9th September 2026 / Article
Reflections: Konstantin Helm on the SHF Peer Network Spring Workshop with Fred Moten
By: Konstantin Helm
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. There they were joined by keynote speaker, cultural theorist, poet and teacher of performance studies, Fred Moten, exchanging ideas around collectivity, individuality and oneness in intellectual pursuits.
Konstantin Helm, researcher, lecturer, and PhD candidate at the Department for English and American Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, shares their reflections on these events below.
Before I go to the workshop with Fred Moten, I read one of his books in an air-conditioned coffee shop in central London. Outside, the morning sun has already turned the air into syrup. It feels surreal to step outside and walk to Conway Hall. This is in part because both the city and its inhabitants seem mildly dazed by the weather. Mostly, it is because both the Stuart Hall Foundation workshops I’ve already attended felt so different from what I’m used to in Germany. There is something unique both about the individual expertise of facilitators and participants as well as our shared currents of thought. This unpredictable intellectual meteorology always left me enriched, but I enter feeling quite nervous, not knowing if I prepared well enough or well at all.
Fred Moten thanks us for joining him inside despite the sunshine. When he begins to speak, it immediately becomes clear that he is inviting us to move alongside him. Fred Moten thinks out loud, not as a lecturer, but to lay the groundwork for an afternoon of thinking through something, of thinking together. He sketches the problem between the I and the we, between the intellectual whose job it is to think for others and the inherently collective nature of reflection. The problem is difficult to grasp because it resists the language of objective knowledge, and because, as Fred Moten says, the “’we’ resists object permanence”. For the rest of the workshop, we put these ideas into conversation with Policing the Crisis. In this 1978 work, Stuart Hall and his co-authors think about a crisis that affects society as a whole. However, the crisis erupts most violently where authorities assault the racialised, the marginalised, and – Fred Moten again – the “irrelevants.” We close with an acute awareness of the suffocating world outside this room. Still, I leave full of ideas, a renewed sense of responsibility, and feeling that my work is part of a long, communal project.
The next day, at the Public Conversation, Fred Moten’s keynote speech “The Physics of Political Economy” is a modular exploration of the tension between empirical and phenomenological modes of knowing. His reflections move from du Bois’ metaphysics of race to the calculated uncertainties of quantum mechanics, from Newtonian gravity to the cold mathematics of genocide. At times, I am daunted by the vast, associative and poetic trajectory Fred Moten is taking us on. But often he pauses, looks up from his notes, and brings us back to central London on a sweltering afternoon. In Stolen Life, Fred Moten describes Black Studies as the possibility of “walking in another world while passing through this one.” I am grateful for his guidance in navigating both.
– Konstantin Helm, June 2026
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