Dick Hebdige

English sociologist

Dick Hebdige (born 1951) is an English media theorist and sociologist, and a professor emeritus of art and media studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he taught from 2004 to 2021. His work is commonly associated with the study of subcultures, and its resistance against the mainstream of society. His current research interests include media topographies, desert studies, and performative criticism. Hebdige has written extensively on contemporary art, design, media and cultural studies, on mod style, reggae, postmodernism and style, surrealism, improvisation, and Takashi Murakami. and an honorary degree from Goldsmiths, University of London (formerly known as Goldsmiths' College).

Hebdige has been teaching at art schools since the mid 1970s. Since 1992, Hebdige has been working on arts administration, events planning, program development, and curriculum innovation first at CalArts (2001 2008), then at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) as director of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center from 2005 and as co director of the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA). Hebdige is also a scholar in residence at the University of Houston where he has given multimedia lectures and performance series with the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts. In partnership with the Future Art Research Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, Hebdige launched UCIRA’s Desert Studies Project in 2009. The program, now run from UCSB, is "a pilot program in interdisciplinary arts centered research, immersion pedagogy, and process curating," aiming to "integrate arts based research and the production, performance and exhibition of artworks into Desert Studies." The project invites students, faculty, and the public to make art that is "immersive" in the desert in multiple ways.

Hebdige's 1979 book Subculture: The Meaning of Style was written between 1977 and 1978 amid the unfolding of punk in the United Kingdom. Hebdige, in his mid twenties at the time, had just graduated with a Master of Arts degree from Birmingham University’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). At this time, the domain of cultural studies was just emerging. Subculture was commissioned by University of Cardiff English professor and editor, Terence Hawkes, as part of a series published by Methuen called New Accents (aimed at introducing theoretical and interpretive approaches to English literature students). The commission was an opportunity for Hebdige to continue graduate work on developing a contextual, culturalist model of youth culture and consumption. Specifically, linking the concerns of youth culture, consumption, and the politics of insubordination to debates within aesthetics, semiotics, and poststructuralism. Hebdige states that “the aspiration was to blur the line between specialized, discipline embedded academic and intellectually curious subcultural, non academic readerships.”

Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London & New York: Routledge, 1979. Cut‘n’Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music. London & New York: Routledge, 1987. Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things. London & New York: Routledge, 1988.

Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. Edited by Paul D. Miller a. k. a. DJ Spooky. Hebdige contributed a chapter.