8.3: Popular Culture Studies- Bowling Green and Birmingham

Contemporary study of popular culture can be viewed as a merging of two larger academic fields: communication studies and cultural studies (Carey, 1989; Grossberg, 1993). As U.S. sociologists from the Chicago became less focused on media projects the Mass Communications field of study became a formalized academic field (Carey, 1996). When those scholars began connecting with the Speech and Rhetoric Communications field, the more substantial field of communication studies was born (Harwood & Cartier, 1953). This broader field incorporated textual analysis and rhetorical criticism into the mass communications subject areas, and text-based studies of media products and their messages became common.

The Birmingham School:

Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS)

Popular culture studies were rooted in both scientific or behavioral audience-based analyses and interpretive analyses of the text. Some of these interpretive studies were tied to ethnographic studies of audiences and how they interpret the messages.The influence of CCCS has surpassed into the mainstream and from academics to consumer-based, collective, and preservation efforts.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): "South Austin Museum of Popular Culture" by Venturist is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Furthermore, across the Atlantic, studies from the Frankfurt school worked their way into the Semiotics and Rhetoric fields, including the semiotic theories of scholars like Roland Barthes that we discussed in Module 2. There, too, the messages and texts of media products became a focus, however these studies often maintained the social reform goals of the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory and Marxism (Storey, 2018). Added to this mix were the theories of French Psychoanalytic Theorists and literary criticism by scholars such as Jacques Lacan and Jean-Paul Sartre, which provided the foundations for Postmodern and Post-Structural Theories that we will discuss in more detail in the next unit of this module (Storey, 2018; Turner, 2005).

On both sides of the Atlantic, as these academic traditions merged, two specific programs developed that led the field of popular culture studies (Carey, 1989; Grossberg, 1993; Storey, 2018). The first of these two schools was established in 1964 at the University of Birmingham in England. This was the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) we discussed in Module 5 as having been tied to the establishment of the contemporary field of Cultural Studies research.

Figure \(\PageIndex{2}\): "Muirhead Tower - University of Birmingham - blue plaque - The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies" by ell brown is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Popular Culture studies was one of the prominent areas within this program.

The Bowling Green School:

Department of Popular Culture, Popular Culture Library, and Popular Culture Association

American scholars were also becoming more focused on this research, and in 1969 Ray Browne established what would become the Browne Popular Culture Library at Bowling Green State University in Ohio (Browne, 2002). It is the largest collection of popular culture artifacts produced since the 1880s in the United States (BGSU Libraries, 2018). This was soon followed by the Browne’s establishment of the Center for Popular Culture Studies in 1970, and the Department of Popular Culture at Bowling Green in 1973 (Brandt & Clare, 2018; Browne, 2002). Browne also helped found the Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association (Browne, 2002; Stevenson, 1977).

Figure \(\PageIndex{3}\): "Honda Civic (US), National Museum of American History" by InSapphoWeTrust is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

In the early years the Birmingham School maintained its focus on Marxist critiques of popular culture as a hegemonic force. Similarly, the Bowling Green School took a more primary source text-focused critical approach toward individual artifacts of popular culture, identifying the myths, heroes, icons, and other semiotic elements embedded in the artifacts and traced them to underlying cultural beliefs. Bowling Green’s approach to popular culture also took an ethnographic turn, and included contemporary folklore studies, while the Birmingham school kept its primary focus on the culture industry.

Popular culture studies on both sides of the Atlantic maintained a focus on the relationship between cultural artifacts and the communication of power. Stuart Hall’s (1973, 1974) reception theory and discussion of encoding and decoding messages added a new element by challenging the long-held Marxist assumptions that popular culture was inherently oppressive. Hall argued that non-White audiences viewed White popular culture through a critical eye themselves, therefore independently challenging the presumed normalizing tendencies of the Culture Industry (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1944/1946).

Simultaneously, Ray Browne argued that popular culture artifacts needed to be studied because they reached a larger portion of the general public and had more potential influence than any of the so-called great works of literature and theatre studied in contemporary English programs (Brandt & Clare, 2018; Browne, 2002). He further argued that popular culture artifacts themselves reflected a much broader swath of American political and ideological values than most critics assumed, furthering the argument that popular culture was a needed field of study (Duncum, 1987).

In both the UK and the US, detractors to the study of popular culture existed in academia.

In some established academic departments, this movement clearly constitutes a threat from within. It is one thing to have to contend with those forces of mass communication which rage untrammeled outside of the walls of academia. It is another to be challenged by one's colleagues. A scholar who has, for example, spent his life studying the works of Beethoven does not take kindly to the suggestion that a study of the Beatles should have an academic priority comparable to that accorded Beethoven. (Stevenson, 1977).

Scholars supporting the idea of studying and teaching popular culture studies, however, argued that the influence of popular culture artifacts on audiences was justification for continuing the academic pursuit (Brandt & Clare, 2018; Browne, 2002; Stevenson, 1977; Storey, 2018).

In the US, Browne’s work soon inspired similar programmatic development in Communication Studies, English, History, and American Studies programs at Michigan State University, the University of Chicago, Western Kentucky University, and the University of Maryland. This was followed by standard inclusion of popular culture studies into communication and media programs such as the University of Southern California’s film school and that university’s Annenberg School for Communication Studies (Mintz, 1983; Stevenson, 1977).

Figure \(\PageIndex{4}\): "Embodied, Constructed and Performed Youth Identities in Relation to Global Celebrity Influencers, Popular Culture, Social Media and Intersectionality: Dreaming the Impossible Dream. Dr. Fiona Blaikie #viznotes" by giulia.forsythe is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Popular culture studies today encompass many fields of study, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. Media studies and communication continue to house some of the more robust approaches to the study of popular communication, especially as communication technologies continue to increase in reach, mobility, and significance to daily life.

References

BGSU Libraries. (2018). Ray and Pat Browne Library for Popular Culture Studies. Retrieved from https://www.bgsu.edu/library/pcl.html

Brandt, J., & Clare, C. (2018). An introduction to popular culture in the US: People, politics, and power. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Browne, R. B. (2002). Conversations with Scholars of American Popular Culture: Ray B Browne. Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture, 1900 to Present, 1(2).

Carey, J.W. (1989). Communication as culture: Essays on media and society. Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman Inc.

Carey, J.W. (1996). The Chicago School and mass communication research. In E.E. Dennis, & E. Wartella, (Eds.). American communication research: The remembered history, (pp. 21-38). New York: Routledge.

Duncum, P. (1987). Approaches to cultural analysis. Journal of American Culture, 10(2), 1-15.

Grossberg, L. (1993). Can cultural studies find true happiness in communication? Journal of Communication, 43(4), 89-97.

Harwood, K., & Cartier, F. (1953). On a general theory of communication. Audiovisual communication review, 1(4), 227-233.

Mintz, L. E. (1983). " Recent Trends in the Study of Popular Culture": Since 1971. American Studies International, 21(5), 88-104.

Stevenson, G. (1977). The Wayward Scholar: Resources and Research in Popular Culture. Library Trends, 25(4), 779-818.

Storey, J. (2018). Cultural theory and popular culture: An Introduction (8th ed.). New York: Routledge.

Turner, G. (2005). British cultural studies. New York: Routledge.