Date and Time
17th May 2025
Location
Conway Hall
25 Red Lion Square, London. WC1R 4RL
Speakers and Artists
- Prof. Françoise Vergès
- Mohammed Elnaiem
The Stuart Hall Foundation invites you to the inaugural event of our 2025 programme, In Search of Common Ground. We are delighted to welcome political theorist, writer, activist, independent curator and political educator, Prof. Françoise Vergès to Conway Hall as the keynote speaker for the 8th Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversation.
In Vergés’ keynote, ‘There Will Be No Future Without Seizing the Present’, she will consider how we might think across difference to construct a life-affirming politics in times of poly-crisis, with a presentation organised around possibilities for reappropriating the present:
Imagining a post-racist and post-capitalist future seems impossible when the present is plagued with genocide and imperialist wars; when catastrophic floods, hurricanes and fires engulf our planet; when murderous migration policies and increased poverty further entrenches racism, xenophobia, and misogyny into the fabric of our societies.
Liberating the present from colonisation, racial neoliberal capitalism, and the forces which make our planet uninhabitable for human and nonhuman species alike necessitates orienting our political imaginations towards wholesale revolutionary change; towards the possibility of forging a future in which all life can flourish, in which all life is protected.
Stuart Hall called upon us to embrace “a politics without guarantees”, by which he suggests that we cannot construct a politics simply through denunciation and condemnation. Instead, we ought to produce “new dimensions of meaning which have not been foreclosed by the systems of power which are in operation.”
This is a call for radical imagining and action, for thinking beyond the imperialist post-World War II order.
– Françoise Vergès
Françoise Vergès’ keynote speech will be followed by a conversation with Mohammed Elnaiem, Director of the Decolonial Centre, who will also be chairing the audience Q&A. The event will close with the premiere of ‘The Audacity of Our Skin’, a video featuring poet Selina Nwulu performing a revisited work filmed by Alice Kanako.
From 6pm, attendees are invited join us for an informal reception at the venue with complimentary plant-based food and soft drinks catered by Goodness Gracious Feast. Bowls of hearty dal, rice, samosa and salad, served with chutney and chilli sauce, will be available.
Skin Deep will host a pop-up library in the hall, continuing their efforts to support creative work in service of racial justice. This free library of liberatory texts offers attendees the opportunity to relax and flip through their back prints, works from collaborators and inspirations for their latest print issue, ‘Anthology’.
Newham Bookshop will be hosting a book stall with titles related to the programme for sale throughout the event, and refreshments will be available for purchase at the bar.
Full details of the In Search of Common Ground programme are available here.
Please note, doors will open at 2.30pm. The event will begin at 3pm prompt.
Attendees can either attend in person at Conway Hall in London, UK, or join online via a livestream.
Tickets are now on sale and cost £6 standard / £4 concession / £3 online.
BSL interpretation will take place on stage. Live online captions will be available to view during the event here: https://121captions.1capapp.com/event/shf
For any additional access information, please contact us at info@stuarthallfoundation.org.
If you are interested in attending the event in person or online but are unable to due to the ticket price, please contact us at info@stuarthallfoundation.org.
Supported by Comic Relief, the Hollick Family Foundation and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, in collaboration with Conway Hall, Words of Colour and Pluto Press.
Speakers and Artists
Prof. Françoise Vergès
Prof. Françoise Vergès is a political scientist, activist, historian, film writer, and public educator. She is the author of A Decolonial Feminism, A Feminist History of Violence and A Programme of Absolute Disorder. She is also a senior research fellow at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation, University College London. She lives in Paris.
Mohammed Elnaiem
Mohammed Elnaiem is a researcher and author, and the Director of the Decolonial Centre, a Pluto Educational Trust project dedicated to anti colonial and decolonial political education. His former column, “Black Radicals,” ran for two years on JSTOR Daily. He has published for news and political analysis outlets, including Al Jazeera, New Internationalist, Jacobin Magazine, The Funambulist, Africa Is a Country, World Politics Review, The Global African Worker, New Frame, ROAR Magazine, and Toward Freedom. In his writing and research, he has explored various topics, including blackness, the Sudanese revolution, reparations movements, the history of slavery and imperialism, and the relationship between capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy.
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