---
title: "Cultural studies"
chunk: 2/6
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_studies"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:57:43.870636+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Stuart Hall's directorship of CCCS ===
Beginning in 1964, after the initial appearance of the founding works of British Cultural Studies in the late 1950s, Stuart Hall's pioneering work at CCCS, along with that of his colleagues and postgraduate students, gave shape and substance to the field of cultural studies. This would include such people as Paul Willis, Dick Hebdige, David Morley, Charlotte Brunsdon, John Clarke, Richard Dyer, Judith Williamson, Richard Johnson, Iain Chambers, Dorothy Hobson, Chris Weedon, Tony Jefferson, Michael Green, and Angela McRobbie.
Many cultural studies scholars employed Marxist methods of analysis, exploring the relationships between cultural forms (i.e., the superstructure) and that of the political economy (i.e., the base). By the 1970s, the work of Louis Althusser had radically rethought the Marxist account of base and superstructure, significantly influencing the "Birmingham School". Much of the work done at CCCS examined youth subcultural expressions of antagonism toward "respectable" middle-class British culture in the post-WWII period. Also during the 1970s, the politically formidable British working classes were in decline. Britain's manufacturing industries, while continuing to grow in output and value, were decreasing in share of GDP and numbers employed, and union rolls were shrinking. Millions of working-class Britons backed the rise of Margaret Thatcher amid labour losses. For Stuart Hall and his colleagues, this shift in loyalty from the Labour Party to the Conservative Party had to be explained in terms of cultural politics, which they had been tracking even before Thatcher's first victory. Some of this work was presented in the cultural studies classic, Policing the Crisis, and in other later texts such as Hall's The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left, and New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s.
In 2016, Duke University Press launched a new series of Stuart Hall's collected writings, many of which detail his major and decisive contributions toward the establishment of the field of cultural studies. In 2023, a new Stuart Hall Archive Project was launched at the University of Birmingham to commemorate Hall's contributions in pioneering the field of cultural studies at CCCS.

=== Late-1970s and beyond ===
By the late 1970s, scholars associated with The Birmingham School had firmly placed questions of gender and race on the cultural studies agenda, where they have remained ever since. Also, by the late 1970s, cultural studies had begun to attract considerable international attention. It spread globally throughout the 1980s and 1990s. As it did so, it both encountered new conditions of knowledge production, and engaged with other major international intellectual currents such as Post-structuralism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism. The wide range of cultural studies journals now located throughout the world, as shown below, is one indication of the globalization of the field. For overviews of and commentaries on developments in cultural studies during the twenty-first century, see Lawrence Grossberg's Cultural Studies in the Future Tense, Gilbert Rodman's Why Cultural Studies?, and Graeme Turner's What's Become of Cultural Studies?

=== Hall's cultural studies ===
Hall's cultural studies explores culture as a system that shapes individuals' identities through the meanings and practices arising from the constant power dynamics that comprise it. Hall viewed culture as a "critical site of social action and intervention, where power relations are both established and potentially unsettled." He perceived culture as a power dynamic, in which the media unintentionally possesses more control over ideology than the public. Hall viewed the media as a source of preserving the status quo of a reflection that already exists in society. The media hegemony in question, he emphasized, "is not a conscious plot or conspiracy, it's not overtly coercive, and its effects are not total." Compared to other thinkers on this subject, he studied and analyzed symbols, ideologies, signs, and other representations within cultural studies. Most of his contributions occurred in the 1980s, where he looked at how media cultivates cultural power, how it is consumed, mediated and negotiated, etc. Hall has also been accredited with the expansion of cultural studies through "the primacy of culture's role as an educational site where identities are being continually transformed, power is enacted, and learning assumes a political dynamic." He viewed politics as being used mainly for power instead of the betterment of society. This led to the belief that political dynamics could change with a reform in the education system (if one changes the education system, then one can change the culture). Hall viewed culture as something that is institutionalized, which could only be studied through the interactional patterns that people within a culture exhibit and experience. Culture is something that makes up society, is a learned trait, and is influenced by various forms of media that help to establish it. Power is the underlying tone of Hall's cultural studies. Hall believed that culture has some power, but the media's use of it is what sways and dictates culture itself.