For the 8th Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversation, the Stuart Hall Foundation welcomed political theorist, writer, activist, independent curator and political educator, Prof. Françoise Vergès as the keynote speaker. Taking place on Saturday 17th May at Conway Hall in London and online via livestream broadcast, the event inaugurated our 2025 programme, In Search of Common Ground.

Vergès’ keynote, titled ‘There Will Be No Future Without Seizing the Present’, considered how we might think across difference to construct a life-affirming politics in times of poly-crisis. The writer and activist posited that building common ground is building transnational solidarity, and urged against despair: “Let us think defeat as a chapter in the long fight for liberation and freedom.”

The keynote was preceded by a video excerpt from Stuart Hall’s Race, The Floating Signifier (1997) and an introductory address from SHF Executive Director Orsod Malik. After the keynote, Vergès was joined by Mohammed Elnaiem, Director of the Decolonial Centre, for a discussion and audience Q&A which further considered how we might understand Hall’s thinking on “a politics without guarantees”.

The event also featured the premiere screening of ‘The Audacity of Our Skin’. Featuring poet and essayist Selina Nwulu reading her newly revisited version of the titular work to camera, the filmed performance was shot and edited by videographer Alice Kanako and commissioned by the Stuart Hall Foundation supported by Comic Relief.

Following the event, attendees were invited to congregate at an informal reception, where they discussed ideas with programme contributors and with each other. Plant-based South Asian food catered by Goodness Gracious Feast and drinks from the bar were made available, while Newham Bookshop held a stall with titles related to the programme on offer.

Skin Deep hosted a pop-up library at the back of the hall, continuing their efforts to make space for creative thinking in service of and beyond racial justice. The library of liberatory texts offered attendees the opportunity to relax and flip through back prints of the Skin Deep magazine, pick up their latest issue and delve into their sources of inspiration.

Read a transcript of the event recording.

View photography from the event.

Supported by Comic Relief, the Hollick Family Foundation and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, in collaboration with Conway Hall, Words of Colour and Pluto Press.

Listen to the audio recording of The Second Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversation, held at Conway Hall on 2nd February 2019. The event gathered our growing community of artists, students, academics, cultural activists and engaged citizens to consider how to reimagine and reclaim public space in the context of our present social and political upheavals.

Pursuing this question through multiple lenses, the afternoon centred on two sets of conversations. The first, between artist Willie Doherty and curator Elvira Dyangani Ose, addressed the question of ‘how to share a place’ through Doherty’s longstanding engagement with the Ireland/Northern Ireland border. The second conversation featured a panel including Guardian columnist John Harris; sociologist Michael Rustin; and senior editor, Novara Media, Ash Sarkar. Titled ‘Meeting the Crisis: Trump, Brexit, and the Left’, it asked ‘what is to be done’. These two discussions were punctuated with interventions and perspectives from a new generation of artists, scholars and cultural activists.

Programme:

14.00: Welcome note Hammad Nasar, Stuart Hall Foundation Executive Director

14.10: Black Cultural Activism Map Presentation Farzana Khan

14.15: My time as a Stuart Hall Scholar Ruth Ramsden-Karelse

14.20: How to share a place Willie Doherty in conversation with Elvira Dyangani Ose

15.10: Joining the Stuart Hall Foundation’s work Rebecca Hall and Hammad Nasar

15.20: Tea & coffee break

15.50: Meeting the Crisis: Trump, Brexit, and the Left John Harris, Michael Rustin and Ash Sarkar, chaired by Claire Alexander

17.05: Closing remarks Gilane Tawadros, Stuart Hall Foundation Vice-Chair

17.10: Musical improvisation * Elaine Mitchener, Mark Sanders and Neil Charles * Acoustic performance—not recorded.

17.30: Event finishes

Image: Willie Doherty, At the Border IV (The Invisible Line), 1995. Image courtesy the artist and Kerlin Gallery.

Our third Annual Public Conversation pursued the theme of Resistance through multiple lenses. The event, which took place on Saturday 8th February, welcomed special guests; multidisciplinary artist and designer Bahia Shehab, journalist and author Jack Shenker, investigative journalist Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi, sociologist Yusef Bakkali, and jazz pianist and composer Nikki Yeoh. The afternoon was chaired by Professor Ethel Brooks. Watch a selection from the day’s sessions: – Keynote from Jack Shenker 00:00:04​ – Discussion panel with, Yusef Bakkali, Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi and Jack Shenker, chaired by Ethel Brooks 00:30:33​ – Stuart Hall Foundation Chair Gilane Tawadros, introduces Nikki Yeoh 1:25:50​ – Performance from Nikki Yeoh 1:26:43​ www.stuarthallfoundation.org

The Stuart Hall Foundation welcomed renowned public intellectual Jacqueline Rose for our 6th Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversation at Conway Hall, London, on Saturday 11th February 2023. She delivered a lecture entitled ‘What is a Subject? Politics and Psyche After Stuart Hall’. Stuart Hall’s work can be read as a perpetual searching, however difficult or painful, for the linchpins which entangle intimate personal history to global political relations. It’s through this approach to reading Hall that Rose began to realise how deeply embedded his work was within psychoanalytical thought. In this lecture, Rose tracks the key aspects of Hall’s thinking, and questions how, through its prism, he might have reached out to some of the most anguished political and cultural realities of our current times. Following Rose’s keynote and a brief intermission, she is joined by psychotherapist Sharon Numa in conversation. Jacqueline Rose recently adapted this lecture into an essay on Stuart Hall at The New York Review. Read it here: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/09/21/the-analyst-stuart-hall-jacqueline-rose/