The Stuart Hall Foundation is pleased to announce our 2026 programme expands on the theme In Search of Common Ground, continuing to consider the role of difference in building solidarities within contemporary Britain and beyond.
Launched in 2025 to mark our 10th anniversary, In Search of Common Ground returned to Professor Stuart Hall’s concept of cultural identity to examine how we might broaden the intellectual and creative scope of social justice movements today. In 2026, the programme works through this question across several arenas at the forefront of global politics.
“How can we organise these huge, randomly varied, and diverse things we call human subjects into positions where they can recognise one another for long enough to act together, and thus to take up a position that one of these days might live out and act through as an identity? Identity is at the end, not the beginning, of the paradigm. Identity is what is at stake in political organisation. It isn’t that subjects are there and we just can’t get to them. It is that they don’t know yet that they are subjects of a possible discourse. And that always in every political struggle, since every political struggle is always open, is possible either to win their identification or lose it.”
Stuart Hall, Subjects in History: Making Diasporic Identities (1998)
The second year of In Search of Common Ground opens with our 9th Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversation on Saturday 23rd May at Conway Hall, London, featuring cultural theorist, poet and teacher of performance studies, Fred Moten, as the keynote speaker. Moten’s address, titled ‘The Physics of Political Economy’, builds on Stuart Hall’s engagement with Marxism.
Tickets to attend in person or online are on sale now.
“Among so many other things, Stuart Hall is a wonderfully careful and rigorous reader of Karl Marx. Hall’s critical attendance upon Marx, which is perhaps more accurately described as a generative critical entanglement with Marx, offers new ways to understand the physics, as well as the metaphysics, of political economy. In so doing, the relay between intellectual method and insurgent tactics is illuminated and renewed as well. Let’s pay attention to what we do and how we move.”
Fred Moten, keynote speaker for the 9th Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversation
In Search of Common Ground continues with Reading the Crisis, our online conversation series. The series returns for a third year in an expanded format featuring six in-depth engagements with economics, technology, democracy, migration, culture and climate respectively. Hosted by senior lecturer and former BBC Radio senior producer Aasiya Lodhi and critic, media theorist and editor of Representology K Biswas, Reading the Crisis will take place online monthly from June to November. Guest speakers will be announced and registration will open later this spring.
Our Living Archives podcast will also return this year, featuring intergenerational conversations with six diasporic artists in the UK, produced in partnership with the International Curators Forum. The second season of Living Archives will launch in August.
“I am looking forward to continuing our In Search of Common Ground programme into 2026 at such a critical juncture. As Britain faces deepening divisions, we hope the programme will continue to engage a broad public, generating critical insights that support those working across the connected fields of activism, academia and the arts to consider how we can build solidarities across difference.”
Orsod Malik, Director of the Stuart Hall Foundation
Our collaborations with grassroots organisations continue to develop through a programme of community-based screenings, presenting Hassane Mezine’s feature documentary Fanon: Yesterday Today alongside creative workshops with local partners in Brixton and Birmingham. Additionally, the programme will continue our commitment to fostering critical dialogue through closed workshops for the SHF Peer Network of scholars, fellows and artists.
Read more about In Search of Common Ground on the project page.
In Search of Common Ground is supported by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, the Hollick Family Foundation, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and the Power of Pop Fund, with programme partners the Advocacy Academy, Brixton Community Cinema, Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity, Conway Hall, Hood Futures and the International Curators Forum.
The 9th Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversation with Fred Moten is supported by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, the Hollick Family Foundation, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and the Power of Pop Fund, in collaboration with Conway Hall.
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