Page 282 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

NOTES TO PAGES 17–22 271

projects and a general privileging of concrete studies over purely ‘theoretical’ ones.
We believe this return to ‘concrete work’ is vitally necessary and can be
accomplsihed without falling back into a simple empiricism.

Chapter 1
Cultural Studies and the Centre: some problematics and problems

1 Different theoretical emphases are already reflected in the first issue of the journal.
See, for example, the exchange between Alan Shuttleworth (‘People and culture’)
and Stuart Hall (‘A reply’), in WPCS 1.
2 There is still no ‘journal of the field’ as such. Its absence may have helped to keep
the field ‘open’, but it may also have constituted a barrier to its coherent
development. For a long time those interested in Cultural Studies had to track it
down through a labyrinth of internal references.
3 At first the Centre was part of the English Department, and it remains in a Faculty
of Arts. This may have somewhat inhibited the extension of the field to include
sociological, historical and anthropological approaches. There was, for a long time,
a lag between the image of the Centre and the kind of work it was actually doing.
In part, the journal was designed to help close that gap.
4 For example, the Portsmouth CNAA BA degree is based on history and literature;
the North-East London Polytechnic on an innovative kind of sociology course.
Communications Studies has also provided a fruitful disciplinary base, though
itself a ‘hybrid’ in disciplinary terms.
5 The size of the Centre staff has never adequately matched the actual numbers of
research students supervised, the complexity of the field or the range of topics
covered. It was not designated a ‘growth’ area and could not attract the scale of
outside funding commensurate with its project. In less propitious economic times
innovations of this kind in higher education will be even harder to get off the
drawing-board.
6 In the early days most Centre students came from a literary background. But by the
early 1970s we were admitting students with a ‘humanities’ or ‘social science’
disciplinary formation in about equal numbers. This is still the general pattern.
7 In practice, this distinction was not always easy to sustain, especially to those not
directly familiar with our thinking. They assumed—wrongly, in our view —that a
descriptive definition of the field was adequate.
8 Through the journal’s life we printed few ‘outside contributors’, and all of those
had close connections with the Centre and had given versions of their articles as
seminars on some Centre occasion.
9 This grant was generously renewed shortly before Sir Allen Lane’s death. Its great
value was that it was not ‘earmarked’: we could therefore use it to launch new
ventures. It was not large, but—in terms of the Centre’s development—it was
invaluable. Without it the Centre would have remained a loose grouping of
graduate students working on broadly similar themes.
10 Stencilled Papers have been widely used, especially as practical course materials in
a range of courses in universities, colleges and schools.
11 His thesis was subsequently published as Images of Women (Chatto and Windus
1975).