from culturalism to theory?

Key theories

Culturalism

The founding works of Hoggart, Williams, and Thompson treated culture as lived experience and stressed human agency, a position later labelled culturalism within the field.

The Birmingham programme

Under Stuart Hall the Centre fused culturalism with structuralist and Gramscian theory, producing collaborative studies of media, ideology, and class collected in its working papers.

History

The field's founding moment lies in three works of 1957 to 1963 by Hoggart, Williams, and Thompson that took working-class culture seriously. Hoggart founded the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham in 1964; under Stuart Hall's direction from the late 1960s it absorbed continental theory and produced influential collaborative research before its closure in 2002.

Debates

Culturalism versus structuralism

An internal debate pitted the founders' emphasis on lived experience and agency against structuralist accounts that stressed determining systems, a tension Hall sought to mediate.

Key figures

• Richard Hoggart
• Raymond Williams
• E. P. Thompson
• Stuart Hall

Seminal works

• hoggart1957
• williams1958
• thompson1963
• hallheld1980

Frequently asked questions

When did cultural studies begin?

As an organised field, with the founding of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in 1964, though its founding books appeared in the late 1950s.