Linton Kwesi Johnson, Roger Robinson and Jay Bernard to join 4th Stuart Hall Public Conversation on 3rd February

The Stuart Hall Foundation welcomed renowned public intellectual Jacqueline Rose for our 6th Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversation at Conway Hall, London, on Saturday 11th February 2023. She delivered a lecture entitled ‘What is a Subject? Politics and Psyche After Stuart Hall’. Stuart Hall’s work can be read as a perpetual searching, however difficult or painful, for the linchpins which entangle intimate personal history to global political relations. It’s through this approach to reading Hall that Rose began to realise how deeply embedded his work was within psychoanalytical thought. In this lecture, Rose tracked the key aspects of Hall’s thinking, and questioned how, through its prism, he might have reached out to some of the most anguished political and cultural realities of our current times. Following Rose’s keynote and a brief intermission, she joined psychotherapist Sharon Numa in conversation. Watch a recording of the event here.

For the 8th Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversation, the Stuart Hall Foundation welcomed political theorist, writer, activist, independent curator and political educator, Prof. Françoise Vergès as the keynote speaker. Taking place on Saturday 17th May at Conway Hall in London and online via livestream broadcast, the event inaugurated our 2025 programme, In Search of Common Ground.

Vergès’ keynote, titled ‘There Will Be No Future Without Seizing the Present’, considered how we might think across difference to construct a life-affirming politics in times of poly-crisis. The writer and activist posited that building common ground is building transnational solidarity, and urged against despair: “Let us think defeat as a chapter in the long fight for liberation and freedom.”

The keynote was preceded by a video excerpt from Stuart Hall’s Race, The Floating Signifier (1997) and an introductory address from SHF Executive Director Orsod Malik. After the keynote, Vergès was joined by Mohammed Elnaiem, Director of the Decolonial Centre, for a discussion and audience Q&A which further considered how we might understand Hall’s thinking on “a politics without guarantees”.

The event also featured the premiere screening of ‘The Audacity of Our Skin’. Featuring poet and essayist Selina Nwulu reading her newly revisited version of the titular work to camera, the filmed performance was shot and edited by videographer Alice Kanako and commissioned by the Stuart Hall Foundation supported by Comic Relief.

Following the event, attendees were invited to congregate at an informal reception, where they discussed ideas with programme contributors and with each other. Plant-based South Asian food catered by Goodness Gracious Feast and drinks from the bar were made available, while Newham Bookshop held a stall with titles related to the programme on offer.

Skin Deep hosted a pop-up library at the back of the hall, continuing their efforts to make space for creative thinking in service of and beyond racial justice. The library of liberatory texts offered attendees the opportunity to relax and flip through back prints of the Skin Deep magazine, pick up their latest issue and delve into their sources of inspiration.

Read a transcript of the event recording.

View photography from the event.

Supported by Comic Relief, the Hollick Family Foundation and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, in collaboration with Conway Hall, Words of Colour and Pluto Press.