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The winner of the 2023 SHF x Cultural Studies Award is Isis Giraldo, who receives the award in recognition for her article ‘SoHo as virtual theatre: performing gender, race, and class in 21st-century Colombia‘ which was published in Cultural Studies vol. 36, no. 1 (January 2022).

The awarding committee, consisting of Coeditors Nabil Echchaibi and Ted Striphas, and trustees from the Stuart Hall Foundation’s Academic Committee, is pleased to have selected Giraldo’s work from among 12 eligible essays. The committee said:

‘It was difficult to decide the winner of the SHF x Cultural Studies Award this year, because all shortlisted papers ably combined advanced theoretical understanding with an interesting empirical-contextual focus. However, for its notable liveliness and ‘hybrid’ blending of ‘Hallian’ cultural studies and Colombian cultural politics, we selected Isis Giraldo’s article to be awarded.

This paper understands the ideological significance of one specific cultural artefact/project as a ‘virtual theatre’ through which many facets of its Colombian social context are displayed and condensed. The article offers a range of illuminating observations; it is also theoretically bold. The importance of the Latin American ‘coloniality of power’ framework is acknowledged, yet the author registers some reservations too, more generally pressing the continuing importance of Birmingham-style cultural studies, especially its gender dimension (in close conjunction with race and class). An energetic and engaging study.’

– awarding committee, the 2023 SHF x Cultural Studies Award

The SHF x Cultural Studies Award is a collaboration between the Stuart Hall Foundation and the Routledge/Taylor & Francis journal Cultural Studies. The award seeks to recognise an article by an early career scholar that best captures, and/or makes the most significant contribution to, Cultural Studies as Stuart Hall envisioned it, furthering Hall’s interests, commitments and spirit as a political intellectual.



Isis Giraldo is a junior lecturer in the English Department of the University of Lausanne, where she teaches US and Caribbean literature and New American Studies in English. Her research belongs within the fields of cultural and media studies from critical approaches that recentre power and justice.

On receiving this year’s award, Isis said:

‘Being announced as the winner of the 2023 SHF x Cultural Studies Award was a delightful and unexpected surprise for me, and I couldn’t be prouder to have my name officially linked to Stuart Hall, whose work and legacy have been crucial to my becoming the researcher and educator I am.

In line with Stuart Hall, I understand my academic work as intellectual, pedagogical, and political interventions with the potential of meaningful individual and social transformation. I firmly believe that the intellectual path he opened decades ago remains as timely as ever, and I am honoured to be walking this path, and to do so with the aim of attempting to make the world a better place.

I would like to thank the Stuart Hall Foundation and Taylor & Francis for having considered me for this award, and the Trustees for their generous assessment of my article.’

– Isis Giraldo, winner of the 2023 SHF x Cultural Studies Award

Read more about Isis Giraldo.
Learn more about the SHF x Cultural Studies Award.


Top image: ‘Control’ by Matheus Aravena

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