ABSTRACT
In his recent essay ‘“A moment of profound danger”: British cultural studies away from the Centre’, Richard Miller assesses both the virtues and the shortcomings of the Open University Popular Culture course (Miller, 1994). He does so, however, with a broader purpose in view: to contribute to a history of cultural studies that will pay closer attention to the institutional conditions which regulate its practices and which, in so doing, may also sometimes constrain and limit its possibilities. His attention thus focuses on the respects in which a careful examination of the Popular Culture course-or, as it is now widely known, U203-can direct our attention to ‘the tensions between the theoretical positions that have been staked out by cultural studies and the pedagogical practices it has called on in specific institutional settings to bring others into its field of study’ (Miller, 1994:419).
