The 2nd Stuart Hall Essay Prize awarded to Harriet Hillier

The Stuart Hall Essay Prize

The Stuart Hall Essay Prize was launched in August 2023, inviting new and unpublished writing that connected with Stuart Hall’s ideas and impacted broad public discourse. The prize was intended for a selected writer whose essay engaged with and offered originality and value to a field of debate with which Hall engaged throughout his life, and contributed to a radical critique of contemporary society.

In April 2026, the 2nd Stuart Hall Essay Prize was awarded to Harriet Hillier for the essay “Choosing a Nation: Identity, Belonging, and Representation in International Sport”. The judging panel, composed of Catherine Hall, Jo Littler and Kennetta Hammond Perry, described the essay as “beautifully written… We appreciated its extrapolation of the hybrid histories of the sport, its grasp of the neoliberal dynamics shaping its present, and its deft threading through of personal experience to tell the story on multiple levels.”

Harriet Hillier’s prize-winning essay is published in full below.

 

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Choosing a Nation: Identity, Belonging, and Representation in International Sport

   

The piste gleams under the strip lights, a narrow path of metal bordered by silence. Beyond the mask, my breath sounds like static. The referee’s “En garde!” cuts through the air, and I glance at the scoreboard: GBR flashes beside my name. The Union Jack stitched onto my sleeve glows under the glare, its threads slightly frayed from travel. It marks me as British, yet my body carries a different inheritance, Austrian roots, a Central-European rhythm that lingers in speech and stance. When I salute, mask off, blade raised, the gesture feels doubled: a British salute performed by someone not entirely British.

International sport demands clarity where life offers complexity. To fence for a nation, one must choose: one flag, one anthem, one allegiance. Bureaucratic forms leave no space for hesitation or hyphenation. Yet identity rarely fits so neatly. It is layered, shifting, relational. Stuart Hall reminds us that cultural identity “is a matter of becoming as well as of being.” His insistence that identities are historical, positional, and negotiated becomes palpable in the stillness before a bout.

This essay follows that tension. It adopts Hall’s conjunctural method, the practice of reading culture at the intersection of political, economic, and ideological forces, to examine international fencing as a stage on which nationality is not given but performed. Drawing on Hall’s concepts of articulation, encoding and decoding, and hegemony, I explore how sport under post-Brexit nationalism and neoliberal governance produces the “national athlete” as both emblem and contradiction. Fencing, with its lineage in military ritual and its strict codes of etiquette, renders this choreography visible: each salute, anthem, and uniform a small ceremony of belonging enacted rather than assumed.

Like Hall himself, born in Kingston, educated in Oxford, living between worlds, many athletes inhabit thresholds. The piste becomes a symbolic border where the global and the national, the personal and the political, meet under fluorescent light. Here, belonging is not something one has but something one does.

For Hall, the urgency of cultural analysis lay in connecting everyday experience to wider social structures. To read sport through this lens is to glimpse how private rituals echo public ideologies. The salute, the anthem, the stitched flag are not just symbols of allegiance; they are practices through which nations reproduce themselves. In a time when borders tighten and migration accelerates, these gestures become a language for negotiating who counts as British, and who remains peripheral. The piste therefore offers a concentrated image of the nation’s struggle to imagine unity in diversity.

In the wider conjuncture, this question of belonging extends far beyond the piste. Post-Brexit Britain continues to wrestle with migration, identity, and globalisation, and sport becomes one of the few stages where those tensions play out in public view. As Hall urged, culture is where “the political and the personal become the same terrain.” To read international sport through that lens is to see how our movements, across borders, disciplines, and histories, make visible the unfinished work of national identity. The piste becomes not just a sporting arena but a mirror of society’s attempt to define who is seen, who is valued, and who stands for the nation when its own sense of unity is in question.

     

To write about belonging in sport is to step into the terrain Hall mapped across a lifetime of border crossings. He called himself “an unhomely figure in the heart of the metropole,” and from that in-between vantage he argued that identity is always produced through history and power. When an athlete stands for a flag that half fits, Hall’s vocabulary becomes not theory but description.

Stuart Hall reminds us that cultural identity ‘is a matter of becoming as well as of being’ (Cultural Identity and Diaspora, 1990). Hall dismantled the notion of pure, self-contained identity: it is not essence but positioning. International sport demands the opposite, the passport as truth, the federation’s database as proof of belonging. The rulebook fixes what life keeps fluid. Signing the form that registers me as GBR performs exactly the stability Hall showed to be fiction. To step onto the piste is to embody identity as process, to enact the unfinished.

As Hall argues in The Work of Representation (1997), culture does not reflect meaning; it makes it. Symbols and gestures construct “Britishness.” The flag on my jacket, the crest on my mask, the anthem after a win, these do not merely express the nation; they produce it. Repetition gives form to an idea that would otherwise dissolve. Yet each time the gesture is made by a body both inside and outside the imagined community, the meaning shifts. The performance wobbles; the category strains.

Hall’s model of encoding and decoding helps clarify the spectacle. Institutions encode preferred meanings, unity, pride, meritocracy, through ceremony and media. Audiences and athletes decode from their own positions: some with pride, others with irony or quiet dissonance. When a teammate posts a bilingual caption or adds a hidden emoji flag, the official narrative is being read against the grain. The piste becomes a site of translation, where encoded nationalism meets lived hybridity.

Through Gramsci, Hall conceived hegemony as a process of consent continuously won. Sport is one of its most elegant instruments: it makes the nation feel natural through pleasure and ritual. Yet hegemony is never total. The same symbols that secure consent can be re-articulated toward new meanings. A dual-heritage athlete singing half an anthem, or none, occupies that fissure where power meets possibility. Such micro-gestures, hardly visible to spectators, are the moments when culture is rewritten from within.

Hall’s notion of diaspora replaces the purity of roots with the creativity of routes. The diasporic subject is not lost but productive, forging new meanings out of mixture. The international athlete, training in one country, speaking several languages, representing another, embodies this hybridity. The piste becomes a map of global migration condensed into motion, history channelled through footwork.

Hall’s thinking also sits in conversation with others who mapped the cultural topography of late twentieth-century Britain. Hall’s contemporary and collaborator Doreen Massey insists in For Space (2005) that space itself is political, “the product of interrelations,” always under construction. Her insistence on place as process complements Hall’s notion of identity as becoming: both reject fixity. If Hall gave us the vocabulary of articulation, Massey supplied its geography, reminding us that belonging is spatial as well as symbolic.

Paul Gilroy extended these insights into what he called the Black Atlantic (1993), a cultural formation that exceeds national borders while shaping British modernity from within. Gilroy’s emphasis on movement, music, and memory parallels Hall’s own trajectory from Kingston to London; together they expose how the nation’s sense of itself is forged through the very diasporas it tries to contain.

Nira Yuval-Davis later named this tension the politics of belonging (2011): the everyday ways states draw boundaries around who counts as “us.” Her work reframes Hall’s theory of representation for a post-9/11, post-Brexit era, where the border operates not only at the edge of territory but within citizenship law, social policy, and affect. Reading Hall through these interlocutors sharpens the lens for this essay: nationality in sport is not just an image but a spatial and political project, performed on and through the bodies that cross its lines.

Hall’s framework is not a toolkit but a method of living through contradiction. Culture is the ground where power operates through meaning, and where those meanings can be shifted. What follows traces how the modern nation, through sport, turns belonging into performance, each bout, anthem, and stitched flag a negotiation between self, symbol, and state.

     

Having outlined Hall’s approach to identity as becoming and representation as performance, I now turn to the nation itself, the historical stage on which these identities are enacted. To represent a nation, one must first understand what a nation is, not land but an imagined community continually performed into being. Since the late nineteenth century, sport has been one of its grandest theatres. Picture the 1908 London Olympics: the Union Jack flutters above colonial delegations marching behind the imperial flag. Coal smoke, brass bands, “God Save the King.” Empire reborn as spectacle. The nation becomes visible when the team walks out.

Modern sport and the modern nation grew together. The first Olympics and, later, the Commonwealth Games translated imperial hierarchies into athletic form: colonies supplied competitors; the metropole claimed medals. The promise of meritocracy disguised empire’s residue.

After empire, that spectacle re-articulated itself. “Team GB,” a banner adopted in the 1990s, offered a sleek image of post-imperial Britain, diverse yet united, multicultural yet disciplined. The slogan One Team GB performs a fantasy of harmony while smoothing over the frictions of class, race, and migration. Hall would recognise this as hegemony’s aesthetic: a feel-good image securing consent by making difference appear harmless.

Yet the nation remains unsettled. Globalisation has made training and talent more mobile than ever. Fencers switch federations; coaches circulate; dual passports multiply. The paradox: as sport grows more international, the policing of flags intensifies. Eligibility rules harden, bureaucracies multiply, and debates about “true representation” reignite. Each instance of hybridity triggers a compensatory performance of purity.

Standing beneath the same flag once raised above imperial subjects, I sometimes feel that residue stitched into my own uniform. The cloth is new, the design modern, but the meaning carries centuries of weight. The nation, as Hall would say, is an articulation of past and present, empire’s echo reshaped by global capital. When migrant or dual-heritage athletes compete for Britain, they expose that articulation; history flashes briefly in motion and muscle.

Post-Brexit Britain amplifies the contradiction. The rhetoric of “taking back control” seeps even into sport, where funding structures reward medal prospects while immigration policies restrict movement. The athlete who trains abroad but competes under the British flag becomes a small contradiction within a larger nationalist script. The piste, once a narrow strip of individual combat, mirrors the political moment: open borders in practice, closed ones in rhetoric.

The nation in sport is thus a continual rehearsal of belonging, repeated until believable. Each bout on that strip carries the echo of these histories: empire’s shadow, global capital’s gloss, the weight and promise of the flag.

     

If the previous section traced the nation’s spectacle across history, this one returns to the intimate level of experience, how those structures materialise on the piste itself. The piste looks the same everywhere: a narrow metallic strip bordered by silence and expectation. What changes is the flag beside your name. When I first fenced under GBR, the selection email arrived like a passport renewal, official, bureaucratic, sterile. The subject line read simply Team Announcement. No mention of heritage or home. Yet behind that message lay years of motion: childhood between languages, summers in Austria, flights back to London. Identity, Hall reminds us, is always “a matter of positioning.” That email positioned me, neatly, nationally, incompletely.

The selection ritual felt ceremonial: forms to sign, declarations to make, a small flag stitched over the heart. Representation here is productive, not descriptive; the bureaucracy manufactures nationality as much as it records it. The federation’s database encodes a version of me the nation wants to see. Even within that encoding, there is room for reinterpretation.

The first time I stood on a u17 World Cup podium, bronze medal around my neck, the photographer’s flash fixed me beneath the Union Jack. The caption read, Hillier wins bronze medal. A face, a flag, a headline, power working through image, fixing what is fluid. Yet within that frame, multiplicity persists. My Austrian grandmother asked, half-jokingly, if I might one day fence for her country; my British teammates reposted the image with emojis. Each decoding reflected a different reading position. Meaning, like identity, lives in that play of recognition and misrecognition.

Fencing’s language is hybrid, Italian footwork, French terminology, Hungarian rhythm. Every lunge is already international. To fence is to inhabit hybridity physically, coordination built from borrowed gestures. Hall’s notion of ‘new ethnicities’ (1989) names this condition: identity not as dilution but as creative recombination. The piste becomes a strip of global memory, history channelled through movement.

Among my peers, this negotiation is constant. Emma (not her real name), who fenced for Team GB at the Olympic qualifier, switched to Team France the following summer. Her parents are French, her training base Parisian, now she is at a university in Paris, her funding precarious with the dream of the 2028 LA Olympics. The switch required a three-year stand-down shortened only by federation consent, a bureaucratic dance between heritage and opportunity. Another teammate, Anna (not her real name), an American foilist with European roots, reversed the path, moving from Team GB to Team USA for funding, scholarship, as well as the best path for her to qualify for the 2028 Olympics in LA. Their choices are not betrayals but necessities for their survival in the sport as a career. Hall might call these acts “articulations”: temporary linkages between self, structure, and survival.

Each metallic clang makes theory audible, belonging rehearsed but never resolved, a flag meeting the breath of a body that knows more than one home.

     

Having explored identity as performance, I now turn to how nationalism itself is encoded and contested through sport’s imagery. International sport is a vast machinery of representation. Its images, sounds, and rituals translate the abstraction of “nation” into something visible and felt. Stadiums, podiums, and screens become what Hall once called “systems of meaning production”: sites where identity is encoded through colour, anthem, and slogan. Yet, as Hall showed, meaning never travels unchallenged. Each viewer, athlete, or replay participates in renegotiating what a flag, a face, or a victory can signify.

The encoding of nationalism in British sport is deliberate and polished. One Team GB campaigns frame athletes against cascades of Union Jacks and triumphant montages. Promotional videos splice medals, tears, and confetti into affective shorthand for belonging. The encoded message is clear: to represent Britain is to embody harmony, meritocracy, and pride.

Decoding occurs elsewhere, in locker rooms, on social media, within lived hybridity. Dual-heritage athletes scroll through those same images with affection laced with irony, aware of what they omit. On the piste, the meaning of a salute or a podium photo depends on who performs it and who watches. When I post after competitions, one flag, one caption, another language hums underneath. It is my way of decoding without erasure, translating the official message into something that fits.

Hall’s reworking of Gramsci explains why these rituals carry power. National sport reproduces dominant ideas of belonging by making them feel natural. Flags and anthems act as what Hall called “structures of feeling”: emotional technologies that secure consent. Ideology becomes pleasure, cheering, pride, the podium’s catharsis. The disciplined athletic body seems to prove the nation’s coherence.

But hegemony, Hall reminded us, is “a moving equilibrium.” It must adapt or fracture. The inclusion of multi-ethnic athletes in Team GB exemplifies this adaptability. Diversity becomes proof of benevolent modernity. Contradiction is repackaged as charm. One Team GB’s 2023 brand refresh, with its seamless gradient of skin tones and accents, embodies that logic: multicultural imagery that celebrates mixture while neutralising its political edge. The campaign encodes difference as decoration; resistance turned to design.

Cracks nonetheless persist. Athletes speak in their own idioms online: a caption in two languages, a brief pause before the anthem, a quiet refusal to mouth words that never fit. These micro-gestures are, in Hall’s sense, re-articulations, new linkages that shift meaning off-centre. They remind us that power never closes the circuit completely.

When Emma Raducanu slips between Mandarin, Romanian, and English interviews, or when Mo Farah narrates his Somali childhood on British television, each widens the vocabulary of belonging. Hybridity does not erase nationalism but unsettles its purity. On the piste, resistance lives in micro-rhythm: a multilingual cheer, a mixed-flag emoji, the heartbeat of hesitation before the anthem. Hegemony depends on seamless rhythm; hybridity introduces syncopation.

     

Under neoliberal governance, these rituals of belonging acquire new economic and bureaucratic dimensions. Selection emails speak the language of meritocracy, but behind them lies the market. To choose a nation is rarely a pure act of allegiance; it is also a negotiation with funding, visas, and opportunity. Under neoliberal sport, nationality becomes strategic capital. Hall described neoliberalism as the moment when individuals are remade as “entrepreneurs of the self.” The athlete no longer simply is national; they must manage nationality as brand.

The British state’s own funding architecture makes this logic visible. According to UK Sport’s published 2021–25 investment plan, roughly £352 million of National Lottery funding is distributed across Olympic and Paralympic disciplines, weighted toward those most likely to deliver medals. Fencing, ranked as “progress potential,” receives under £1 million, less than one-tenth of rowing or cycling. Each allocation is justified through a return-on-investment formula that measures national worth in podiums per pound. The system’s language, “world-class programme,” “performance pathway,” “strategic outcomes”, translates citizenship into metrics. Athletes internalise this calculus: value becomes measurable achievement, identity becomes data.

Commercial branding mirrors that calculus. The One Team GB campaign launched in 2016 boasted that 36% of the Tokyo squad identified as minority ethnic, the most “diverse in history.” (Team GB, 2021) The statistic was framed not as structural progress but as marketing proof of a tolerant nation. Diversity, aestheticised through graphics and soundtracks, sells unity back to itself. It is hegemony’s friendly face, the neoliberal smile of representation.

Policy shifts after Brexit add a harder edge. Since 2021, the International Sportsperson Visa has replaced free movement for European coaches and athletes (Home Office, 2021). Training camps once arranged by email now require sponsorship certificates and biometric checks; junior fencers from EU nations must apply for short-term “sporting event” permissions to compete in Britain. The bureaucratic friction literalises Hall’s claim that identity is “formed within the play of history and culture”: here, that play becomes paperwork.

I learned this between seasons. In an empty training hall, the smell of resin and sweat lingering, I scrolled through spreadsheets of flights and funding. Each cell represented a choice: which federation could pay, which coach was accessible, which flag made sense. Each decision felt personal yet was structured by inequality. Smaller nations offered freedom; richer ones promised stability. The flag became currency.

Hall warned that neoliberalism colonises not only institutions but souls, teaching us to measure even identity in returns. Under the global sports economy, fuelled by sponsorship and broadcast rights, flags and anthems circulate like logos; emotion becomes monetised content. The Union Jack on a tracksuit functions less as civic emblem than as brand tag in a crowded marketplace of televised identities. As Hall observed, neoliberalism commodifies culture itself, turning difference into saleable novelty.

This logic produces sharp hierarchies. Athletes from wealthier states train with better facilities; those from smaller nations often naturalise elsewhere. Fencing mirrors this global labour market: talent follows funding. At Tokyo 2020 (held in 2021), more than sixty athletes competed under new national flags (IOC, 2021), mobility rendered spectacle. Bureaucratically, the rules appear neutral: three-year waiting periods, proof of heritage, federation consent. In practice, they sort opportunity along lines of capital.

Hybridity here is double-edged. It can symbolise cosmopolitan progress, yet it also becomes a commodity to package and sell. Sponsors adore the bilingual athlete, the “bridge between cultures,” provided her story stays inspirational and apolitical. The moment hybridity turns critical, support evaporates. Neoliberalism survives by absorbing difference and reselling it as virtue.

My own experience sits uneasily in that economy. Representing Britain grants visibility; maintaining Austrian ties offers flexibility. Every choice feels voluntary yet is framed by structure. To be an athlete is to inhabit what Hall called “a conjuncture of constraint and agency”, freedom bounded by system.

Across global sport, strategic nationality has become ordinary. Fencers, footballers, sprinters shift allegiances for funding or access. Citizenship becomes instrument, not anchor. Hall’s analysis clarifies why: when all social goods are marketised, even belonging becomes transaction. The neoliberal athlete embodies that shift, the self as project, nationality as portfolio.

And yet within that calculation lingers a human question: what remains of identity when it becomes strategic? Choosing a nation feels less like affirmation than wager, a bet placed at the intersection of aspiration and constraint. Hall helps us read this not as personal failure but as symptom: evidence of how deeply neoliberalism has entered the intimate spaces of self-definition.

     

In contemporary Britain, these forces converge most visibly in the post-Brexit conjuncture, where nationalism, global mobility, and neoliberal selfhood collide. The crowd roars beneath a tangle of flags; the scoreboard flickers GBR in LED light. The smell of polish, the blur of colours, the anthem swelling through tinny speakers, this, too, is the conjuncture. To think conjuncturally, Hall wrote, is to grasp the relations between processes that define a moment. Ours is one such moment: the collision of nationalism, global mobility, and neoliberal individualism. In Britain, that collision is staged most visibly through sport, where the flag still promises unity even as the society beneath it fragments.

Since 2016, Brexit has revived an older language of sovereignty and border. Take back control migrates easily into sport’s idiom of pride and representation. Funding agencies invoke “British excellence”; tabloids praise “true Brit” medal winners. Yet many of these athletes are global citizens: born abroad, trained elsewhere, fluent in several languages. Their success depends on the very mobility that nationalist rhetoric condemns. Hall once wrote that the nation is “stitched together out of difference, not erased of it.” Watching a multicultural Team GB march behind a reclaimed imperial flag reveals that paradox in pageantry.

Globalisation has not dissolved nations; it has rearranged them into networks of flow and exclusion. Fencers share coaches, exchange footage, and train across continents, an economy of motion that renders patriotism both outdated and desperately necessary. The more borderless sport becomes in practice, the more fiercely institutions police its symbols. Nationality functions as affective control, securing meaning in a world that might otherwise feel unmoored. Hall’s insight that identity is formed “within the play of history and culture” clarifies this contradiction: we cling to flags precisely when their borders have blurred.

Brexit sharpened these contradictions materially. New visa regimes re-categorised European coaches as “International Sportspersons”; youth mobility schemes flickered on and off with diplomatic whim. Training camps once routine now require sponsorship letters and biometric appointments. The state reasserts its gatekeeping even as sport relies on transnational expertise. The piste becomes a border in more than metaphor.

Neoliberalism deepens the struggle by turning belonging into brand management. Athletes are urged to craft “authentic stories”, narratives of struggle and triumph that convert identity into content. Difference is celebrated only while it sells. Hall warned that under neoliberalism, culture becomes the terrain on which consent is won. The hybrid athlete is welcome so long as hybridity markets unity, not critique. Diversity becomes design: a poster, a hashtag, a campaign. In 2025, as Britain debates dual-citizenship policy even while fielding its most multicultural Olympic squad, the contradiction feels complete.

And yet hybridity carries potential. Hall’s New Ethnicities envisions belonging without purity, difference without hierarchy. Every athlete carrying more than one home rehearses that possibility. Their movement hints at a future where multiplicity is ordinary rather than exceptional. The present conjuncture is thus both crisis and opportunity: nationalism returns as anxious theatre; globalisation multiplies identities; neoliberalism commodifies them. But within that churn lies the chance to imagine belonging differently. Sport, because it makes identity visible, could model a more honest multiculturalism, one that acknowledges hybridity instead of disguising it. Hall taught that culture is never where difference ends but where it begins to speak.

This insight matters beyond sport. The politics of visibility that play out on the piste are mirrored across Britain’s classrooms, newsrooms, and stages. Questions of who is represented and on what terms continue to structure the cultural field. Each televised victory or anthem becomes a miniature referendum on belonging, testing how inclusive the nation’s story really is. Reading these rituals through Hall’s work reminds us that cultural analysis is a democratic act: a way of listening to how people, in their ordinary gestures, negotiate power. If culture is where meaning is made, then sport is one of its loudest laboratories, a place where the struggle over identity becomes legible, rhythmic, and collective.

     

The piste gleams again under the lights, the same narrow strip where this story began. My shoes click against metal; the air hums with anticipation. Opposite me stands another fencer, another flag, another translation of belonging. In that small, bounded space, everything traced in theory returns to motion: representation, hegemony, hybridity, neoliberal choice. They converge not as abstractions but as muscle memory. On the piste, identity is never settled. Each salute repeats a ritual of allegiance while revealing its fragility. Each anthem enacts a unity that lasts only as long as the music. Hall’s insight that cultural identity is “a matter of becoming as well as of being” becomes literal here: belonging must be continually rehearsed to exist at all. The athlete does not possess nationality; she performs it, sustains it, and sometimes resists it, all within a few measured steps.

Seen through Hall’s lens, the piste is a microcosm of the conjuncture itself. Nationalism asserts coherence; neoliberalism sells it; globalisation unsettles it; hybridity makes it visible. Yet within that choreography lies potential. Each hybrid athlete who stands beneath a flag while carrying more than one home enacts Hall’s “new ethnicities”: multiplicity without apology. They show that the nation’s story can be retold, not erased, but re-imagined. For Hall, culture was always the ground where power and imagination meet, where the old order shows its cracks and new meanings slip through. The piste, in that sense, is both battleground and rehearsal room: ideology embodied and reinterpreted in real time. Fencing taught me that representation is never innocent, that identity is not chosen once but continually negotiated between self and symbol.

This reflection returns us to Hall’s enduring question: what kind of nation do we want to be? If culture is where power and meaning meet, then sport becomes one of its most visible testing grounds. The stories told through flags and anthems shape who can speak for Britain, and whose voices remain unheard. The task, Hall would insist, is not simply to celebrate diversity but to transform the structures that decide which differences are permitted. Recognising hybridity as ordinary rather than exceptional allows the national imagination to move beyond tolerance toward genuine reciprocity. In that shift lies the promise of a more democratic cultural politics.

If we took Hall seriously, selection, funding and eligibility would change. Funding metrics would expand beyond medals to include access and mobility, so federations aren’t forced to treat nationality as currency. Eligibility rules would prioritise lived ties over purity tests, with transparent, timely pathways for dual nationals. Visa policy would recognise sport’s transnational labour, easing short-term camps and junior competitions. The national athlete would stop policing unity and start resourcing multiplicity, the only honest ground on which a twenty-first-century nation can stand. In choosing one flag, I discovered the impossibility of singular belonging. On the piste, identity becomes a movement, between languages, histories, and gazes, a rhythm of becoming that Hall teaches us to see. Each bout begins again, and so does the work of imagining who we might be together.

   

About the author

Harriet Hillier is a second year undergraduate Music student at the University of Manchester and an international épée fencer representing Great Britain at U20, U23, and senior level. In 2025, she was awarded the Royal Philharmonic Society Young Classical Writers Prize. She previously performed with the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain (2022–24) and has medalled at two U17 World Cups. She also represented Great Britain at the World University Games last year.

   

References

British Olympic Association (Team GB). Tokyo 2020 Diversity Report. London, 2021.

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993.

Hall, Stuart. “New Ethnicities.” In Black Film, British Cinema. London: BFI, 1989.

Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” In Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990.

Hall, Stuart. “The Work of Representation.” In Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage, 1997.

Home Office. International Sportsperson Visa Guidance. London: GOV.UK, 2021.

International Olympic Committee (IOC). Tokyo 2020 Athlete Nationality Data. Lausanne, 2021.

Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: Sage, 2005.

UK Sport. Investment Guidance 2021–25. London: UK Sport, 2021.

Yuval-Davis, Nira. The Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations. London: Sage, 2011.