1. Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School
In the Anglo-Australian tradition of Cultural Studies, the British Birmingham
School was a key intervention.
Encoding/decoding, resistance, hegemony, homology, style - these and other
concepts were either invented or popularized by Stuart Hall (the Director of
the School in its decisive period of intervention) and his students. The
students now read like a roll call of the great and the good in Cultural Studies:
Dick Hebdige, Larry Grossberg, Angela McRobbie, Paul Willis, Paul Gilroy,
Greg McLennan, David Morley, Chas Critcher and many others. It was a
heady moment in the birth of a new field which we now call Cultural Studies.
Its influence has been immense and is ongoing, since many of the
Birmingham graduates are Professors who continue to lecture and write about
culture.
This lecture aims to provide a critical assessment of Hall and the Birmingham
School. It will exploit and develop arguments set out in my book 'Stuart Hall'
(Polity 2003), as well as reactions to the book from the Birmingham circle and
others.