PhD Seminar: Cultural Studies Now
A London Arts and Humanities Partnership Seminar, 2024-2025
Convened by Dr Tom Six (Reader in Politics and Performance, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama)
Policing the Crisis
Mugging, the State and Law and Order
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).
Cover of ‘The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain’
Content
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 1: Culture
3-5pm, 25 November 2024
Please read:
Hall, S. 'The Great Moving Right Show', Selected Political Writings: The Great Moving Right Show and Other Essays, ed. Sally Davison, David Featherstone, Michael Rustin and Bill Schwarz (Duke University Press, 2017), pp. 172-186.
Optional reading/listening:
Akomfrah, J. The Stuart Hall Project, 2013. (this extract covers the emergence of Cultural Studies).
Gilbert, J. ‘This Conjuncture: For Stuart Hall’, New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics, Vol. 96-97, 2019, pp. 5-37.
Hall, S. ‘Studying the Conjuncture’ from ‘Through the Prism of an Intellectual Life’, the text of which is also published in Hall, S. Essential Essays, Vol. 2: Identity and Diaspora, ed. David Morley (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), pp. 303-324.
Seminar 2: Study
3-5pm, 27 January 2025
Please read:
Hall, S., Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts. ‘The Politics of Mugging’ in Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1978), pp. 327-397.
Optional reading/listening:
Camp, Jordan T. and Christina Heatherton, ‘Conjuncture: Jordan T. Camp on Conjunctural Analysis’, Conjuncture podcast, November 28, 2023.
Solomos, J., Bob Findlay, Simon Jones, and Paul Gilroy. ‘The organic crisis of British capitalism and race: the experience of the seventies’, in the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain (London: Hutchinson, 1982), pp. 9-46.
Seminar 3: Now
3-5pm, 3 February 2025
Please read:
Wilson Gilmore, R. ‘Forgotten Places and the Seeds of Grassroots Planning’, in Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (London: Verso, 2022), pp. 410-448.
McRobbie, A. ‘No such thing as peacetime: Notes on Gaza, Hannah Arendt and cultural studies’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, online May 24, 2024.
Optional reading/listening:
Kelley, Robin D.G. and Jordan T. Camp, ‘Conjuncture: Against Pessimism’, , Conjuncture podcast, August 22, 2022.
Bhattacharyya, G., Adam Elliott-Cooper, Dalia Gebrial, Kojo Koram, Sita Balani, Kerem Nişancıoğlu, Luke de Noronha, Nadine El-Enany. ‘Longing for Authority’ in: Empire’s Endgame (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021), pp. 135-148.
