Listen to the audio recording of The Second Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversation, held at Conway Hall on 2nd February 2019. The event gathered our growing community of artists, students, academics, cultural activists and engaged citizens to consider how to reimagine and reclaim public space in the context of our present social and political upheavals.

Pursuing this question through multiple lenses, the afternoon centred on two sets of conversations. The first, between artist Willie Doherty and curator Elvira Dyangani Ose, addressed the question of ‘how to share a place’ through Doherty’s longstanding engagement with the Ireland/Northern Ireland border. The second conversation featured a panel including Guardian columnist John Harris; sociologist Michael Rustin; and senior editor, Novara Media, Ash Sarkar. Titled ‘Meeting the Crisis: Trump, Brexit, and the Left’, it asked ‘what is to be done’. These two discussions were punctuated with interventions and perspectives from a new generation of artists, scholars and cultural activists.

Programme:

14.00: Welcome note Hammad Nasar, Stuart Hall Foundation Executive Director

14.10: Black Cultural Activism Map Presentation Farzana Khan

14.15: My time as a Stuart Hall Scholar Ruth Ramsden-Karelse

14.20: How to share a place Willie Doherty in conversation with Elvira Dyangani Ose

15.10: Joining the Stuart Hall Foundation’s work Rebecca Hall and Hammad Nasar

15.20: Tea & coffee break

15.50: Meeting the Crisis: Trump, Brexit, and the Left John Harris, Michael Rustin and Ash Sarkar, chaired by Claire Alexander

17.05: Closing remarks Gilane Tawadros, Stuart Hall Foundation Vice-Chair

17.10: Musical improvisation * Elaine Mitchener, Mark Sanders and Neil Charles * Acoustic performance—not recorded.

17.30: Event finishes

Image: Willie Doherty, At the Border IV (The Invisible Line), 1995. Image courtesy the artist and Kerlin Gallery.

Stuart Hall, the British-Jamaican cultural theorist, would have been open to and pragmatic about the ideas of the younger generations of anti-racists now in the making.

There are some scholars and intellectuals whose indispensable work one returns to over and over again. For me, as for so many others, it is the late Cultural Studies’ founding father, professor Stuart Hall (1932-2014). For though much of Hall’s rich oeuvre came in response to  concerns in the context of Black and anti-racist struggles in his adopted homeland of the UK in a period spanning from the 1950s until his death in 2014, it still feels remarkably prescient and relevant to the present conjuncture.