ABSTRACT
Cultural studies first emerged as a recognisable discipline in England at the end of the 1950s, with the publication of a number of key works. Despite how politically different the Workers Educational Association and the extra-mural departments were from one another, they tended to be staffed by teachers motivated by similar political, ethical and pragmatic commitments. Firstly, the British Labour movement. More than this, however, most of the early cultural studies writers were committed to a particular set of ideas about the direction which leftist politics in Britain and in the rest of the world ought to take and the values which ought to inform it. The first key institutional moment in the story of this development is the founding of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in 1964. The relationship between the May Day Manifesto and the more famous events of May 1968 is instructive.
