Ahead of the 8th Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversation in May 2025, our network of creative and intellectual practitioners gathered at Conway Hall for the SHF Peer Network Spring Workshop. Joined by Professor Françoise Vergès, together they spent the day discussing each others’ practices, exchanging ideas and building connections.

Hosted by the Stuart Hall Foundation, the workshop began with lively introductions between the invited groups: members of the SHF Peer Network, the CoDE ECR (Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity Early Career Researcher) Network and scholars from YCEDE (Yorkshire Consortium for Equity in Doctoral Education). Françoise Vergès then led an open floor discussion on methods and strategies grounded in arts, history, activism, philosophy, postcolonial or feminist studies that may be deployed to address a broad, pertinent set of questions:

“How do the memories and history of past struggles for liberation and abolition help us to “build a politics that speaks to the specific moment in which we are working”? How do we formulate the common grounds that will build international solidarities and connect the struggles for climate justice, against racism, Islamophobia, imperialism, fascism and the rush to grab minerals and lands for extraction? How do we fight locally in a way that strengthen a transnational decolonial antiracist movement, without erasing differences?”

Workshop participants were also invited to attend the 8th Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversation with Françoise Vergès the next day. Eleanor Beaton, Stuart Hall Scholar at the University of Edinburgh (Scottish Graduate School of Social Sciences), shared her reflections on the experience here.

Supported by Comic Relief, the Hollick Family Foundation, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, Conway Hall, CoDE and YCEDE.

Thank you to the SHF Trustees and Associates whose contributions made this event possible: Giorgia Doná, Michael Rustin and Nick Beech.

Writer, researcher, member of the Stuart Hall Foundation Peer Network and a speaker in this year’s In Search of Common Ground programme, Dr. Lola Olufemi shares insights and reflections on her experience participating in the Reading the Crisis conversation series.

I found the format of the Reading the Crisis series particularly generative – thinking about the present conjuncture through the threads left by an intellectual exchange between CLR James and Stuart Hall emphasised the importance of public dialogue as a means of combatting the anti-intellectualism of our increasingly fascist present. We must emphasise the connectivity of radical thinking across forms and arenas in order to reinvigorate the process of interpretative struggle that creates a culture. The dialogue allowed me to consider the creation of new strategies for attending to the present – particularly Houria’s insistence that notion of Gramsci’s notion of the ‘Integral State’, the relationship between the state and civil society as it operates in Europe is racialised and that this integral racial state “however tentacular, does not exhaust either the human being or their capacity to break the chains and enjoy their freedom.” Our conversation illuminated the responsibility of cultural workers, public intellectuals and academics to address the persistence of race as an ordering principle, a “floating signifier”, and the beating heart of the fascist project which is expressed through “common sense” objections to forms of migration in the United Kingdom. It also highlighted the affective dimensions of political education – if we can move people towards political consciousness, actions, affiliations and relationships which reject the myopic and alienated existence we have inherited from the neoliberal project of the last two decades through cultural interventions like this, we should not hesitate to do so. This is one part of a multi-pronged strategy.

I am always thinking about how we gain deeper understanding of the political legacies to which they belong and work in service to extend them in new ways. The necessity of making connections across time cannot be understated. My conversation with Houria made me realise that the exchange between CLR James and Stuart was not an archival relic, locked into the domain of the past; the insights they shared were pertinent to the present moment and were rearticulated in our conversation through a feminist lens. It reminded me of what I already know: we may live under different conditions but the political project remains the same.

– Lola Olufemi, September 2025

On Friday 23^rd May, 2025 University of Sussex Stuart Hall Fellow Bleue Liverpool presented new work at the Brighton Festival as part of her Fellowship. Bleue collaborated with musician and sound artist Ibukun Sunday to create ‘an unclassified syncretism’, an audio-visual intervention within the Meeting House Chapel at the University of Sussex. Through this event, the duo sought to composite metaphysical abstractions of Paul Gilroy with research into migration narratives and landscapes of south-east English Channel coastline port culture. The event was part of the Festival of Ideas, a collaboration between the Faculty of Media, Arts and Humanities at the University of Sussex and Brighton Festival.

Bleue Liverpool shares reflections on her experience of the collaboration below, alongside production photographs of the audio-visual work plus a new text building upon the themes of project.

– So what do we know ?
– You mean, what are we willing to tell ?

Well, we know that the practice of syncretism in the 18^th century Afro-Caribbean, enabled the subjugated to insurgently gather, speak, & remember – right under the gaze of the colonial eye. We’re aware that our ancestors, ambitious as they were, on the night of the 14^th of August 1791, came together in ritual that embedded West African Vodou resistance – a legacy of the Fon Kingdom – into appropriated Christian systems and iconography. Allegedly the appropriation of the Catholic Church’s appliances deeply disturbed colonial administrators, whom were utilizing the system to “civilize”, “assimilate”, “commodify” our ancestors’ dignity. Subsequently, this ritual and a carefully calculated eclipse brought on a rebellion – sugar everywhere – a rupture, in the politics, that made a case of Identity.

– But Ibukun, you’re from that port Lagos, in Nigeria… South North Atlantic?
– Yes
– Me too, from a port, in the North North Atlantic…
– Yes
– A Pan-African conversation when we gather, no? when we commune?
– Yep… it’s old & ongoing
– What is?
– The conversation

The ports of Calais, Dover, Newhaven Port and Dieppe have had a great deal of increased activity in the 21^st century. They are coming, the Others, moving from east to west, using container lorries in any attempt to flee civil rights atrocities, seeking employment, a better life than history. The border-industrial complex is having a field day, acquiring oxygen detectors, attempting to catch whomever before land. Asylum claims are easily accumulated, strategically neglected, and ultimately unclassified – leaving the politics to place the Others in Hotels. They stay in these hotels sometimes for years, a room for a family, unable to seek employment, without access to fundamental natural law actions e.g. cooking for oneself. These hotels, conduits, elongated liminal spaces forge new identities, the nature oscillates in spite of fixity.

– a form of syncretism?
– Yep

In a cafe around Waterloo, down a spiral staircase to a basement that could easily recreate London’s Great Fire of 1666, he comes to my table slowly but densely. “The word “race” was utilized in the same way that in our contemporary the word “culture” is used. That the project of cultural studies is a more or less attractive candidate for institutionalization. The national character ascribed to the concept of modes of production is a fundamental question, ethnohistorical specificity of dominant approaches of cultural politics. That what was initially felt to be a curse – the curse of homelessness or the curse of enforced exile gets repossessed. It becomes affirmed and is reconstructed as the basis of a privileged standpoint.”^[1] I ask him if slavery was integral to the economic fruition of western civilization, how is the western world economically dependent on asylum seekers despite nationalism?

– Our inflections transfigure West to East, North to South.
– Yea… Of course.
– We need to find axis points.
– hmm
– Where do we gather to speak?
– They have Churches.
– Yes Ibukun, they have Churches.

As an Intermedia artist, collaboration has become an integral improvisational utility in circumventing a collective memory. By facilitating Pan-African conversations that take on unorthodox and unconventional mediums – such as sound and video artistic experimentation – new sonic-visual methodology is spontaneously generated that perhaps gives insight on not only acts of resistance but on cultural preservation. What was most appreciated on my side was that the Stuart Hall Foundation gave Ibukun and I the opportunity to come together finally for what will be a ongoing collaboration. In addition, the opportunity to wander, with naïveté, around the coast of South-East Sussex with nothing more than a handi-cam, generously provided by the media department of the University of Sussex, was pivotal. The camera gave me permission to wander, and that in itself from the position of my specific identity: revolutionary.

– Bleue Liverpool, November 2025

View a video excerpt of ‘an unclassified syncretism’ below.

On Friday 22nd March 2024, we invited members of the SHF Peer Network and the CoDE ECR (Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity Early Career Researcher) Network to join us at Conway Hall in London to participate in an Anti-Racist Scholar Activism Workshop. Led by Remi-Joseph Salisbury and Laura Connelly, authors of Anti-Racist Scholar-Activism (Manchester University Press, 2021), this dynamic forum explored anti-racist scholar activism amidst the confluence of crises scholars, artists and practitioners are navigating in their respective fields at this time.

We commissioned SHF Peer Network member CJ Simon – currently a PhD scholar with the White Rose Doctoral Training Partnership – to share his reflections following the event below:

In a time where it can feel quite lonely to be a Black academic, I am forever grateful for the work of the Stuart Hall Foundation. On 22nd and 23rd March, the foundation took over Conway Hall to host two exciting events; the first was an ‘Anti-Racist Scholar Activist’ workshop run by Dr Remi Joseph-Salisbury and Dr Laura Connelly, the second a Public Conversation between the acclaimed installation artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien and the incomparable writer and curator Gilane Tawadros. Whilst very different in form and substance, both events promised to bring together a wide network of scholars, artists, practitioners, and members of the public invested in producing a more equitable world. Boy, did it deliver. Over those two days there was an electric pulse of conversation between attendees stretching out from Conway Hall to the pubs and cafés dotted around London, all centred around our lived experiences, struggles, hopes, and plans for carving some kind of path forward. Lonely no longer.

As a theatre-maker and PhD researcher interested in understanding how communities can come together to shape political opinions and behaviours, there was something incredibly refreshing about a workshop so devoted to praxis: talking through how our theoretical work can and should lead to real-world practice. This conversation was perfectly contrasted with the screening of Isaac Julien’s ‘Once Again… (Statues Never Die)’, a film which very poignantly asks the audience to reflect on the colonial relationship between history, art, and intimacy. Vindicating the writing of Stuart Hall, Julien’s piece demonstrated to me just how crucial art is to the practical work of anti-racist activists. A lovely feeling for someone who came into academia through the world of poetry and theatre.

Surprisingly, the most exciting – and probably most radical – thing to come from this weekend hasn’t actually happened yet. In finding new friends, new peers, and new mentors to talk with, disagree with, and learn from, I know that the work has only just begun. The community is growing and expanding and finding a way to sustainably fight for an equitable world.

– CJ Simon, May 2024