ABSTRACT
Working in the belly of the beast to challenge and dismantle the beast is an enterprise fraught with contradiction. Yet artists and cultural workers through the ages have used popular cultural forms that are bought, traded, and consumed in the capitalist marketplace to undermine the logic of that same marketplace. Within adult education there has been interest among educators and scholars in how popular culture can be used to animate social change. European Marxist scholarship and critical theory, particularly the work of Gramsci, Benjamin, and Adorno, laid a rich foundation for contemporary cultural studies. In the United Kingdom much of the work of the Welsh cultural critic, Raymond Williams, the BritishCaribbean intellectual Stuart Hall, and the first (and only) chairman of the National Advisory Council for Adult and Continuing Education, Richard Hoggart, was conducted within university extra-mural adult education. Williams (1995) consistently declared that the foundations of contemporary cultural studies were laid in English adult education.
