What is the Birmingham School, specific point 5

The Birmingham School is entirely based on Marxism, but it is quite orthodox Marxism. Under the umbrella of Western Marxism, there are different Marxist traditions, so many people, although they belong to the same academic Marxism, may belong to different schools and do not have a fixed model. There is a history that cannot be ignored.

In the years of the 1968 revolution, the storm of revolution swept through Western Europe and even the United States. The working class, ordinary people and large numbers of students took to the streets, unusually optimistic, positive and excited, but the results were not as one might have imagined, and they were very disappointed. Scholars and theorists at universities have to reflect on themselves.

Was our analysis wrong? We had the right theory and the masses, but we still failed. Therefore, this leaves us with a huge space to think about Marxist theory and tradition, and how to adapt to the actual political context.

In 1964, the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) was established at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, and a new paradigm of popular culture studies has since shone on the academic stage.

In 1964, Richard Hoggart founded The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at Birmingham University in the United Kingdom. After Hoggart served as director of the center for five years, in 1968 Stuart Hall took over as director. The center's third director was Richard Johnson, who succeeded him in 1979, and the fourth director was George Lorrain.

At the end of the 80s of the 20th century, the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies was expanded into the Department of Cultural Studies, which was tasked with teaching cultural studies courses to undergraduates. His research mainly involves popular culture and the daily life of the masses closely related to popular culture, and the objects of analysis and criticism are widely involved in television, movies, radio, newspapers, advertisements, bestsellers, children's comics, pop songs, and even interior decoration and leisure methods. Mass media has always been the focus of research in these many and scattered research contents, especially the study of television.

His research methods were initially influenced by American communication studies, but during Hall's leadership, he absorbed the views of Althusser and Gramsci and turned to the analysis of the ideological function of the media.