Interdisciplinary project, born in postwar Britain, that takes culture — popular music, television, magazines, working-class neighborhoods, the meanings people make of their own lives — as a serious object of political and theoretical analysis rather than a trivial surface over "real" economic and political life. Its founding gesture is the refusal of the high/low, elite/mass, serious/entertaining partitions that English literary criticism (above all F.R. Leavis) had inherited from Matthew Arnold; its working premise is that culture is a site where power, resistance, and identity are contested, not an epiphenomenon of something more fundamental.
The canonical founding texts are three books that did not originally think of themselves as a movement: Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy (1957), a Yorkshire-working-class memoirist's study of popular reading and the commercial press; Raymond Raymond Williams's Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961); and E.P. E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963). The institutional crystallization came with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham, founded by Hoggart in 1964 and directed by Stuart Stuart Hall from 1968 to 1979. Under Hall the Centre absorbed continental theory — Antonio Gramsci's hegemony, Louis Althusser's ideology, Barthes's semiotics, feminist and post-colonial thought — and produced a distinctive practice: close political reading of mugging panics, punk subculture, soap operas, policing, school discipline, women's magazines, Thatcherism.
From Birmingham the approach travelled — to the United States, Australia, Latin America, and East Asia — and in travelling changed. North American cultural studies, installed mostly in English and communications departments, tended to shed the explicit Marxist politics of the British project while keeping the attention to popular texts; critics, including Hall himself, worried that it had become a kind of sophisticated consumption theory, celebrating the agency of the audience and losing the question of structural power. The CCCS itself was closed by the University of Birmingham in 2002 — a decision widely read as retaliation for its politics. The tradition is more dispersed now, but its working assumptions — that meaning-making is political labor, that subordinate groups produce culture rather than merely receive it, that the analysis of the ordinary is as serious as the analysis of the canonical — are now so widespread across the humanities that it is easy to forget how recently they had to be fought for.