Cultural Studies as a discipline cannot keep up with the shifts and realignments of
culture in our global technological age without abandoning the structure of academic
publishing. On the whole, academic publishing is a business. Anyone who has trolled the
Internet for used copies of books at the beginning of a semester knows it’s a really
good business, too. Good for universities, for publishing houses, for bookstores and
for re-sellers. Its good for everyone, really, except young academics. This needs to
change.

How can we talk about culture, a fluid
subject no matter your academic or disciplinary perspective, when it can take as long
as four years for an accepted paper to be published in a journal, even less competitive
one? We believe this forum is a partial answer. What we’ve worked to provide here is a
central location where the debates about contemporary culture can happen as near to the
events that inspire them as possible. Think of the ECCCS as a place where every good
conversation about cultural studies you’ve had over lunch could happen again.

We don’t contend to be the model of
what should replace the current system of academic publishing � but it’s a start.

- Justin Philpot

October 1, 2008

Why we’re calling it The ECCCS

For students of Cultural Studies in North America, Great Britain and Australia citing
the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies as the theoretical and
spiritual locus of Cultural Studies is de rigueur. Rightly so. It’s hard to imagine
Cultural Studies without the hard work of the Birmingham Centre’s founders, members and
associates. We all owe them a great debt. But Chris Jenks is also right when he
describes what was created there an “ill-disciplined hybrid” and a “bastard child.” And
bastard children, shunned and maligned though they may be, have a very peculiar habit
of revealing in their own nature the idiosyncrasies of their parents.

Cultural Studies has never been a discipline with a single cohesive vision. Theoretical
and methodological differences existed before the discipline coalesced into a
recognizable field of study, and have only intensified since. Much of what enters the
field as cultural analysis is little more than personal defenses of theoretical
positions, exposing individual sympathies but doing little to increase the reader’s
knowledge about what anything means. And so this project does not rely on a particular
theoretical base to justify its existence. Rather, it is an attempt to break out of a
decades-old rut of mudslinging.

The Electronic Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies shares the better part of its
name with the Birmingham Centre because we believe they share the same type of
revolutionary potential. The Birmingham Centre heralded the theoretical break from the
dominant high culture/low culture debate that had held sway for centuries. This project
endeavors to break away from the academic publishing system that restricts young
academics from addressing relevant, contemporary issues in cultural studies in a timely
fashion. We should be able to share and collaborate with our colleagues around the
world, in as close to real time as possible. We want to be able to discuss things that
are happening, not what has happened. And we want to discuss what it means. The ECCCS
represents a new space and a new process that we hope can be adopted and adapted by
anyone with similar interests. It’s easy, it’s exciting and it’s accessible. And we
believe it is the first step in helping bring about a new way of “doing” cultural
studies.

- Justin Philpot

August 22, 2008