The Reading the Crisis series asks: what kinds of tools and strategies are needed to confront this conjuncture? This online conversation series seeks to advance Stuart Hall’s thinking by analysing a curated selection of three texts in relation to present-day political formations. In alignment with our 2025 programme theme, In Search of Common Ground, we have chosen three Stuart Hall texts where Hall is in dialogue with Edward Said, CLR James and bell hooks. Each conversation, chaired by Aasiya Lodhi, aims to form an online teach-in space dedicated to demonstrating how engaging in a conjunctural analysis can enrich artistic practice, deepen organising work, and academic study.

The first conversation took place on Wednesday 4th June 2025, with Brenna Bhandar and Hashem Abushama considering the state of contemporary discourse on Israel-Palestine through Hall’s open letter to Edward Said, titled ‘For Edward Said’ (2004).

Read a transcript of the event here:
https://www.stuarthallfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/RTC-2025-1-Transcript.pdf

Supported by Comic Relief, the Hollick Family Foundation and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, in collaboration with Words of Colour, Pluto Press, Soundings, and Taylor & Francis.

Reading the Crisis is part of the Stuart Hall Foundation’s In Search of Common Ground programme. Learn more about In Search of Common Ground by clicking here.

The Stuart Hall Foundation is pleased to be collaborating with Hackney Libraries to offer a reading list of books relating to the Reading the Crisis online conversation series. Feel free to access this list before, during or after the events to further explore some of the ideas that may be discussed:
https://www.lovehackney.uk/reading-lists/reading-the-crisis

To coincide with the Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversations that take place each year, we invite members from our Scholars, Fellows and Artists Network to participate in an in-person event. These network events are dedicated to fostering critical engagement and collaboration among scholars, artists and practitioners. They embody the purpose of our regular network gatherings: to facilitate interdisciplinary dialogue, nurture intellectual development and provide support for underrepresented practitioners.

On Friday 22nd March earlier this year, we hosted a workshop at Conway Hall in London. 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 a member of our Scholars, Fellows and Artists Network, CJ Simon – currently a PhD scholar with the White Rose Doctoral Training Partnership – to share his reflections following the event, included 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.”

The Anti-Racist Scholar Activism Workshop was supported by the CoDE ECR Network

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.