Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies

In 1963, Richard Hoggart helped found the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham. The CCCS (which became known as the Birmingham School) was a research center, which had as its central focus the newly emergent field of study known as cultural studies. The impact of the pioneering work of members of the Birmingham School extends to established disciplines such as sociology, media, politics, history, and education. The work of the Birmingham School led to the creation of cultural studies as a specific focus for academic study.

The key idea underpinning the work of the Birmingham School was to move away from traditional elite cultural thinking, which emphasized the importance of “high culture,” toward a focus on contemporary “lived experience” and popular culture. The founders of the Birmingham School set themselves the task of developing a sociology of literature or of culture and posed a number of specific questions for further exploration. These questions concerned

• the role of writers and artists,
• the significance of audiences,
• how and through whom opinions are formed and transmitted,
• how written and spoken words are produced and distributed,
• and the complex nature of interrelations.

The Birmingham School has its intellectual roots in the following publications: Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy (1957), Raymond Williams's Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961), and E. P Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1964). This body of work set the frame for the evolution of a distinct approach to the study of literature and society, an approach that focused on the conditions of the working class and embodied the rejection of elitist notions of culture in favor of a common culture. The Birmingham School's notion of a common culture was open enough to encompass what had hitherto been shunned by academic discourse, that is, popular or mass culture.

The Birmingham School provided the space for the blending of literary studies with the sociological study of society. The establishment of the Birmingham School marked a complete break from both the elitist traditions within English literary discourse and, in the case of sociology, the positivism and conservative nature of American structural-functionalism. The work of the Birmingham School has been characterized by a reliance on qualitative research methods, in particular, the use of ethnography as a research tool. The use of qualitative methodology can be seen as an attempt to distance the Birmingham School from what they regarded as the conservative and overly positivistic state of English academic tradition.

One of the significant theoretical contributions made by the Birmingham School, in particular through the work of Stuart Hall, was the development of a unique blend of structuralism that drew on Lacan and Althusser and the Marxist notion of hegemony first articulated by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. This blending provided later writers, such as Willis, Hebdige, McRobbie, and Chambers, with an analytical toolbox with which to identify and subsequently examine subcultural practices within British society. These subcultures were marked out as pivotal in the process of social identity construction and as zones of ideological conflict.

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