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.

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 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

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.

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

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. Joined by cultural theorist, poet and teacher of performance studies, Fred Moten, together they spent the day discussing each others’ practices, exchanging ideas and building connections.

Hosted by the Stuart Hall Foundation and facilitated by SHF Associate Ruth Ramsden-Karelse, the workshop began with introductions from attendees: members of the SHF Peer Network and the CoDE ECR (Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity Early Career Researcher) Network. Fred Moten and Ruth Ramsden-Karelse led open discussions, breakout sessions and readings around Policing the Crisis (Hall et al), The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (Spillers) and more, prompted by a line of enquiry suggested by Moten:

“The aesthetics of common ground/policing the crisis (of the negro intellectual). On the one hand, let’s consider the problem of art and the artist in this particular moment in the history of our obligation to beauty; on the other hand, at this particular moment in the history of our commitment to truth, let’s consider the problem of the intellectual in an ongoing intensification and transformation of policing that turns out to be coterminous with a moment many of us have considered to be one of triumph. It might be especially to consider Stuart Hall’s work in relation to that of one of his great contemporaries, Hortense Spillers. What’s the relation between the refusal of personality and the refusal of the empiricist attitude?”

Workshop participants were also invited to attend the 9th Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversation with Fred Moten the next day. Written reflections on the Spring Workshop and Public Conversation were commissioned from Peer Network members Erinma Ochu, Researcher in Residence with Watershed and Professor in Immersive Media at UWE Bristol, and Konstantin Helm, researcher, lecturer, and PhD candidate at the Department for English and American Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Supported by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, the Hollick Family Foundation, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, the Power of Pop Fund, Conway Hall and CoDE.

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