Les limites du Centre : Nature, Place et Héritage du CCCS au sein du monde Académique et Politique (1964-1988)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Is there room for marginal practices within universities? By contributing a comprehensive institutional history of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) between its founding year in 1964 in Birmingham and its merger with the University of Birmingham’s Department of Sociology in 1988, this dissertation offers possible answers to that question. Building on seminal work assessing the significance of the CCCS in the academic and political world of the second half of the 20th century, this study reveals the entire institutional trajectory of the Centre per se, and lays emphasis on its lesser-known periods and practices. By examining the CCCS’s various networks which supported its founding, endorsed its early production, disseminated its publications and built on its framework to expand the burgeoning field of cultural studies — while coming to its rescue in times of crisis (and sometimes overusing its slender resources) — this dissertation seeks to focus on the working practices which turned the Centre into the so called “Birmingham school”. To do so, it focuses on CCCS’s archival material held at the University of Birmingham’s Cadbury Research Library and on three series of qualitative interviews with former CCCS members including one conducted especially for this work. By articulating such material, in connection to the historical context during which the Centre evolved for close to a quarter of a century, to a sociological understanding of the power struggles at play within the academic field, this work establishes that the CCCS’s marginality was both a source of strengths and weaknesses: the Centre achieved creating something beyond its own walls, as it became a place where an experience grounded in academic freedom could develop. Nevertheless, the CCCS, its growing fame notwithstanding, was never entirely safe and never ceased to be fragile on the institutional, theoretical and operational levels. Such is the crest line which has been explored in this work. By highlighting these findings, this research contributes one answer (there are many others) to the question of what can be achieved from the margins of the university.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".