Announcing SHF's 2025 programme, In Search of Common Ground

Marking the Stuart Hall Foundation’s 10^th anniversary, we are delighted to announce our 2025 programme, In Search of Common Ground.

This year, we invite you to join us to collectively consider the role of difference in broadening the intellectual and creative scope of social justice movements working today. At a time of increasing political and cultural hostility, with the far-right consolidating local and global influence while mainstreaming fascistic politics, we will turn to Professor Stuart Hall’s writings to ask: Where are new solidarities emerging? What historical traditions and political ideas are being drawn upon to confront the present situation?

Our 2025 programme will include public events, workshops, community film screenings, and conversations with artists exploring how we can build a collective politics that moves us toward a more just world.

In Search of Common Ground opens with the Stuart Hall Foundation’s 8th Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversation on Saturday 17th May at Conway Hall, London, featuring writer and activist Prof. Françoise Vergès as keynote speaker. Titled ‘There Will Be No Future Without Seizing the Present‘, Vergès’ address will explore the urgent need for a life-affirming politics in times of polycrisis, and will be followed by a conversation with Mohammed Elnaeim.

Tickets to attend in-person or online are on sale now.

“Liberating the present from colonisation, racial neoliberal capitalism, and the forces which make our planet uninhabitable necessitates orienting our political imaginations towards wholesale revolutionary change. Stuart Hall called upon us to embrace ‘a politics without guarantees’, urging us not only to denounce injustice but to construct new dimensions of meaning beyond the systems of power that govern us.”

Françoise Vergès, keynote speaker for the 8th Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversation

From June to September, our Reading the Crisis series returns with three online conversations responding to Stuart Hall’s collaborative thinking with Edward Said, CLR James, and bell hooks. Guest speakers include Brenna Bhandar, Hashem Abushama, Houria Bouteldja, Lola Olufemi, Gary Younge, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Each conversation, chaired by Aasiya Lodhi, forms an online teach-in space asking what kinds of tools and strategies are needed to address this conjuncture.

“Professor Stuart Hall’s open and porous conception of identity can be read as a profoundly creative proposition, challenging us to come together and build a politics that speaks to the specific moment in which we are working. It invites us to take stock of our situation and find the intersections where our histories and political interests meet to forge a collective politics that is flexible enough to hold – even if momentarily – the sum of our individual experiences.”

Orsod Malik, Director of the Stuart Hall Foundation

Further activities as part of In Search of Common Ground are to be announced. Additionally, the programme will continue our commitment to fostering critical dialogue through closed workshops and screenings for the SHF Peer Network of scholars, fellows, artists, and community partners.

Read more about In Search of Common Ground on the project page.

In Search of Common Ground is supported by Conway Hall, Comic Relief, the Hollick Family Foundation, and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, with programme partners Black Southwest Network, Brixton Community Cinema, CoDE, MAIA, Pluto Press, Routledge, Taylor & Francis, Soundings, and Words of Colour.

The 8th Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversation with Françoise Vergès is supported by Comic Relief, the Hollick Family Foundation and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, in collaboration with Conway Hall, Words of Colour and Pluto Press.

Reading the Crisis is 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.