“Thus do purely marketing decisions homogenize research and university teaching in accordance with fashions coming from America, sometimes managing to fabricate outright ‘disciplines’ like cultural studies, this mongrel domain born in England in the Seventies, which owes its international dissemination – if not the whole of its existence – to a successful publishing strategy” (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1999: 74).

An important and largely overlooked element of the “grassroots” of this story—the story of the formalization of cultural studies’ publications.  It was not, in the first instance, a top-down undertaking and indeed probably wasn’t until the 1980s, and even then never wholly.

The story of the Birmingham Centre tends to be told though some combination of the following: (a) a focus on its major figures; (b) its work; and (c) the rows.  Never to our knowledge has there been a studied look at its publications—not the content of those publications, however compelling it may be, but rather their form, function, and frequency.

Want to spend some time reconstructing the publication history of the Birmingham Centre.

--Occasional Papers; special occasion pamphlets

(2^nd OP called “Two Working Papers in CS”)

-- WPCS (1971 – replacement for OP)

(Also producing pamphlets)

--Stenciled Occasional Papers Launched 1974-75

--Reboot(???) or formalization of CCCS Pamphlets (1976-77)