Cultural Studies Now Seminar Series – Seminar 2

Overview

Cultural Studies, in its British incarnation, was in effect the intellectual front of the political movement of the New Left. This movement became consolidated in the UK after 1956 when the Suez crisis and Soviet invasion of Hungary jointly precipitated the emergence of an anti-imperial and non-doctrinaire group of Marxist activists and intellectuals, centred initially on the journal New Left Review. Following his appointment in 1969 as Acting Director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), which had been established by Richard Hoggart at the University of Birmingham, Stuart Hall gradually took the place of Raymond Williams as the leading intellectual voice of this loosely affiliated formation. Over the next decade, Hall worked with his colleagues and graduate students to develop a theoretical basis and critical methodology for the politically engaged analysis of culture (considered as a social totality), leading to landmark texts such as Policing the Crisis (1978) and The Empire Strikes Back (1982).

This seminar series will begin by asking how British cultural studies both understood and analysed ‘Culture’, before focusing on its lessons for ‘Study’ (i.e. methodology) and its capacity (or otherwise) to enable us to analyse the world today (‘Now’). Sessions are open to all PhD students at LAHP institutions. If possible, please commit to attend all three. I will begin each session with an introduction to some important issues raised in the readings, before turning over to a discussion of the readings, and how they relate to your research.

Seminar 2 (12th March – In-person – G10 at Charles Bell House,43-45 Foley St, London W1W 7TY ) will consider the question ‘how does cultural studies understand culture?’ We will draw primarily on Hall’s classic essay ‘The Great Moving Right Show’ about the emergence of what would come to be called Thatcherism in the late 1970s, and consider how he frames his analysis of culture as a social totality a) by using the concept of the conjuncture, and b) by treating theory as a strategic resource. We will consider a number of ways of theorizing a conjunctural account of culture, and discuss their potential significance for our own research.

Link to Tickets for the series is found here