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. 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.

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