Abstract

Stuart Hall conceptualized his time at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies as a series of interruptions. It was this fluidity that gave rise to Hall’s conception of cultural studies as a ‘moving target’, a fusion of a range of disciplinary approaches that was uniquely influenced by politics in the world beyond the academy. The political commitments of those at the Centre were wide-ranging and, from its embrace of collective ways of research and decision-making to its deployment of various strands of European Marxist theory, had a critical impact on the Centre’s working practices. Yet as the diverse work of many of these same scholars has shown, the political climate of the present-day is almost unrecognizable from that of the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, arguably the most productive period in the Centre’s history.

Cultural Studies 50 Years On explores how the political, social and cultural contexts of the early 21st century influenced the object and method of doing cultural studies. In bringing together a historical reassessment of the Centre with present-day questions regarding the future of the field the aim is not to reduce cultural studies to the work of a single, now-defunct institution. Instead it aims to utilize what is a critical moment in the trajectory of the field in order to take stock of where it has come from and to explore where it might be going.
In this thoughtful and wide-ranging collection, Kieran Connell and Matthew Hilton have brought together leading practitioners and first-rate scholars in the field of cultural studies to reflect on and chart the important histories, legacies, practices, and politics of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and with it the whole radical intellectual project of cultural studies. The outcome is a vital, illuminating, and robust intervention that no scholar or student interested in the past, present, and future of cultural studies can afford to ignore!
Jaafar Aksikas, Cultural Studies Program, Columbia College Chicago; President of the Cultural Studies Association (2014-2016); and Editor of Cultural Studies and Marxism.
If you care about the history of cultural studies, then you need this book.
If you care about the current state of cultural studies, then you need this book.
If you care about the future of cultural studies, then you need this book.
Gilbert B. Rodman, Associate Professor of Communication Studies, University of Minnesota
Kieran Connell is a Lecturer in Contemporary British History at Queen’s University Belfast. He has published on subjects including race, immigration, photography and the New Left in post-war Britain and has co-curated exhibitions on the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and the photographs of Janet Mendelsohn. Previously he worked at the Open University and the University of Birmingham.

Matthew Hilton is Professor of Social History at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of several books including Smoking in British Popular Culture (Manchester, 2000), Prosperity for All: Consumer Activism in an Era of Globalisation (Cornell, 2009) and The Politics of Expertise: How NGOs Shaped Modern Britain (Oxford, 2013). He is an editor of Past and Present and is currently researching the history of humanitarianism and international aid and development.