The Stuart Hall Foundation Peer Network online monthly forums provide a regular opportunity for members to connect, exchange ideas and support one another. SHF Associate and Peer Network member Ruth Ramsden-Karelse details her experience facilitating these forums below.

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Since January 2023, I’ve facilitated virtual monthly forums for researchers and artists whose work has, like mine, been made possible by scholarships and fellowships that the Stuart Hall Foundation offers in partnership with institutions across the UK and beyond.

When I started my DPhil in 2017, I was honoured to receive a Stuart Hall scholarship. Four years later, on the eventual other side of that doctoral research, I was delighted to become one of the Foundation’s Associates: new roles designed to support the work of the Trustees and ensure input and representation across career stages. As an Associate, I’ve sat on the Foundation’s Academic Committee and worked with my colleagues to support our growing network of Stuart Hall scholars, fellows, and artists-in-residence.

As a member of that network myself, I formed connections that continue to shape and enrich my work in meaningful ways. Higher education is typically atomising, and for minoritised scholars and those invested in social justice, finding community is particularly important. Opportunities to gather and speak with other network members and Trustees always highlighted the Foundation’s biggest strength: a community of scholars, cultural workers, and organisers, spanning Master’s students to Professors, and ranging from child psychoanalysts and sociologists to poets and musicians, whose interests, investments, and political engagements reflect the rich diversity of Stuart Hall’s own.

Our monthly forums aim to harness precisely that strength. In addition to three annual in-person events, these virtual meetings offer network members a more regular space to gather, meet, and catch up with each other, with myself, and with our Director, Orsod. Attendees air challenges, share resources, and offer support and encouragement. Topics of discussion build on each other, and often relate to current events, ranging from abolition, to the connections between arts and academia, to what it might mean to be an organic intellectual. A few forums have taken the form of workshops facilitated by network members—by Lola Olufemi on writing as a response to political violence and by Subira Joy on killing the cop inside our heads, for example.

With these forums, we try to put into practice in some small way the model offered by Stuart Hall: by centring collaboration, knowledge sharing, and thinking and learning together; by committing to the necessary, continual practice of having the difficult conversations and acting on them; and by taking seriously our political commitments, while trying not to take ourselves too seriously.

– Ruth Ramsden-Karelse, July 2026

Ahead of the 9th Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversation in May 2026, our network of creative and intellectual practitioners gathered at Conway Hall for the SHF Peer Network Spring Workshop. There they were joined by keynote speaker, cultural theorist, poet and teacher of performance studies, Fred Moten, exchanging ideas around collectivity, individuality and oneness in intellectual pursuits.

Konstantin Helm, researcher, lecturer, and PhD candidate at the Department for English and American Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, shares their reflections on these events below.

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Before I go to the workshop with Fred Moten, I read one of his books in an air-conditioned coffee shop in central London. Outside, the morning sun has already turned the air into syrup. It feels surreal to step outside and walk to Conway Hall. This is in part because both the city and its inhabitants seem mildly dazed by the weather. Mostly, it is because both the Stuart Hall Foundation workshops I’ve already attended felt so different from what I’m used to in Germany. There is something unique both about the individual expertise of facilitators and participants as well as our shared currents of thought. This unpredictable intellectual meteorology always left me enriched, but I enter feeling quite nervous, not knowing if I prepared well enough or well at all.

Fred Moten thanks us for joining him inside despite the sunshine. When he begins to speak, it immediately becomes clear that he is inviting us to move alongside him. Fred Moten thinks out loud, not as a lecturer, but to lay the groundwork for an afternoon of thinking through something, of thinking together. He sketches the problem between the I and the we, between the intellectual whose job it is to think for others and the inherently collective nature of reflection. The problem is difficult to grasp because it resists the language of objective knowledge, and because, as Fred Moten says, the “’we’ resists object permanence”. For the rest of the workshop, we put these ideas into conversation with Policing the Crisis. In this 1978 work, Stuart Hall and his co-authors think about a crisis that affects society as a whole. However, the crisis erupts most violently where authorities assault the racialised, the marginalised, and – Fred Moten again – the “irrelevants.” We close with an acute awareness of the suffocating world outside this room. Still, I leave full of ideas, a renewed sense of responsibility, and feeling that my work is part of a long, communal project.

The next day, at the Public Conversation, Fred Moten’s keynote speech “The Physics of Political Economy” is a modular exploration of the tension between empirical and phenomenological modes of knowing. His reflections move from du Bois’ metaphysics of race to the calculated uncertainties of quantum mechanics, from Newtonian gravity to the cold mathematics of genocide. At times, I am daunted by the vast, associative and poetic trajectory Fred Moten is taking us on. But often he pauses, looks up from his notes, and brings us back to central London on a sweltering afternoon. In Stolen Life, Fred Moten describes Black Studies as the possibility of “walking in another world while passing through this one.” I am grateful for his guidance in navigating both.

– Konstantin Helm, June 2026

Ahead of the 9th Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversation in May 2026, our network of creative and intellectual practitioners gathered at Conway Hall for the SHF Peer Network Spring Workshop. There they were joined by keynote speaker, cultural theorist, poet and teacher of performance studies, Fred Moten, exchanging ideas around collectivity, individuality and oneness in intellectual pursuits.

We commissioned SHF Peer Network member Erinma Ochu – currently Researcher in Residence with Watershed and Professor in Immersive Media at UWE Bristol – to share their reflections following the event.

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The Stuart Hall Foundation’s annual workshop and public conversation is a scholarly highlight. This year’s workshop with Fred Moten – yes, Fred Moten (!) – built on the spirit of the Foundation’s monthly online peer meet-ups, facilitated by Ruth Ramsden-Karelse, as a lightly held, joyous space for collective thinking.

Across two sunny days at Conway Hall, organisers offered material enactments of care that enabled participation, particularly for disabled and caregiving attendees. This infrastructural care is an ethical stance: accessibility and interdependence are practiced methods as much as values.

Into this deliberately crafted environment, Moten brought two texts: Stuart Hall et al.’s ‘Policing the Crisis’ and Hortense Spillers’ ‘The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual’. Between his generative, admittedly provisional reflections and Ruth’s carefully selected quotes we traced the historical and contemporary implications of moral panics, emphasising the shift from consensual to coercive state governance. Arriving at the ‘empiricist attitude’ – state and academic tendencies to privilege ‘hard facts’ over ideology – we discussed how this shapes discourse and determines which lives matter.

We recognised that the current democratic crisis was upheld by Big Tech, platform capitalism, institutionalised EDI, and moral panics around gender, disability, and immigration. More time – perhaps a second workshop (?!) – might have allowed us to share and imagine strategies for resisting such determinant forces. For me, this includes valuing mutual learning as a practice to build community and solidarity.

I really valued that we had space for critical difference and plurality. Staying with this critical yet affirmative tension, creates an essential line of flight for generating new horizons beyond the current status quo.

I am still distilling Moten’s public conversation which I watched at home, online. His story about New Orlean’s Felicity Street which questioned whether life might be richer outside sanctioned measures of value – stayed with me. As current pressures intensify, this line of inquiry question may open up space for indeterminacy and poetic alternatives.

A final note: seeing photos from the event – recognising some faces, wondering about those I am yet to meet – I felt the collective energy they hold as an archive of living resistance and solidarity.

– Erinma Ochu, June 2026

On Friday 23^rd May, 2025 University of Sussex Stuart Hall Fellow Bleue Liverpool presented new work at the Brighton Festival as part of her Fellowship. Bleue collaborated with musician and sound artist Ibukun Sunday to create ‘an unclassified syncretism’, an audio-visual intervention within the Meeting House Chapel at the University of Sussex. Through this event, the duo sought to composite metaphysical abstractions of Paul Gilroy with research into migration narratives and landscapes of south-east English Channel coastline port culture. The event was part of the Festival of Ideas, a collaboration between the Faculty of Media, Arts and Humanities at the University of Sussex and Brighton Festival.

Bleue Liverpool shares reflections on her experience of the collaboration below, alongside production photographs of the audio-visual work plus a new text building upon the themes of project.

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– So what do we know ?
– You mean, what are we willing to tell ?

Well, we know that the practice of syncretism in the 18^th century Afro-Caribbean, enabled the subjugated to insurgently gather, speak, & remember – right under the gaze of the colonial eye. We’re aware that our ancestors, ambitious as they were, on the night of the 14^th of August 1791, came together in ritual that embedded West African Vodou resistance – a legacy of the Fon Kingdom – into appropriated Christian systems and iconography. Allegedly the appropriation of the Catholic Church’s appliances deeply disturbed colonial administrators, whom were utilizing the system to “civilize”, “assimilate”, “commodify” our ancestors’ dignity. Subsequently, this ritual and a carefully calculated eclipse brought on a rebellion – sugar everywhere – a rupture, in the politics, that made a case of Identity.

– But Ibukun, you’re from that port Lagos, in Nigeria… South North Atlantic?
– Yes
– Me too, from a port, in the North North Atlantic…
– Yes
– A Pan-African conversation when we gather, no? when we commune?
– Yep… it’s old & ongoing
– What is?
– The conversation

The ports of Calais, Dover, Newhaven Port and Dieppe have had a great deal of increased activity in the 21^st century. They are coming, the Others, moving from east to west, using container lorries in any attempt to flee civil rights atrocities, seeking employment, a better life than history. The border-industrial complex is having a field day, acquiring oxygen detectors, attempting to catch whomever before land. Asylum claims are easily accumulated, strategically neglected, and ultimately unclassified – leaving the politics to place the Others in Hotels. They stay in these hotels sometimes for years, a room for a family, unable to seek employment, without access to fundamental natural law actions e.g. cooking for oneself. These hotels, conduits, elongated liminal spaces forge new identities, the nature oscillates in spite of fixity.

– a form of syncretism?
– Yep

In a cafe around Waterloo, down a spiral staircase to a basement that could easily recreate London’s Great Fire of 1666, he comes to my table slowly but densely. “The word “race” was utilized in the same way that in our contemporary the word “culture” is used. That the project of cultural studies is a more or less attractive candidate for institutionalization. The national character ascribed to the concept of modes of production is a fundamental question, ethnohistorical specificity of dominant approaches of cultural politics. That what was initially felt to be a curse – the curse of homelessness or the curse of enforced exile gets repossessed. It becomes affirmed and is reconstructed as the basis of a privileged standpoint.”^[1] I ask him if slavery was integral to the economic fruition of western civilization, how is the western world economically dependent on asylum seekers despite nationalism?

– Our inflections transfigure West to East, North to South.
– Yea… Of course.
– We need to find axis points.
– hmm
– Where do we gather to speak?
– They have Churches.
– Yes Ibukun, they have Churches.

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As an Intermedia artist, collaboration has become an integral improvisational utility in circumventing a collective memory. By facilitating Pan-African conversations that take on unorthodox and unconventional mediums – such as sound and video artistic experimentation – new sonic-visual methodology is spontaneously generated that perhaps gives insight on not only acts of resistance but on cultural preservation. What was most appreciated on my side was that the Stuart Hall Foundation gave Ibukun and I the opportunity to come together finally for what will be a ongoing collaboration. In addition, the opportunity to wander, with naïveté, around the coast of South-East Sussex with nothing more than a handi-cam, generously provided by the media department of the University of Sussex, was pivotal. The camera gave me permission to wander, and that in itself from the position of my specific identity: revolutionary.

 

   

– Bleue Liverpool, November 2025

[1] Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Harvard University Press 1993)

   

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View a video excerpt of ‘an unclassified syncretism’ below.

Our 2025 SHF Peer Network Welcome Event took place on Friday 17th October, inviting new scholars, fellows and artists joining the network to congregate at Whitechapel Gallery, London, and develop connections with the Foundation and each other. Attendees introduced their research, field of study or practice, reflected on excerpts from Stuart Hall’s lecture ‘Through the Prism of an Intellectual Life’, visited Whitechapel Gallery’s retrospective on Joy Gregory before meeting the visual artist and participated in an introductory session of the SHF Forum.

Feven Cofré Eyob, a PhD scholar supported by an SHF CHASE DTP studentship at SOAS, shares reflections on her experience attending the event below.

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Bustling into the Whitechapel Gallery on that bright October morning with my trusted trio – a backpack, pushchair, and my baby – I half expected to be met with polite tolerance at my hefty load. There is, after all, quite a difference between being cordially invited as an academic and the deeper, rarer feeling of being genuinely welcomed into a fold, as both mother and researcher. To my delight, what awaited me felt like a homecoming. Each greeting came with warm introductions that flowed effortlessly into bubbling conversations.

This hum of conviviality set a purposeful undertone that carried us throughout the day. With the program of lectures and presentations, our earlier introductions percolated into reflections on what home means. How do we become at home without being at home? What might it mean to be “in but not of” the institutions in which we work? By the end of our meeting, I felt reassured in our camaraderie. All of us in the room were interested in questions of how to navigate being unsettled by unjust systems, by structures so vast they defy comprehension, and yet strive to still find something generative in our attempts to unpack their formations. As Stuart Hall conveyed to us from the archives: we may never speak the truth, but can commit to the ongoing task of seeking our best truths.

As these themes and ideas moved through our dialogues, we found ourselves deepening our engagement through reflections on Joy Gregory’s brilliant exhibition Catching Flies with Honey, as well as considering what an intellectual life means. Looking around the room, among peers who already felt familiar, I sensed a quiet cultivation of kinship – in our ideas, responses, and research praxis. Our shared academic genealogy became visible in our gathering and in our collective musings on the concepts articulated by our academic ancestor, Stuart Hall.

From far behind the veil, reverberating through the archives and coursing through the minds and hearts of the people in that room above the Whitechapel Gallery, Stuart Hall taught us about finding our way, about overcoming disillusionment and dislocation on our scholarly path and, in doing so, reassured us. That this journey need not be a burden, but an empowering trajectory: one that honours our mission, infuses us with purpose as we serve our communities, and invites us to find joy in the constellation of academic kinship that was fostered that day.

– Feven Cofré Eyob, November 2025

Writer, researcher, member of the Stuart Hall Foundation Peer Network and a speaker in this year’s In Search of Common Ground programme, Dr. Lola Olufemi shares insights and reflections on her experience participating in the Reading the Crisis conversation series.

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I found the format of the Reading the Crisis series particularly generative – thinking about the present conjuncture through the threads left by an intellectual exchange between CLR James and Stuart Hall emphasised the importance of public dialogue as a means of combatting the anti-intellectualism of our increasingly fascist present. We must emphasise the connectivity of radical thinking across forms and arenas in order to reinvigorate the process of interpretative struggle that creates a culture. The dialogue allowed me to consider the creation of new strategies for attending to the present – particularly Houria’s insistence that notion of Gramsci’s notion of the ‘Integral State’, the relationship between the state and civil society as it operates in Europe is racialised and that this integral racial state “however tentacular, does not exhaust either the human being or their capacity to break the chains and enjoy their freedom.” Our conversation illuminated the responsibility of cultural workers, public intellectuals and academics to address the persistence of race as an ordering principle, a “floating signifier”, and the beating heart of the fascist project which is expressed through “common sense” objections to forms of migration in the United Kingdom. It also highlighted the affective dimensions of political education – if we can move people towards political consciousness, actions, affiliations and relationships which reject the myopic and alienated existence we have inherited from the neoliberal project of the last two decades through cultural interventions like this, we should not hesitate to do so. This is one part of a multi-pronged strategy.

I am always thinking about how we gain deeper understanding of the political legacies to which they belong and work in service to extend them in new ways. The necessity of making connections across time cannot be understated. My conversation with Houria made me realise that the exchange between CLR James and Stuart was not an archival relic, locked into the domain of the past; the insights they shared were pertinent to the present moment and were rearticulated in our conversation through a feminist lens. It reminded me of what I already know: we may live under different conditions but the political project remains the same.

– Lola Olufemi, September 2025

Ahead of the 8th Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversation in May 2025, our network of creative and intellectual practitioners gathered at Conway Hall for the SHF Peer Network Spring Workshop. Joined by Professor Françoise Vergès, together they spent the day discussing each others’ practices, exchanging ideas and building connections.

Eleanor Beaton, Stuart Hall Scholar at the University of Edinburgh (Scottish Graduate School of Social Sciences), shares her reflections on these events below, exploring themes of resilience, solidarity, and hope amid ongoing crises.

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Wrapping up an afternoon spent thinking through how to build transnational solidarities across our differences in times of poly-crisis, Françoise Vergès drew upon the past to impart upon us a message of hope for the future – “the desire for emancipation,” she said, “will never die, across four centuries of slavery, there was always resistance.” In the present moment, marked by the genocide of the Palestinian people, by new and evermore violent wars waged in the name of U.S. imperialism, by the harshening of border regimes in Fortress Europe, and by the disastrous effects of climate breakdown, Françoise Vergès wove together the past and the present in order to imagine an alternative future, in order to teach us how we might continue in spite of it all, how we might, in her words, “confront finite disappointment with infinite hope.”

When I returned to Conway Hall this year to hear Françoise speak, one year after having joined Remi Joseph-Salisbury and Laura Connelly there for a workshop on anti-racist scholar activism, I was struck most clearly by a sense of déjà-vu. One year ago, I had come to London dejected, aimless, and confused. My work – with trans migrants, asylum-seekers, and refugees – had been derailed by institutional upsets which I no longer felt I had the energy to overcome. One year ago, I had all but given up. But in that room, filled to the brim as it was with like-minded thinkers, with academics, artists, and archivists, with my mentors and with my peers, with people who had faced the same challenges and setbacks as I had, and who, like myself, feel a burden of responsibility to the communities they work with, a burden which requires them to find paths forward, paths towards a better future. Last year, Erinma and Gabriel who sat either side of me, and all of my other peers in that room, they buoyed me, they reminded me of what it is we are trying to achieve with our work, they sent me back on the train home with the determination I needed to continue, and I did. A year on, I stepped into Conway Hall with new anxieties and new questions, as I prepare to start fieldwork in Germany, not entirely sure what I’m getting myself in for. Again, my fears were assuaged. Conversations with colleagues, with friends old and new, and with Françoise herself, they grounded me in the ‘why’ of the work, they brought back to the front of my mind that fickle affective drive which animates so much of what we do at the Stuart Hall Foundation, they kept me going, and they keep me going, in spite of it all.

– Eleanor Beaton, June 2025

On Friday 22nd March 2024, we invited members of the SHF Peer Network and the CoDE ECR (Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity Early Career Researcher) Network to join us at Conway Hall in London to participate in an Anti-Racist Scholar Activism Workshop. Led by Remi-Joseph Salisbury and Laura Connelly, authors of Anti-Racist Scholar-Activism (Manchester University Press, 2021), this dynamic forum explored anti-racist scholar activism amidst the confluence of crises scholars, artists and practitioners are navigating in their respective fields at this time.

We commissioned SHF Peer Network member CJ Simon – currently a PhD scholar with the White Rose Doctoral Training Partnership – to share his reflections following the event below:

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In a time where it can feel quite lonely to be a Black academic, I am forever grateful for the work of the Stuart Hall Foundation. On 22nd and 23rd March, the foundation took over Conway Hall to host two exciting events; the first was an ‘Anti-Racist Scholar Activist’ workshop run by Dr Remi Joseph-Salisbury and Dr Laura Connelly, the second a Public Conversation between the acclaimed installation artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien and the incomparable writer and curator Gilane Tawadros. Whilst very different in form and substance, both events promised to bring together a wide network of scholars, artists, practitioners, and members of the public invested in producing a more equitable world. Boy, did it deliver. Over those two days there was an electric pulse of conversation between attendees stretching out from Conway Hall to the pubs and cafés dotted around London, all centred around our lived experiences, struggles, hopes, and plans for carving some kind of path forward. Lonely no longer.

As a theatre-maker and PhD researcher interested in understanding how communities can come together to shape political opinions and behaviours, there was something incredibly refreshing about a workshop so devoted to praxis: talking through how our theoretical work can and should lead to real-world practice. This conversation was perfectly contrasted with the screening of Isaac Julien’s ‘Once Again… (Statues Never Die)’, a film which very poignantly asks the audience to reflect on the colonial relationship between history, art, and intimacy. Vindicating the writing of Stuart Hall, Julien’s piece demonstrated to me just how crucial art is to the practical work of anti-racist activists. A lovely feeling for someone who came into academia through the world of poetry and theatre.

Surprisingly, the most exciting – and probably most radical – thing to come from this weekend hasn’t actually happened yet. In finding new friends, new peers, and new mentors to talk with, disagree with, and learn from, I know that the work has only just begun. The community is growing and expanding and finding a way to sustainably fight for an equitable world.

– CJ Simon, May 2024