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Abstract
This essay offers some reflections on the heritage of cultural studies prompted by a conference held at Birmingham University in June 2014. The conference, called CCCS50, was mounted as part of a two-year research project into the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) which is (state) funded by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council. It was scheduled to mark 50 years since the founding of the CCCS by Richard Hoggart in 1964. Speakers at the conference included many who had studied and taught at the CCCS and the later Department of Cultural Studies, and there were ancillary events such as an art exhibition at the nearby Midlands Arts Centre and a photographic exhibition elsewhere in the university. The unhappy history of the relationship between Birmingham University and Cultural Studies (the university had shut down all cultural studies teaching in 2002, as well as consistently under-resourcing it) was a shaping presence during the conference. This and the deaths, in 2014, of both Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall, affected participation in, attendance at, and the tenor of, the proceedings. The author, who studied at CCCS in the 1970s, and has previously written about this experience, explores some of the contradictions of the event for those who found themselves being made history.
Notes on Contributor
Charlotte Brunsdon studied at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the 1970s, and wrote about this in The Feminist, the Housewife and the Soap Opera (2000). She has subsequently taught and written about film and television and her books include London in Cinema (2007) and Law and Order (2011). She is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick.
Notes
1 AHRC project AH/K000500/1, ‘The Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies: connected collaboration, connected communities and connected impact’. Funded under the AHRC's ‘Connected Communities’ scheme.
2 The archive was announced by Matthew Hilton (Citation2013) in this journal in an issue (27.5) which also includes interviews with many former associates of CCCS. See also www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/historycultures/departments/history/research/projects/cccs/
3 Ann Gray (Citation2003) provides an account of the vicissitudes of Centre and Department of Cultural Studies in the wake of the closure, and drew on this history in her sombre conference presentation.
4 The Muirhead Tower, a brutalist tower block on the Birmingham University campus was the location of the CCCS from 1977.
5 The plaque reads, ‘The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies the focus for British cultural studies founded here in 1964’. The Muirhead Tower was not built in 1964 (commissioned in the late ‘60s, it was completed in 1971 and renovated in 2008).
6 Anon., AHRC, no date circa 2012, Abstract: ‘The Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies: connected collaboration, connected communities and connected impact’. gtr.rcuk.ac.uk/project/954FA1CF-54F0-433B-925B-6EA39F25D9F (accessed 4 August 2014). These publicly accessible research project blurbs are normally written by the Principal Investigator/Research Team, and have to be supplied at the point of application, but appear unauthored on the AHRC website.
7 Hall's comment was made in 1990 at the Illinois Cultural Studies conference, and published in the huge volume which emerged from that conference (Hall Citation1992). It is significant that it was more than ten years after leaving Birmingham that Stuart wrote this, as I discussed in ‘A thief’, Brunsdon (Citation1996).
8 I realize that ‘we’ makes many claims, but will just have to risk it to make the point. John Clarke's conference contribution on staff student relations in CCCS was perceptive and retrospectively very wise about the extraordinary gift made (and burden taken on), by Michael Green, Stuart Hall and Richard Johnson, the full time staff of the 1970s. My remarks concern CCCS in the 1970s, after the start of the MA in 1975.
9 One of the several incomplete collective CCCS projects concerned the Western film; there were piles of research material from this, and other projects, lying around gathering dust for many years. Worth noting too that Richard Dyer's Ph.D. thesis – an early completion – was on Light Entertainment, and Ros Brunt studied popular broadcasters such as Alan Whicker, while Janice Winship worked on women's magazines.
10 The Tavern in the Town was a central Birmingham pub bombed, along with the Mulberry Bush, on 21 November 1974 as part of the IRA's mainland campaign in the 1970s. Jonathan Coe's (Citation2001) novel, The Rotter's Club, set in Birmingham in this period, opens with an account of the explosion. One of the consequences was that, for some years after, central Birmingham was very quiet in the evenings.
11 My invocation of the 1970s here is structured by the subsequent meaning of the decade in political discourse in Britain. For cultural studies, the sixties were formative and enabling, and the version of the seventies I am thinking of is really a ‘long 1970s’, which comes to an end with the 1981 riots, the Falklands war and the re-election of Mrs Thatcher in 1983. As Ann Gray, Maureen McNeil and Richard Johnson among others have discussed, the demands on the Department of Cultural Studies in the 1980s and 1990s were rather different as it shifted to undergraduate teaching.
12 Writing in the context of audio-visual and paper archives, the Head of Preservation at the Riksarkivet/National Archives in Stockholm, Sweden, makes a compelling case for the paradoxes of digitizing archives, Jonas Palm (Citation2005).
13 Back in the CCCS was poorly advertised at the event, but some of the photographs can be found at backinthecccs.wordpress.com. Roy Peters took the photograph of the Durham Miners’ Gala on the cover of Working Papers in Cultural Studies no. 10, ‘On Ideology’ (Birmingham: CCCS, 1977).
14 A participant from the floor pointed out that A levels (final secondary school exams) in media and film studies, arguably one of the institutional sites in which cultural studies has been most influential in Britain are under severe threat from a government education agenda committed to returning to ‘proper’ subjects.
15 Abstract, ‘The Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies: connected collaboration, connected communities and connected impact’. gtr.rcuk.ac.uk/project/954FA1CF-54F0-433B-925B-6EA39F25D9F (accessed 4 August 2014).
16 A trace of the type of measurement entailed in ‘impact’ was included in the course pack for the conference, a questionnaire headed ‘CCCS50 Feedback Form’.
17 The panel members were Dorothy Hobson, Chas Critcher, Bob Findlay, Ranjit Sondhi, Roger Shannon, Dick Hebdige and Isaac Julien.
18 The details of this work are complex and highly structured, and Hebdige has performed site-specific versions. The precision timing includes projecting the last 8 minutes of Zabriskie Point against a closely synchronized reading of an assortment of real estate ads, foreclosure notices, reports from the ‘New York Times’ on the financial crisis, supermarket coupons, classified ads and postings on Craigslist (Southern California edition). In Birmingham he read reports from the New York Times on Border Books bankruptcy filing in 2011 over the sequence where shelves of books are being blown up in the film. At certain points items appear simultaneously on screen and in three dimensions from the non-virtual shopping bag at the podium- e.g a packet of Special K cereal in a 2-for-1 supermarket offer, a loaf of Wonder Bread thrown into the air as it flies across the screen.