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 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

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.

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.

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