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.

Hosted by the Stuart Hall Foundation, the workshop began with lively introductions between the invited groups: members of the SHF Peer Network, the CoDE ECR (Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity Early Career Researcher) Network and scholars from YCEDE (Yorkshire Consortium for Equity in Doctoral Education). Françoise Vergès then led an open floor discussion on methods and strategies grounded in arts, history, activism, philosophy, postcolonial or feminist studies that may be deployed to address a broad, pertinent set of questions:

“How do the memories and history of past struggles for liberation and abolition help us to “build a politics that speaks to the specific moment in which we are working”? How do we formulate the common grounds that will build international solidarities and connect the struggles for climate justice, against racism, Islamophobia, imperialism, fascism and the rush to grab minerals and lands for extraction? How do we fight locally in a way that strengthen a transnational decolonial antiracist movement, without erasing differences?”

Workshop participants were also invited to attend the 8th Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversation with Françoise Vergès the next day. Eleanor Beaton, Stuart Hall Scholar at the University of Edinburgh (Scottish Graduate School of Social Sciences), shared her reflections on the experience here.

Supported by Comic Relief, the Hollick Family Foundation, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, Conway Hall, CoDE and YCEDE.

Thank you to the SHF Trustees and Associates whose contributions made this event possible: Giorgia Doná, Michael Rustin and Nick Beech.

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

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.

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

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