The Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, a new model of activism within the postwar British New Left? - Archive ouverte HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2022

The Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, a new model of activism within the postwar British New Left?

Résumé

In 1957, Richard Hoggart published The Uses of Literacy, dedicated to the cultural practices of the British working class. In 1960, the two journals The New Reasoner and The University Left Review merged into The New Left Review, which first editor-in-chief between 1960 and 1962 was Stuart Hall. In 1964, Paddy Whannel and Stuart Hall published The Popular Arts, a teacher’s guide to handling new subjects such as cinema and music at school. That same year, Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall set up the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham, a research center committed to the study of present-day British culture. The Centre, or CCCS, was the locus of convergence of several driving forces: intellectual forces, interested in analyzing the cultural practices of people and thus allowing them to become legitimate research objects at university; political forces, attentive to the impact of such cultural practices on people’s resistances to capitalism; and economical forces, concerned with viability and the rationalization of the university funding system. Over its almost forty years of existence, the CCCS was chronically understaffed, at times thriving academically and politically, and all too often on the edge of closure. It however left a tangible trace in the history of academia and political activism, not only by laying the groundwork for a new research field, that of cultural studies, but also by having been a place of nearly constant pedagogical freedom and experimentation. By being a space of cooperation and confrontation both within, and without, the Centre has been deeply influenced by political events and university reforms alike. It became a democratic space: guarding the walls of an unstable academic praxis, reinventing itself over and over, redefining its aims and objects during its thirty-eight years of life, publishing groundbreaking research in the realm of social science and doing field work in constant relationship to left wing politics. This paper aims at situating the CCCS and analyzing the ways in which it has invested the concept of fragmented powers: first, by replacing the Centre in the wider context of British postwar politics, then, by retracing its steps alongside the evolution of the British university system over the second half of the twentieth century, and finally by examining its administrative, pedagogical, and publishing practices, as so many instances of fragmented powers inside a university research center.
Fichier non déposé

Dates et versions

hal-04034448 , version 1 (17-03-2023)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-04034448 , version 1

Citer

Eléana Sanchez. The Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, a new model of activism within the postwar British New Left?. Fragmented Powers : Confrontation and Cooperation in the English-Speaking World, Emmanuelle Avril, Dominic Bryan, Emily Clough, James Cohen, Laurence Cossu-Beaumont, David Fée, Pierre Gervais, Lauren Gutterman, Fabrice Mouron, Sarah Pickard, Jun 2022, Paris, France. ⟨hal-04034448⟩
25 Consultations
0 Téléchargements

Partager

Gmail Facebook X LinkedIn More