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

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.

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