Goldsmiths, University of London, is to celebrate the life of the leading teacher, cultural analyst and critical thinker Stuart Hall with a week-long series of events taking place 24-28 November. Stuart Hall Week will include daily screenings of The Unfinished Conversation, by artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah, and culminates with a conference exploring Hall’s projects and legacy, along with the official naming of a college building in his honour.
Hall, who died earlier this year at the age of 82, was internationally recognised as a leading figure in the field of cultural studies and is often referred to as the ‘godfather of multiculturalism’, thanks to his expansive work exploring post-colonialism and the studies of identity, ethnicity, race, gender and diaspora.
Born in Jamaica in 1932, Hall was research fellow and later head of Britain’s first centre for cultural studies at Birmingham University (1964-79), before joining the Open University where he became head of the Sociology Department, retiring as Emeritus Professor in 1997. He taught at Goldsmiths throughout his career within the departments of Media and Communications, Visual Cultures, Sociology and Cultural Studies.
Unfinished conversation
Stuart Hall Week opens with a presentation of Akomfrah’s three-screen film installation The Unfinished Conversation (24 November, 6-8pm, Dept of Media and Communications), which premiered at the 2012 Liverpool Biennial. The installation features movie footage, stills and soundscapes from Hall’s personal archive which are juxtaposed with an interview where Hall discusses his discovery of ‘a personal and political identity’. Following the launch event, it will run daily until Sunday 30 November, along with screenings of archive interviews and documentaries from throughout Hall’s career.
Panel discussions taking place across the week will explore a number of Hall’s key texts including his encoding/decoding model of communication, his contribution to the 1978 publication Policing the Crisis, and his 1974 work, Marx’s Notes on Method: A ‘Reading’ of the 1857 Introduction. Panelists include artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien, Gilane Tawadros (chief executive, DACS), Matthew Fuller (head of Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths) and Shela Sheikh.
An exhibition, Learning from Stuart Hall: An Architectural Analysis of the Transformations of Higher Education (opening Tuesday 25 November, 5-6pm, Centre for Research Architecture), will look at Hall’s work both as an intellectual and an activist.
Next Friday’s Stuart Hall International Conference: Conversations, Projects and Legacies – which will be live streamed from 10am – is a chance to re-interrogate some of the key areas in which Hall was active at different stages in his career. Opening with a panel chaired by Professor Irit Rogoff looking at his legacy at Goldsmiths, further discussions will explore Hall’s ideas on gender, race and class, and look at how his work led to an international expansion of the field of cultural studies.
Hall’s wife, Professor Catherine Hall, will also be present at the conference to offer her closing remarks and unveil a plaque to officially rename as the Professor Stuart Hall Building the home of the college’s Department of Media and Communications, Institute of Management Studies and Institute for Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship.
Stuart Hall Week, 24-28 November 2014, Goldsmiths, University of London.
Tickets for the conference on 28 November are sold out but the event will be live streamed. See www.gold.ac.uk/media-communications/stuart-hall-conference/
