On Friday 17th October 2025, we invited new scholars, fellows and artists joining the SHF Peer Network to gather at Whitechapel Gallery, London, for our 2025 Welcome Event. This was an opportunity to develop connections between the new members and the Foundation, providing a space to meet and exchange ideas in person. Attendees were invited to introduce their research, area of study or practice, consider Stuart Hall’s thoughts on what it means to be a public intellectual, and learn more about the Foundation’s programme of events, workshops and opportunities available to them through the Peer Network.

Following the screening of clips from Hall’s lecture ‘Through the Prism of an Intellectual Life’, introduced by SHF Trustee Nick Beech, attendees participated in breakout and group conversations on what “an intellectual life” means to them and how it relates to their own pursuits.

The new Peer Network members were also invited to visit the Whitechapel Gallery’s retrospective on visual artist Joy Gregory, Catching Flies with Honey, which SHF Associate Roshini Kempadoo led a group discussion around afterwards. Later in the day, Joy Gregory met with attendees to share insights on her practice too.

In the afternoon, SHF Associate and Peer Network member Ruth Ramsden-Karelse hosted an introductory session to the SHF Forum, a regular online forum where the network collectively engages with wider social, cultural and political issues. A space for Peers to think with one another beyond their disciplines and institutional settings, this ad hoc in-person session invited discussions on what our political investments and aims are, in relation to the work that we do.

Thank you to the SHF Trustees and Associates whose contributions made this event possible: Nick Beech, Giorgia Doná, Roshini Kempadoo, Michael Rustin and Ruth Ramsden-Karelse.

The Stuart Hall Foundation Peer Network programme brings together SHF’s community of scholars, fellows, and artists to support their intellectual, creative and professional development. Through monthly forums, skills-based workshops, residencies, and peer-led exchanges, the programme provides a supportive space for underrepresented practitioners to share ideas, receive pastoral support and collaborate across disciplines. Grounded in Stuart Hall’s commitment to dialogue, interdisciplinarity and public engagement, the programme creates a space for participants to share ideas, while fostering a generous and connected community of intellectual and creative practitioners who are challenging inequality through their work.

The SHF Peer Network is comprised of successful applicants to the Foundation’s scholarship and fellowship opportunities in partnership with academic institutions, and artistic residencies in partnership with cultural organisations. These scholarship and fellowship opportunities are developed by the SHF’s Academic Committee, a group of Trustees and Associates who assess applications during the selection process and support delivery of the Peer Network programme. The Academic Committee includes Nasar Meer, Becky Hall, Catherine Hall, Michael Rustin, Nick Beech, Derron Wallace, Giorgia Doná, Kennetta Hammond Perry, Roshini Kempadoo, Ruth Ramsden-Karelse, Remi Joseph-Salisbury and Shamim Miah.

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.

– 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.

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

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

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.

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.”

– 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:

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