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Raymond Williams’ major contributions to intellectual progress are usually categorised within cultural theory, media studies or neo-Marxist studies. Serious analysis of his contributions to education as a field of practice as well as a field of study have been relatively neglected. This is the first book to redress that omission, focusing on how his writing and thought have helped us to understand education in Britain and also provide analytical tools that have helped to shape educational studies in the USA and internationally. Ian Menter draws on Williams’ several novels, including Border Country, as well as on his seminal contributions to cultural theory, including Culture and Society, The Long Revolution, Keywords and Marxism and Literature. Menter also examines how Williams’ life shaped his understanding of education including his early involvement in adult education and his deeply ambivalent relationship with the academy. Public education is positioned as a key arena of social struggle where decisions shaping the nature of our futures and crucial to creating a democratic and just society. The book includes a foreword by Michael Apple who is John Boscom Professor Emeritus of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA, which makes reference to the importance of Williams’ work in relation to education in the USA.

This paper addresses the theme of fear and anxiety in contemporary drama and performance through a consideration of the trope of the dystopian near-future as it has re-occurred in a significant number of recent British plays. It takes as its starting point the contention that the prevalence and persistence of this motif makes it worthy of investigation. The plays under discussion do not re-inscribe socio-political problems, or the status quo, by pretending to be objective records of the real world. Instead they create alternative fictional near-future worlds, exploratory dystopias that deliberately perform anxiety-inducing and estranging critical interrogations of current cultural and political concerns. Drawing on the work of Raymond Williams this essay seeks to show that the critical and emotional insights offered by these play-worlds are made possible only through the process of our pondering their strangeness. Each example stages its own particular disruption of theatrical realism and in so doing engages critically both with the British realist theatrical tradition, and also with the wider cultural discourses about ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ that haunt our contemporary neoliberal moment and the emotions these discourses produce.

This article examines the meaning of the ‘impolitical’ regarding cases of impolitical theatre and associated critical discourse, with reference to Rodolfo Usigli and Raymond Williams, among others. It is argued that ‘impolitical’ theatre represents social relations from the standpoint of the ideal of culture. The analysis starts with Richard Schechner’s critique of the original Broadway production of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and discusses this play, segueing into The Performance Group’s Dionysus in 69. The author indicates the differences of theatre practice between the examples chosen, and shows that these theatres nevertheless participate in the same form of theatrical representation as they broach similar social questions of moment in the Unites States in the 1960s. John Yves Pinder has recently received his PhD from the University of Leeds. He is currently teaching at Leuphana University of Lüneberg.

This paper reflects upon intellectual possibilities of Raymond Williams’ classic study The Country and the City (1975) within current urban and regional research. First, the paper canvasses the relevance of the book by constructing a frame of reference based on its citations in urban and regional studies. The principal findings of this approach discern frequent use of the main points developed by Williams in recent discourse. Thereafter the paper raises two issues that have been somewhat neglected in the present adoption of The Country and the City. First, the possibilities of the concept of structure of feeling still seem underdeveloped in urban and regional research today. The idea of generation-specific structures aims at the heart of the habit of urban theory-making. Second, drawing on the work on hierarchies of French anthropologist Louis Dumont the binary relationship between country/city shown in the book could be used as a fruitful methodological starting point for thinking about representation in more recent studies of spatial relationships.

Carl Andre’s opposition between an activating art and a pacifying culture becomes the impetus for wider reflections on artistic autonomy and agency with special reference to how fine art is taught at college. I propose that artistic agency might better be accounted for and enacted by conceiving of it not as something set against or at a distance from culture in general, but ‘as’ culture. Through an overview of various institutional and discursive accounts of artistic production which describe the ways in which art is itself influenced and determined by external factors, and an extended analysis of Raymond Williams theory of culture as ‘collective advance’, I propose that fine art education needs to confront the question of contemporary art’s wider cultural embeddedness, and the political culture of art itself—a politics based in the nature of the social relationships art practice engenders.

This book provides a critical introduction to the full range of Williams' work - fiction and non-fiction. It assesses the significance of his contribution in understanding culture, politics and society. Fair-minded, accurate and sensitive, the book makes crucial connections between the different aspects of Williams' work and the underlying concern for a democratic polity which informed it.

Cultural and creative industries are now an established area of academic research. Yet, the welcome innovations that are associated with the development of a new field of study are also matched by confusions and conjectures. The term itself, ‘cultural and creative industries’, is the subject of extensive debate. It goes hand in hand with closely related concepts such as ‘creative economy’, as well as reflecting definitional struggles aimed at conjoining or demarcating the creative and the cultural. Many of these debates have been the subject of sociological research and research in Sociology. This collection considers that specific role of sociology, and Sociology, to the study of cultural and creative industries. The e-special issue collects articles ranging from early empirical and theoretical precursors to the formal establishment of cultural and creative industries as a field of study, to more recent work considering the coherence and usefulness of the category itself.

In 1964 the furniture designer and entrepreneur Terence Conran, along with various partners, opened a shop in London selling furniture and household goods. It was a 'lifestyle shop' called Habitat. By the late 1970s is was a fixture of many cities and towns across Britain. This essay treats Habitat as a taste formation, as part of a structure of feeling that was specific to what many social commentators were calling the 'new middle class'. The essay charts some of those feelings and the material culture that supported them, and argues for an approach to taste that treats it as an agent of sociohistorical change as well as a practice that maintains and reproduces social class. The feelings that Habitat could be seen to activate ranged from 'cottage urbanism' and improvised sociability to a sense of middle-class-classlessness. Habitat's role was ambiguous, nurturing both middle class radicalism and the marketization of democratic impulses. In the transition from welfare state socialism to neoliberal hegemony Habitat's role was both surreptitious and substantial.

Widely regarded as one of the founding figures of international cultural studies, Raymond Williams is of seminal importance in rethinking the idea of culture. In tribute to his legacy, this edited volume is devoted to his theories of cultural materialism and is the most substantial and wide-ranging collection of essays on his work to be offered since his death in 1988. \"Raymond Williams was the last of the great European male revolutionary socialist intellectuals born before the end of the age of Europe (1492-1945).\" --Cornel West Contributors include Stanley Aronowitz, John Brenkman, Peter de Bolla, Catherine Gallagher, Stephen Heath, John Higgins, Peter Hitchcock, Cora Kaplan, David Lloyd, Robert Miklitsch, Michael Moriarty, Morag Shiach, David Simpson, Gillian Skirrow, Kenneth Surin, Paul Thomas, Gauri Viswanathan, and Cornel West.