Resistance Rituals is one of the foundational works of the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) of the University of Birmingham and, therefore, of the Cultural Studies. In front of the press and conservative politicians, unable to see in post-war youth cultures more than spectacle or violence, Stuart Hall and his colleagues developed a historical analysis that combined attention to classes with the agency of their protagonists (mods, skinheads , dreadlocks, rudies, hippies).

At a time of accelerated changes in the economic structure as well as the consolidation of mass society, the CCCS researchers accompanied the British youth to try to understand the meanings of their novel "styles", as well as to highlight the cultural forms of resistance implicit in their sociability patterns. At the crossroads of the macro and the micro, of the objective changes and of the subjective desires, they were able to read an era that left behind the homogeneity of the working class but still imperiously sought new forms of community and identity.

The CCCS of the University of Birmingham was founded by Richard Hoggart in 1964. The interdisciplinary perspective of the center combined Marxism, critical theory, post-structuralism, ethnography and media analysis. The renowned Antillean sociologist Stuart Hall was appointed director of the center in 1968. Under his direction the studies considered canonical of Cultural Studies were developed: Policing The Crisis (1978) and The Empire Strikes Back (1982), as well as the classic that is now published, Ritual of resistance (1975).