Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) was a key innovative teaching and research establishment at the University of Birmingham, England, that contributed to the beginnings of the field of cultural studies. Established initially as a postgraduate center in 1964 to promote academic scholarship on the neglected subject of contemporary mass culture, the CCCS, until its closure in 2002, was revolutionary in challenging the canon of traditional academia, which seemed to focus narrowly on elite high culture.
Those affiliated with the CCCS recognized the sociopolitical importance of researching popular mass culture and everyday life using a theoretical lens and with an inclusive, egalitarian, and nonreductionist vision. A broad definition of culture was advocated, as all forms of culture were regarded as important to study whether they were high or low and popular or elite.
History
In 1962, Richard Hoggart, a professor of English who was highly influenced by author and cultural theorist Raymond Williams, expressed interest in researching the mass culture of modern times when he spoke at his inaugural lecture at the University of Birmingham. Hoggart established the CCCS in 1964 and became its first director, pursuing a new form of academic sociocultural inquiry in a rapidly changing world, a scholarly subject that would come to be known worldwide as cultural studies. The center was interdisciplinary and renowned for academic work that utilized elements of literary criticism, sociology, history, and anthropology under the guidance of pioneering critical theorists such as Stuart Hall, who served as the second director of the CCCS (1968–79).
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The CCCS was acclaimed for its impact upon cultural studies in Britain and globally, as well as lauded for its efforts to understand contemporary sociopolitical changes and the complexities of class relations. The CCCS was not a monolithic outlet for cultural studies; it consisted of diverse voices speaking from distinctive theoretical and sociopolitical trajectories, often using sociological and literary frameworks in new ways to further their analyses and interpretations of popular culture and media. The principal remit of the CCCS was interrogation of the mass media and exploration of popular culture and subcultures. The authors associated with the CCCS published seminal work about moral panics, race and racism, youth subcultures, women’s culture, and working-class urban culture.
Hoggart and Hall developed groundbreaking ideas and analyses about culture and media that would be used by media theorists in the 1980s and afterward. Hall had arrived in England from Jamaica in 1951 on a Rhodes scholarship to study English at Merton College, Oxford. He served as the founding editor of the New Left Review before joining the CCCS.
Hall was interested in questioning culture and communication through researching the mass media, youth, culture, and identity politics, and he was also keen to dismantle traditional methods of teaching and learning in order for students and teachers to collectively play radically new roles. For example, students were encouraged to move away from individualistic aspirations and instead guided toward the pursuit of joint publications with colleagues and teachers. This pedagogical vision of democratic cooperation between students and teachers resulted in much successful collaboration. Among the theorists affiliated with the CCCS were Angela McRobbie, Paul Gilroy, Dick Hebdige, Paul Willis, Richard Johnson, Larry Grossberg, John Clarke, and David Morley. Importantly, these authors’ works demonstrate the multiple voices and positions that came out of the CCCS.
The Work of the CCCS
The CCCS was an intellectual and political project that explored how media were utilized to serve the hegemonic interests and dominant ideologies of the privileged and powerful in society. Hall, influenced by Karl Marx, Louis Althusser, and Antonio Gramsci, developed a theoretical understanding of how media messages were produced and disseminated. In response to the sociopolitical climate, the CCCS members argued that the social positions (e.g., class, gender, age, and ethnicity) of the audience affected how they decoded media messages.
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The CCCS was a pioneer in the study of how newspapers, radio, film, and television were interpreted differently by audiences in diverse cultural contexts who engaged in processes of resistance and negotiation, sometimes coerced and other times through consent. According to the CCCS, the analysis of media texts alone was not sufficient, for the sociopolitical climate that the audience members experienced also had a bearing on how they responded to media culture.
The significance of the reader/viewer as an active recipient of media messages contests notions of audiences passively accepting the hegemonic discourses channeled through the media. Media messages may be encoded with a preferred meaning for the audience to accept, but these preferred meanings can be negotiated or opposed. When viewers watch a television program or readers peruse a magazine, they bring with them multiple personal experiences and unique sociocultural backgrounds, which in turn affect how they view the program or read the text.
Hall regarded mass communication as complex and multilayered: He identified three typical responses to how media culture was received by the audience: dominant, negotiated, and oppositional. In a dominant reading of a media text, the viewer or reader internalizes the encoded message of the media, while in a negotiated reading the audience may interrogate some of the text but does not decode the ideologies that produced the text. In an oppositional reading of a media text, the audience comprehends that the message conflicts with or contradicts their personal experiences of society. Hall’s ideas were taken up by others writing about the media including David Morley and Ien Ang.
Later Years and Closure
The 1980s saw the beginnings of the slow demise of the CCCS. In the late 1990s, it was combined with the sociology department at the University of Birmingham before closing down in 2002. The CCCS archive, based at the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham, provides resources created by staff and students associated with the CCCS from 1964 to 2002 to showcase the multidisciplinary innovative and collaborative achievements of the center.
The original version of this article was published by SAGE Publications in The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Mass Media and Society.