Biographers of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies have tended to adopt two main narrative approaches to chronicling the Centre’s history.  The first coalesces around its key figures—faculty like Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall, as well as former students such as Charlotte Brunsdon and Lawrence Grossberg, who, since their time in Birmingham, have risen to prominence in the field.  Generally this body of work moves between their own personal reflections on their time in Birmingham and the reflections of travelers in cultural studies who have followed in their wake (CITES).  The second approach focuses less on the figures per se and more on the enduring body of work they produced, both individually and collectively.  Here we have in mind Policing the Crisis (Macmillan, date); Subculture: The Meaning of Style (Methuen, date); Women Take Issue (Hutchinson, date); The Empire Strikes Back (Hutchinson, date); and a host of other landmark texts that comprise what has come to be known retroactively—and indeed problematically—as the “Birmingham School.”[fn]Grossberg quoting John Clarke: “the diversity that won.” Should also probably note the many “rows” various Birmingham figures mention in their personal reflections, as if to acknowledge the lack of unity of position.[/fn]

Taken together, these two approaches have yielded a useful composite of the cultural, political, and economic conditions leading up to the Birmingham Centre’s founding in spring 1964.  They have also provided a glimpse into the sometimes heated process of arriving at the Centre’s own sense of itself and its intellectual commitments.  As Stuart Hall once put it, “My own memories of Birmingham are mainly of rows, debates, arguments, of people walking out of rooms.”

not to mention an inkling of what everyday life might have looked like throughout the 1960s and 70s.

Rarely, however, have has there been a studied investigation into the form, function, and frequency of

its publications.

Rarely to our knowledge has there been a studied look at the form, function, and frequency of its publications.

We want to introduce a third.

Need to talk a bit about the archive, i.e., the annual reports, which are more than just bureaucratic documents – or at least they quickly become more than that.

Note the preponderance of what Zuckerman & Merton call “fugitive” publications.

“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). » make this your ending!

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.

Seemed to recognize from the beginning how important publications would be to the success of the Centre.

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)