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At a time of competing emergencies, unheralded opportunities, anxious futures, and in a world that is more culturally informed than ever it was, we insist on the urgency of cultural analysis.
Culture, for us, is everyday meaning-making and expression. It is the habits, beliefs, traumas, hopes, fears, energies, moods, atmospheres and desires through which we all live. Culture is how we experience and interpret the world. It is the substance through which we orient our daily lives and out of which we grapple with the past and cast out into the future. Culture is also built of relations, to each other, to and between objects, and with the planet.
The Sussex Centre for Cultural Studies is dedicated to a politically nuanced and methodologically innovative study of culture. We specialise in exploratory forms of cultural analysis. These can be centred on the study of the poetics of cultural phenomena or an engagement with their social, political and historical contexts, and often both together.
We work with social and aesthetic forms of culture and attend to them in a capacious manner. For example, we study food, youth and city cultures, the everydayness of digital life, intersectional formations, sonic and digital landscapes, feelings and fashion, atmospheres and demonstrations, playgrounds and prisons. We could go on.
We are still inspired by the tradition of cultural studies and their political underpinnings, as exemplified in the work of Stuart Hall and others, and we are always intrigued by the innovations that cultural studies continues to provide.
We recognise that the social is undergoing processes of reconfiguration and that the complexity of speeds and scales of the world requires being as sensitive to the discordant and the messy as to what appears to fit neatly within an analytic frame. We understand culture as central to these reconfigurations, and we defend the vitality of cultural studies accordingly.
In our study, we value flexibility and nimbleness as much as thoroughness and rigour in developing our explanatory analyses and political philosophies. We are deeply attracted to finding new approaches to the questions culture poses, and to the ideas and terms that have been remaindered by previous forms of critical theory. We haven’t given up thinking about totality, universality, difference, experience, and existence. And we certainly haven’t given up on thinking about justice. But we think about such things not as abstract entities but as grounded theoretical and substantive responses to the material, sensually specific, social practices of culture.
This is reflected in the methodologies we use to capture the nuances inherent in the study of culture. These include ethnographic, autoethnographic, archival, artistic, literary, multi-scalar and formalist approaches.
Last but not least, we hope to provide a convivial context for the study and analysis of culture. At a time of dislocation and competition we maintain a mutualist ethos in which academic staff, students and researchers of culture can work collectively, and in which we use the resources of the centre, to support one another in that endeavour.
We invite researchers interested in participating in the centre to contact us.
