For over three decades, the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has been a vibrant hub for intellectual exploration.
The center brings together a multidisciplinary range of scholars, both from within and beyond the campus, for dialogue on Marxist theory and its legacies; feminist, queer, and trans studies; decolonial, abolitionist, and ecocritical thought; new perspectives on science and medicine; and the visual and performing arts.
This fall, UC Santa Cruz will recognize the importance of the Center for Cultural Studies with a two-day conference on October 24 and 25. The celebration will showcase the Center’s culture of interdisciplinary dialogue and collaborative inquiry, said current Center co-director and UC Santa Cruz Professor of Literature and Critical Race & Ethnic Studies Vilashini Cooppan.
"This conference is not just a celebration of our history but also an opportunity to envision the importance and future of cultural studies in a rapidly changing world," Cooppan continued. "At its core, cultural studies at UC Santa Cruz has always been about bringing together diverse perspectives to tackle complex societal issues."
Echoing the campus’s founding focus on experimental inquiry, the Center for Cultural Studies has provided a concrete structure for thinking in new ways.
Founded in 1988 at UC Santa Cruz, the Center recalled the dynamic environment of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in England, which was founded in 1965 and shaped by the Black British cultural theorist Stuart Hall and other historians, sociologists, and political theorists over the next 35 years.
Citing the Birmingham school’s seminal work of the 1980s, Cooppan noted, “Cultural Studies emerged out of a moment in which it was really important to contest Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative and imperial Britain, and to confront the policing of youth of color and anti-welfare retrenchments in various kinds of state provisions. Cultural Studies was part of a larger project to speak truth to power, to bring about social change, and to democratize both society and learning.”
UC Santa Cruz’s Center for Cultural Studies became known nationally and internationally for convening scholars, activists, and artists from across the social sciences, humanities, and arts, as well as for its academic culture of open exchange.
“One of the Center for Cultural Studies’s standout features is its ability to facilitate regular, meaningful interactions among members,” Cooppan noted. "We are incredibly proud of the unique community that has been built through the Center’s weekly colloquia. It’s a space where faculty, students, and visitors can engage deeply with work in progress, offering feedback that is truly interdisciplinary."
Thanks to a mutual understanding of one another's work and perspectives, the Center’s community is “not just one of colleagues but of co-thinkers,” Coopan said.
The 35th anniversary conference will serve as a platform for revisiting core themes that shaped the Center's conversations over the years, including capitalism, colonialism, the Anthropocene, the Global South, science and technology studies, and feminist, queer, and trans studies.
Lightning talks structured on these and other keywords will snapshot cultural studies concerns and methods.
An opening conversation with founding director Jim Clifford will explore the emergence of the field of cultural studies and the particular twist it took at UCSC.
A multimedia presentation by a former graduate student affiliate of the Center will explore artistic strategies for political mobilization.
Other former graduate student affiliates will reflect on how the Center’s research clusters and larger community informed their academic and professional journeys.
A final open conversation will consider how cultural studies impacted academic and public discourse, how it remains relevant to the study of the global present, and where it (and the UCSC Center for Cultural Studies) may go in the future. In addition to panels and discussions, the conference will include a ceremonial walk from the Center’s present home in Humanities 1 to the historic Mural Room in Oakes College, where the weekly colloquium met for close to two decades.
For more information about the conference and the Center for Cultural Studies, please visit the center’s website.
