Birmingham – Tübingen. Cultural Studies und Empirische Kulturwissenschaft in den 1970er Jahren

Abstract

The paper compares the work of two innovative institutions for research on non-elite culture throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, England, and the Ludwig-Uhland-Institut für empirische Kulturwissenschaft in Tübingen, Germany. In their objects of study, their approaches, the main protagonists’ biographies and in their relationship to the New Left, among other aspects, they overlap considerably, yet they also took some divergent routes. Highlighting studies of mass media, pop phenomena and political-theoretical „problematics“, the paper contributes to an understanding of the different paths the study of (common) culture in Germany and in Englishspeaking countries has taken since then.