Stuart Hall didn’t just comment on culture—he redefined it. For Hall, culture wasn’t limited to museums or novels, nor was it reducible to working-class hobbies or mass entertainment. It was, fundamentally, the ground on which meaning is made and contested. This seemingly simple reframing changed everything.
Drawing from Raymond Williams’ famous declaration that “culture is ordinary,” Hall expanded the project of cultural studies beyond elite canons or sociological surveys. In his hands, culture became a site of struggle: between classes, between identities, between hegemonic power and everyday resistance. This was not a soft metaphor. It was a diagnostic tool—one still urgently needed in a world of brand activism, aestheticized politics, and weaponized nostalgia.
Cultural Studies Begins in Birmingham—but Not Just There
Hall’s most foundational work emerged through his role at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham, where he served as director from 1968 to 1979. The CCCS became a crucible for rethinking the relationships between media, power, identity, and ideology.
What distinguished Hall’s approach was its theoretical hybridity. He was reading Gramsci on hegemony alongside Althusser on ideology, Barthes on semiotics, and Fanon on race. Culture, for Hall, was not autonomous from power—it was the very medium through which power operated, often subtly. As he put it in Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular’ (1981), popular culture is “one of the sites where this struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged.”
The implications were radical: soap operas, reggae, football, or tabloid newspapers weren’t just trivial pastimes—they were cultural battlegrounds.
Against the High-Low Divide
Perhaps one of Hall’s most enduring interventions was the dismantling of the binary between “high” and “low” culture. In a capitalist society where value is always being negotiated through consumption, representation, and class, cultural forms can’t be neatly categorized as either liberatory or ideological. Their meaning depends on context and use.
This perspective destabilizes both elitist dismissal and naïve celebration. A pop song can reinforce dominant gender norms—or it can be reclaimed as an anthem of resistance. A Netflix series might be progressive in theme but regressive in structure. Culture, in Hall’s sense, is never pure. It's always political.
Culture as Process, Not Product
One of Hall’s most important insights lies in understanding culture as process rather than static product. In “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies” (1992), he reflects on the nature of the field: “Cultural studies is not one thing, it has never been one thing.” Instead, it is a constantly shifting, contested terrain.
This fluidity allowed Hall to treat culture as a lived experience rather than a text to be deciphered. It also meant that culture was never something to be simply “read” for meaning—it had to be situated, historicized, and politicized. This helps explain why Hall often rejected easy answers or definitive readings. He wasn’t interested in declaring what something “meant” so much as showing how meaning was produced—by whom, for whom, and with what effects.
Why It Still Matters
In the era of social media, influencers, and culture wars, Hall’s foundational insights have only grown more urgent. The culture we now consume—and create—is simultaneously more personal and more algorithmically mediated than ever before. Every aesthetic choice, every meme, every brand alignment is an act of positioning. The line between “entertainment” and ideology is blurrier than ever.
By returning to Hall’s understanding of culture as ordinary and contested, we regain a sharper lens through which to view today’s symbolic struggles. When a protest slogan becomes a product, when a politician uses TikTok, when a fandom turns political—we are not witnessing culture becoming politicized. It always was.
