Birmingham School TODD WOLFSON Rutgers University, USA he Birmingham School, formally known as the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Stud- ies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham, was an innovative academic enterprise, which led the emergence and development of the ield of cultural studies across the latter half of the twentieth century. he CCCS and the intellectual tradition it inspired reimagined how we understand culture and domination, cultivating groundbreaking work focused on the areas of media and communication, youth culture, class, gender, race, and the politics of representation. he Birmingham School includes the work of noteworthy British scholars such as Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Paul Willis, Dick Hebdige, and Angela McRobbie. Established as a postgraduate research institute by Richard Hoggart in 1964, the initial goal of the Birmingham School was to challenge the cultural elitism of literary theory as well as the positivism of British Sociology, creating an approach that had three components. As Hoggart explained of the diferent elements of this new ield of inquiry, “one is roughly historical and philosophical; another is, yet again roughly, sociological, the third, which will be the most important – is the literary critical” (1970, 255). With a broad agenda and diverse methodologies, the Birmingham School developed a variety of critical approaches for the analysis of cultural artifacts. Perhaps the most enduring legacy of the School is the reconceptualization of popular culture as a site of resistance and negotiation for he Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Consumption and Consumer Studies, First Edition. Edited by Daniel homas Cook and J. Michael Ryan. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. marginalized and disempowered groups. Building on the work of Antonio Gramsci, this perspective imbued popular cultural forms with a new importance, as scholars no longer designated mass culture solely as a mass distraction, but instead re-read pop culture in relationship to power, domination, and resistance. From the beginning of the project, the Birmingham School was decidedly political, particularly because it emerged in the shad- ows of the rising New Let in Britain in the postwar 1950s (Shulman 1993). he British New Let was broadly socialist in orientation, with a strong anti-imperialist and anti-racist bent, and one of the central struggles was the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). Many of the founders and leaders of the New Let became founding members of the CCCS, including Hoggart, literary theorist Raymond Williams, historian E. P. hompson, and the second director of CCCS, Stuart Hall. In fact, the New Let Review, the principal journal of the New Let, was irst edited by Hall, and routinely published the works of hompson and Williams, among others (Shulman 1993). In the initial period of the CCCS, Hoggart and Williams played critical roles in the intellectual life of the Centre. Both men were involved in projects focused on working-class education and socialist politics, and the work of the CCCS was an intellectual extension of this vision. he fundamental texts in this formative period were Hoggart’s he Uses of Literacy (1957), Williams’s Culture and Soci- ety (1958) and he Long Revolution (1961), and hompson’s he Making of the English Working Class (1964). hese canonic texts inluenced the early agenda of the Centre, which focused on historical and critical DOI: 10.1002/9781118989463.wbeccs024