ABSTRACT
In an online plea to save Birmingham University's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Paul Gilroy wrote: Conspiracy theorists may present the Birmingham closure as a matter of settling scores by colleagues envious of the reputation of its cultural-studies brand; or it may be seen as belated punishment for radicalism. John Fiske, the usual suspect when it comes to castigating cultural studies for producing overly optimistic readings of popular culture, claims that popular knowledges like conspiracy theories allow disenfranchised subjects an opportunity to narrate their place within a system that renders them powerless. The commodification of conspiracy theory makes the way in which academics and the press deal with conspiracy theory a more pressing issue for those concerned with how popular cultural texts and practices come to be configured. Cultural studies would have to break a 'conspiracy of silence' to reveal a secret: that cultural studies could well be a con, a scam, a swindle.
