Stuart Hall on 50 years of pop culture, politics and power

In 1964, Birmingham University set up a centre to research mass culture. Now an exhibition explores how relevant its ideas remain. In a piece written shortly before his death this year, one of the school's founding fathers explains why

Stuart Hall

It is 50 years since Richard Hoggart, a newly appointed professor of English at Birmingham University, asked me to come to Birmingham and help him develop a research centre that would be concerned with studying popular cultural forms. Like lots of people on the left at that time, I was deeply impressed with The Uses of Literacy, Hoggart's famous book on working-class cultures. Along with a friend, I had just published my own book that tried to address similar themes. I was teaching part-time in London, but was at something of a loose end. It didn't take me long to decide to take up Hoggart's invitation. After much deliberation, we eventually decided that we would call ourselves theCentre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.

The catalogue, and the exhibition it accompanies, represent an attempt to reflect on the relevance of the centre's vast body of work, 50 years on. In the early days, Hoggart, myself and the talented postgraduate students we began to recruit were all involved in a sort of shared experiment. We wanted to research "mass culture" – magazines, for example, Hollywood films or popular television programmes. But this was a subject that was often looked down on by academics, many of whom thought that their focus should be solely on "high" culture, what was regarded as the "best that has been thought and said". There was no pre-existing programme for the study of the kind of things that ordinary people listened to, watched and read in their daily lives. So together we set about trying to work out what we would do, and how. We were attempting to make up, almost on a week-to-week basis, something that today has become widely known as "cultural studies".

The artists featured in this collection are not working in "cultural studies" – not formally, at any rate. Like all good artists, however, they are engaged with the political and cultural contexts of their time. A great deal has changed since we began our experiment five decades ago, but as the work of these artists demonstrate, the kind of questions we were interested in remain pertinent. Why, for example, are women represented in the media in the way they are? What is the significance of how a person chooses to present themselves to the world stylistically? What do anxieties over ethnic and other minorities say about British society more generally? Through a variety of mediums and using a range of approaches, the artists featured in this collection are united by a shared interest in the world around them and their own place in it. Their work takes subjects that may on first glance appear familiar and challenges you to take a second look.

Stuart Hall in February 2012. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

I spent 15 years at the centre, working alongside people I regarded not merely as colleagues but as friends, political allies and intellectual interlocutors. Despite the best efforts of staff, students and well-wishers, cultural studies at Birmingham was closed in 2002. Yet as a field of study, it has expanded and – in different guises – has spread around the world in a way it would have been impossible to envisage in 1964. In this exhibition, the  ongoing necessity of serious engagement with contemporary culture, in all its complex and changing forms, is vividly illustrated. As Bob Marley once put it: "Don't give up the fight."

Stuart Hall, January 2014

The exhibition 50 Years On: The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies runs from 10 May-27 June at the Midlands Arts Centre. There will also be a conference at the university, 24-25 June.

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/apr/20/stuart-hall-50-years-pop-culture