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

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.

Eleanor Beaton, Stuart Hall Scholar at the University of Edinburgh (Scottish Graduate School of Social Sciences), shares her reflections on these events below, exploring themes of resilience, solidarity, and hope amid ongoing crises.

Wrapping up an afternoon spent thinking through how to build transnational solidarities across our differences in times of poly-crisis, Françoise Vergès drew upon the past to impart upon us a message of hope for the future – “the desire for emancipation,” she said, “will never die, across four centuries of slavery, there was always resistance.” In the present moment, marked by the genocide of the Palestinian people, by new and evermore violent wars waged in the name of U.S. imperialism, by the harshening of border regimes in Fortress Europe, and by the disastrous effects of climate breakdown, Françoise Vergès wove together the past and the present in order to imagine an alternative future, in order to teach us how we might continue in spite of it all, how we might, in her words, “confront finite disappointment with infinite hope.”

– Eleanor Beaton, June 2025

Ahead of the 9th Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversation in May 2026, our network of creative and intellectual practitioners gathered at Conway Hall for the SHF Peer Network Spring Workshop. Joined by cultural theorist, poet and teacher of performance studies, Fred Moten, together they spent the day discussing each others’ practices, exchanging ideas and building connections.

Hosted by the Stuart Hall Foundation and facilitated by SHF Associate Ruth Ramsden-Karelse, the workshop began with introductions from attendees: members of the SHF Peer Network and the CoDE ECR (Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity Early Career Researcher) Network. Fred Moten and Ruth Ramsden-Karelse led open discussions, breakout sessions and readings around Policing the Crisis (Hall et al), The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (Spillers) and more, prompted by a line of enquiry suggested by Moten:

“The aesthetics of common ground/policing the crisis (of the negro intellectual). On the one hand, let’s consider the problem of art and the artist in this particular moment in the history of our obligation to beauty; on the other hand, at this particular moment in the history of our commitment to truth, let’s consider the problem of the intellectual in an ongoing intensification and transformation of policing that turns out to be coterminous with a moment many of us have considered to be one of triumph. It might be especially to consider Stuart Hall’s work in relation to that of one of his great contemporaries, Hortense Spillers. What’s the relation between the refusal of personality and the refusal of the empiricist attitude?”

Workshop participants were also invited to attend the 9th Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversation with Fred Moten the next day. Written reflections on the Spring Workshop and Public Conversation were commissioned from Peer Network members Erinma Ochu, Researcher in Residence with Watershed and Professor in Immersive Media at UWE Bristol, and Konstantin Helm, researcher, lecturer, and PhD candidate at the Department for English and American Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Supported by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, the Hollick Family Foundation, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, the Power of Pop Fund, Conway Hall and CoDE.

Thank you to the SHF Trustees and Associates whose contributions made this event possible: Ruth Ramsden-Karelse, Angela McRobbie, Giorgia Doná, Nick Beech and Roshini Kempadoo.

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