Popular Cultural Studies was a term I invented in the early 1990s when I was co-director of the Manchester Institute for Popular Culture (MIPC) in Manchester. It is, I think, ripe for a comeback in the 2010s. It might help to re-energise Cultural Studies globally. Cultural Studies like many other disciplines has lost its way since the Global Financial Crisis and is left floundering in the wake of the fast developing New Materialism in Philosophy and Contemporary Critical Theory. When Derek Wynne and myself mashed together the Unit for Law and Popular Culture (ULPC, my research centre) and the Centre for Cultural Analysis (CUCA, his research centre) to form the MIPC at Manchester Metropolitan University the coining of the label ‘Popular Cultural Studies’ was meant to signify both the cultural study of popular culture and the fact that cultural studies needed to be popular as it seemed to have come unstuck somewhere in a morass of recriminations, backbiting and theoreticism. The title of the Institute (FOR Popular Culture) was deliberately selected – whatever we were against, we were for Popular Culture. Manchester as a city was exploding with popular cultural logic bombs at the time and we wanted to capture something of its international appeal. Or at least that was our partially tongue in cheek aim. Anyway folks, it worked as a label! Ashgate published sixteen books in our book series entitled Popular Cultural Studies and Blackwell published two volumes of work dedicated to Popular Cultural Studies. But these things always have a shelf life and soon the MIPC went on to do other kinds of work under the directorship of Justin O’Connor.
Recent book length reviews of the field and future of Cultural Studies by founding fathers like Graeme Turner (What’s Become of Cultural Studies?) and Lawrence Grossberg (Cultural Studies in the Future Tense) have raised important questions about the direction of Cultural Studies, a terrain of enquiry which is effectively fifty years old if you take the creation of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham in the UK by Richard Hoggart in 1964 as its touchstone. Stuart Hall followed Hoggart as Director and an international, global brand of Cultural Studies was created. Much of the agonising over the future of Cultural Studies has been concentrated around Stuart Hall’s recent death and the attempts to situate his legacy academically and politically. Stuart Hall’s famous quote, from an early 1980s History Workshop conference, about Popular Culture being an arena of struggle (and that otherwise Hall didn’t give a damn about it!) is at the epicentre of the continuing, difficult relationship between Popular Culture and Cultural Studies. In the wake of this statement from Stuart Hall, the term Popular Culture – rather than working class culture – found a new, though awkward, place within Cultural Studies. My own PhD was conducted in the 1970s and early 1980s at the University of Warwick (jointly in the Law and Sociology schools). Coventry, where Warwick University was situated, was only a short journey from Birmingham and the CCCS at the University of Birmingham and the Sociology department at Warwick (Paul Corrigan, Simon Frith, Bob Fine, Alan Dawe) enjoyed a friendly if robust rivalry at the time. But there was a theoretical and political point to the sociological rivalry. There were already tensions in the air at CCCS (around feminism, around anti-racist politics, around theory) which permeated Warwick too. This was especially true in the area of ‘leisure and popular culture’. In the last few years the term ‘Physical Cultural Studies’ (or PCS) has begun to be used for areas once designated as the sociology of sport and leisure studies, especially in terms of work on physical movement and the body. Partly this has been a reaction to the fact that Sociology was often displaced in these fields and frequently by Cultural Studies. Perhaps Physical Cultural Studies, as a part of a rejuvenated Popular Cultural Studies overall, is the way to go.
